Agentic Development Platforms and the Agentic Enterprise | The Platform Engineering Show Ep 17

" I'm Alan Shimel, and I'm here with my co-host, Luca Galante, in his very own home. Yes. It's been a project.

Congratulations, Luka. It's great to see you in your house. Thank you.

Hey, everyone. Yeah, we talked about it for so long, and it's finally here. We moved into a construction site, literally.

Mm-hmm. But it's a functioning construction site with running water, electricity, and everything else. It's all good.

All right. Hey, you know what? Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

And you know what? It's the start of the rest of it, so congratulations to you. Thank you.

So Luka, a lot's happened since the last time we were able to get together. Of course, you've been busy trying to get the house put together, and I've been doing a lot of traveling. But- You were at Black Hat, right?

Yes, I was in Vegas. Well, I was in a lot of places, but most recently Vegas and Black Hat. And you know, Luka, I've been going to Black Hat for 23 years.

When I first started going to Black Hat, it used to be over at Caesars Palace. Uh-huh. Yeah.

At the Mandalay. And there were maybe 5,000 people, and the exhibits were little tabletops in the hallway because the real action- Oh, it was a hacker thing at the beginning, right? Yeah.

Well, it still is supposedly a hacker thing, but really, yes, the action happened in what they called the briefings, right? Where people would get up. Where Wanna Be Jack got up and showed how he hacked into an ATM and make it spit out money like it's raining money.

Where people would disclose vulnerabilities, that the FBI was there trying to stop them because it was national security. You don't see as much of that anymore because now it's all about- It's a massive college industry, right? Yeah.

Well, it's 20,000 people. Yeah. Which is about half the size of RSA network, of RSA Conference, but it's about 500 vendors.

And the thing this year, Luka, it was all agents all the time, right? It was whether you have an agentic SOC, Security Operations Center, identity for agents, agents doing your vulnerability remediation because Mythos is finding all of these vulnerabilities. It's created such a frothy market because there's so much money being poured in right now into investments that it's really very hard for a company to stand out, right?

You look at the platform engineering marketplace, Luka, there's still a place for companies, startups, to make a mark, to be heard, to innovate, to show their innovation. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

In security, it's not that easy right now. You've got to spend so much money just to keep up with the Joneses, right? Just to have a level that, to really stand out, to really show your innovation.

The big dogs, their feature set is just so big. They cover everything. Yeah.

And then they buy you, right? Buy you. Because if you do have something interesting, they want to buy you.

Yeah. And that's where that is. But really, look, the big story was the agentics, and I know it's a big story across the board.

Platform Con, even in New York when we were there in June, there was already a huge amount of agentic kind of focus. Yeah. I know you guys are doing what, Sydney's in October, San Francisco is when?

February? San Francisco's going to be end of February, so we confirmed the dates now, 24th, 25th. And actually, so to your point, so 24th is going to be Platform Con World Tour, so the San Francisco stop, and where we're going to focus mostly on agentic development platforms, right?

So really how do internal developer platforms, which we've been talking about for a long time, evolve into ADPs or agentic development platforms and really support all agentic workflows and use cases within the AT organization. Which like you were saying, we're seeing this convergence that we've been talking about of security, observability, FinOps, obviously data, obviously AI, in this unified platform layer. And the agentic development platform really is sort of the sum of all of those things converging into one thing that can really serve application developers and broadly the AT organizations, all the different stakeholders within it, security teams, governance teams, and so on.

So that's going to be on the 24th of February. The next day, the 25th of February, which is my birthday actually. It's going to be- Wait, the 25th of February is your birthday?

Yeah. My anniversary. Yeah, I think we talked about it before.

Yeah. Uh-huh. So we should celebrate.

We should celebrate in San Francisco. Absolutely. We'll do Agentic Con, and then we'll go out to Napa or something.

I don't know. Sounds like a plan, though we'll talk off camera. We'll talk.

I might be in Barcelona. Ah, right. The 27th, but I'll check.

We'll talk, but we're going to do Napa. We'll talk. Yeah, yeah.

Don't worry. But what is Agentic Con, Luka? Yeah.

So Agentic Con, it's a new brand that we launched, not just because like everyone else, we had to do some agentic and AI stuff, but really because it came from actually a realization working through the reference architectures of agentic development platforms, right? And so for those listening that have seen it maybe before at Platform Con, and I think we actually screenshared it the last time, so I'm not going to do it again. But one of the things that the Platform Engineering org community's been kind of known for is this reference architectures and the tooling landscape for platform engineering tools that has kind of stemmed from the reference architectures that we actually published, I think at Platform Con '23, like three years ago.

And so that ref arc has five different planes, like observative plane, the developer control plane, and so on. That is now the top layer of the agentic development platform, which is really the tooling layer, right? And it's essentially the tooling layer that's consumed both by humans and by agents, right?

But that ultimately sits on top of two more layers now. A path specification layer, which you can think of it for those of you using Claude, for example, things like skills are essentially probabilistic paths, right? And again, for those of you that have used skills, you'll know the output is not always the same.

That's why they're probabilistic, but obviously they have their advantages. Then there's deterministic paths, which is the usual CI/CD stuff, and then there is things like a hybrid basically, which is sort of like what loop engineering is in a way, right? That essentially takes the combination of those two things and keeps iterating to make them better.

And then it all sits on top of the agent infrastructure layer where you have things like model infrastructure, but you also have things like platform governance. You have things like harness engineering, and so we've also spent a lot of time kind of connecting the dots between all of these things that a lot of people see on X or LinkedIn, right? It's kind of like in one week it's very trendy to talk about loop engineering, and the next week it's harness engineering.

And then I think it becomes very hard for people to make sense of all these things, right? So we put a lot of work into this reference architecture to actually sort of accommodate and make sense of the different pieces of the puzzle. But once you look at that picture, you realize that if you swap the tooling on top, for say marketing and sales tooling, you have actually an agentic sales and marketing platform, right?

But the agent infrastructure at the bottom, the substrate that supports everything really remains the same. And this is actually something that a lot of the vendors, for example, that we've been collaborating with in the community have also realized with. They've built, obviously now everyone's pivoting to your point, to this agentic first product, and they're realizing, "Well, I built this agent thing-" ...

for security use cases, at Black Hat or for platform engineering use cases within IT organizations. But now I'm realizing that actually that same agent environment, agent security, whatever, can support all sorts of agentic use cases within other verticals of the enterprise, too. Right?

And this is actually something that we're seeing firsthand in the field. Platform teams getting a lot of inbound requests from other teams outside of IT organizations. They're like, "Hey, I've done this agentic thing over here.

Actually, now I need it to be production ready, and I need it to be secure" and blah, blah. " Right? " And so that, I think, is really interesting.

And so we wanted to create a space in the market, in the community, that's really enterprise first and enterprise friendly. And so the tagline of Agenticon is the Agentic Enterprise, and where we really look at the agentic infrastructure layer and how it can support all the different use cases. And so it's really a place for platform engineers to meet with other platform engineers, same as Platformcon, but also for platform engineers to meet with other domain experts of these other parts of the company, of the enterprise, that need these agentic workflows supported by a platform layer.

And so that's really the key differentiation, right? So where we're going to move beyond IT organization, beyond agentic development platforms, and into the AXPs realm of these different platforms and different workflows. And yeah, we're very excited.

I think we obviously bring a very enterprise focus on this. There's obviously a lot of, there's AI engineer, MCPCon, Agenticon. There's a lot of, RAI Summit that we've just been at in Paris.

There's a lot of amazing events and conferences that have popped up left and right in the space. We find a lot of them are very focused on the infrastructure layer without necessarily looking too much at what's the actual outcome on an enterprise workflow level and perspective. Yeah.

And ultimately, that's the stuff that, going all the way back to golden paths and all these kind of things, right? That's the stuff that we've been kind of specializing in for the last few years and sort of the spin that we want to bring to this. Sure.

" Yeah. "That was so September. " Yeah.

And I think people, practitioners, leaders, right? That's what they're afraid of. No one wants to bet on a horse that doesn't finish the race.

Right. Right? Right.

And I think things like Agenticon have to give people sort of a view into all of the horses. Yeah. Which ones may finish the race, which ones may win the race.

Yeah. And then let people decide what horse they're riding, so to speak. This is something in our DevOps experience virtual event I've got coming on at the end of September.

It's the same kind of thing, picking your horses in this agentic AI. And you probably should have picked just one, right? That's the other thing is that we're seeing is all of these agents, and with MCP servers and stuff like this, they're all talking to each other in cross-function API, A to A.

It's confusing, I think, to people out there. There's so many choices. There's so many potential golden paths.

Which is the real path? What's going to- Yeah ... be here two years from now?

Yeah, absolutely. And this is the focus of Weave Intelligence, our research arm, that's actually powering all the content program of Agenticon, Platformcon, and everything else that we do in the community, of actually putting out frameworks that can help you evaluate, for example, what is the right agentic workflow that I should start with? How do I think about all these things?

I think, to your point, with an understanding that, hey, we also don't know, right? And we don't pretend to know. This space is moving super fast.

And part of it is let's not reinvent the wheel, and let's use the same principles that have served us until now and apply them with some level of confidence that, hey, if it's worked until now, I think it has some Lindy effect that can go forward into the future. But at the same time, be open about the fact nobody knows at this moment. This is, I think, why it's important to create the spaces for conversation, right?

And you've been to our roundtable events and stuff like that. I love and you're organizing now something that we'll do together at KubeCon, right? This panel conversations and breakfast.

" One thing is to be on stage and like you said, right, on stage, you have to be somewhat certain of what you're talking about, right? Because there's a lot of people listening, and ultimately, you need to have some credibility. But I almost prefer the roundtable to kind of the backroom conversations, where people share behind closed doors, if you will, that nobody is recording.

And that's where the juicy stuff comes out, and where you get really people saying, "Hey, we tried this, we tried that. We screwed that up, and let's see where we go from here," basically. I don't disagree.

Hey, you mentioned KubeCon. We are doing a Futurum Summit Monday morning there. You guys will be doing other events during KubeCon in Salt Lake City, or?

Yeah, so we do our usual as a Kube. So that's going to be on the Monday, same day, but in the evening. And that's basically the unofficial opening party of KubeCon.

That's how I define it. Yep. And we're expecting the usual 2 to 3,000 registrations.

com. You can sign up for free. Just make sure that you also show up on time because the line can be long.

And then around that, we always do roundtable and workshops together with our sponsors. And so we'll definitely have a couple of roundtable conversations before the event. One of the things that we've seen works pretty well is actually hosting it right before the party so that people that attend the event can flow straight into the party, so they can skip the line, and so it becomes a better experience for everybody.

And then we'll do a bunch of stuff throughout the week. But yeah, KubeCon, we never miss it, so. No, it should be a good one.

It was good last time in Salt Lake. But then you guys also, so we spoke about San Francisco, the two events. You do have Sydney, I think is also October, right?

Yeah. And then you announced a Platformcon for next year already, for next June? Yeah.

We have Sydney. We have Paris with São Paulo. That's a world tour together with San Francisco.

It's all happening in H2 this year and then San Francisco Q1 next year. And then, yeah, we just announced the dates for Platformcon '27. That's a flagship week that's going to take place same as this year, last week of June.

So it's going to be the 22nd for London and 24th for New York of June. Super excited about this one. You can tell.

Also, we're re-skinning the website. I don't know if you've seen it, but I'm pretty happy with it. It looks good.

This is good learning for us because in the past, we would kind of do the event, and it's exhausting to organize a big event across two cities, two continents, do the whole thing, and then it's holidays, so people go off. And by the time you relaunch the website for '27, it was always September, October, and you don't have the same momentum, right? This time we went straight into it essentially and relaunched it this week, last week actually.

And it's just so helpful because you still have all these hot memories in your head of what worked, what didn't work, what could we have done better. So I'm pretty happy with the result, and you can already see ticket sales are pretty on fire from now already. So I think it's good.

Well, we'll do that. So that's June 22nd, 24th, but it's that whole week is the virtual- Yeah. Correct.

So I guess 21st to 25th is the week, yeah. Mm-hmm. But Luka, let's dig in.

We only got a minute or two left. Yeah. Here we go.

So agentic is obviously having a huge effect like it is everywhere else on platform. What else for our listeners out here, platform engineering, whether they're platform engineers, DevOps people, cloud-native people, what other kind of things should they be looking into? Well, so one of the things that I keep seeing, right, is as platform engineering keeps maturing as a discipline, all of these things that were sort of just like sideline topics, right, like FinOps, or even security things, right?

Because ultimately, they were still so focused on, like, "Okay, how do I enable developer self-service? How do I make a good developer experience and make the infrastructure self-serviceable," right? But that's still the core of it, building a platform as a product and everything that we always talked about.

But now I think that's being figured out more and more, and so all of these other things, as the platform grows in scope as well, FinOps is no longer a nice-to-have, right? It's really becoming something that a lot of platform teams, for example, are really concerned with, especially now with the whole token stuff, right? So, I'm sure you've seen it, right, but FinOps X, I think, rebranded to Tokenomics Con or something, right?

And- Yeah ... the entire FinOps space is like- Tokenomics is the new thing now. Yeah.

Right. Exactly. So the entire space is moving to that, which is interesting, right?

Because obviously token is going to be a huge part of the spend, but it's not the only thing, right? And there's still a lot of other things that so- Well, but like you said, there's the infrastructure that was spending $8 trillion on, right? Yeah.

And then there's the tokenomics of running these things. But look, like I said before, Luka, three months from now, that's going to wind up sounding very... I'm sorry, my phone rang.

That's going to wind up sounding very August, like- Yeah ... but it's now October, and there's a new structure. I agree with you.

I was surprised that they did it so quickly, right? We started talking about tokenomics three months ago, and they already renamed their main event to that. " Yeah.

And because, but also primarily, again, this was my point with Agenticon earlier. " Obviously, we do believe in long-term agentic is one of the main applications of AI, especially in the enterprise. " So, we always like to connect, and I think that's been one of the special things about our community, to really connect the actual thought leadership and the actual technical content with whatever we do on the field, right?

" We try to be very precise about what we put out there and then create events around those things so that people have a full experience from our webinars and our digital content to actually what you discuss when you meet in person. And so, but yeah, going back to your question, that's what we're seeing a lot, right? Platform teams really worrying about this maturing different bits and pieces, right?

Yeah. And this becoming more and more. And this is also why we launched Weave Intelligence, right?

Because it's moved past this initial DevX and infra focus, and now platform engineering is really quite broad, right? And also the scope of the platform team keeps growing, and so you need to have really, we're putting out reports on FinOps for platform engineers and AppSec for platform engineers and this stuff. And obviously, FinOps and AppSec by themselves are way bigger than just what's meaningful for platform engineers.

But I think at this point, all of these things have grown to a size where even just the Venn diagram overlap of these different things deserves, like a report deserves content, deserves guidelines, right? " I was like, "Look, we see everything and nothing on the field," right? Some enterprises have the platform team of 400 people owning everything under the sun.

Some enterprises have a platform team of 10 people that then needs to interface themselves with all these other teams, right? Yeah. So, there's no one-size-fits-all.

But I think regardless of whether you have a dedicated team or it's a function within a team or within an org, you need to have some blueprints and best practices to think about these things. This is life in an emerging market, my friend. Yeah.

Right? Things change. Hey, Luka, we're out of time.

I know you got to run and do stuff. Thank you for coming on. We'll be back in, I guess, two weeks with our next show.

Yes. Until then, hey, good luck with the house. You can check in on a little bit- I hope we spend a little more time building next time.

Okay. Well, we'll check in with you. org, where you get a lot of the information.

com. We've been publishing a lot there, too, a lot of longer form stuff. So, there's a lot.

It's that time. I think that's where we are in the maturity cycle here, where there's baselines being laid down. So go check it out.

But until next time, on behalf of Luca Galante and myself, enjoy, everyone. Bye-bye.