Platform Engineering on Sander Knape

The Organization of the Future: Smaller Teams, Harder Constraints

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The first post in this series argued that AI is moving engineering up the stack, away from implementation and toward systems, architecture, and governance. The second argued that this changes what engineers do: judgment replaces implementation as the primary constraint, and the best engineers become orchestrators rather than builders.

The third question—the one boards and executive teams most need to answer—is what this means for how engineering organizations are designed.

It’s not mainly a question of how many engineers to hire, or which AI tools to buy. It’s a structural question about how organizations produce, govern, and sustain software at all.

Engineering Is Moving Up the Stack

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

The debate about AI and software development is stuck on the wrong question.

Most discussions ask whether AI writes good enough code, whether it matches human craftsmanship, whether it introduces bugs, whether developers can trust it. Reasonable questions. Increasingly beside the point.

The shift that matters more isn’t about code quality. It’s about where engineering effort is required at all.

AI is moving engineering up the stack, from writing code to designing systems to managing the lifecycle of software in production. The work doesn’t disappear. It shifts upward, toward broader and more structural concerns.

Nuances around centralized platform teams

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 13:49:11 +0200

The popularity of centralized platform teams is rising. The latest Puppet State of DevOps Report shows that 63% of the respondents have at least one internal platform. Platforms are vital enablers for a more DevOps way of working as they provide self-service capabilities that development teams can autonomously utilize.

The definition of a “platform” isn’t set in stone though. Many organizations still struggle to put together a platform team that is really able to add value to the development teams. It’s a challenge to build a team with the proper mindset and an organization that supports that team in the right way. The biggest challenges aren’t technical: it’s the organizational and cultural challenges that must be tackled to ensure such a team’s effectiveness.

From toil to self-service: automate what matters

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 11:44:02 +0200

There are a few reasons that I love my job. One of the most important ones is the variety of work. As a cloud/platform engineer, every day is different. Work goes from writing automation in some programming language, setting up a dashboard in a monitoring/logging tool, hardening Linux machines, writing Infrastructure as Code, building (standardized) CI/CD pipelines, giving workshops, analyzing costs, and more.

This wide variety of work wouldn’t be possible without automation. You have more time to spend on all these things when manual, repetitive work is automated. SRE defines toil as follows:

Five ways to enable developer autonomy in AWS

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 12:00:00 +0200

It hasn’t been that long since it was normal to request compute capacity at some operations department within your organization. In fact, it’s probably still pretty common in some organizations. With the move to virtualization and especially the cloud, this process of course has changed dramatically for the good. Not only compute capacity for applications, but also resources such as databases, queues, load balancers and storage are now available virtually unlimited.