We are All Platform Engineers Now

The pitch you already heardSomewhere around 2019, platform engineering arrived with a slide deck and a promise. Stop making every team reinvent deployment. Build an internal product. Golden paths. Reduce cognitive load. Treat your developers as customers, because customers are people you are contractually obliged to be nice to. The promise was real. The delivery was often a Backstage instance nobody updated, a wiki page titled "Getting Started" last edited by someone who left in 2022, and three engineers who became the permanent on-call rota for everyone else's YAML. The cognitive load did not disappear. It was moved into a queue and given a service level objective. Hold that thought, because it is about to happen to your entire company. The new mathTwo forces are colliding, and neither of them cares about your roadmap. The first is the business pressure that has been building since interest rates stopped being free. Demand for internal services keeps rising. Headcount does not. The…