Why Platform Engineering is the New AI Super Superhighway | Platform Engineering Show Ep 12

Hey everyone. Welcome to Platform Engineering podcast. The platform engineering podcast.

You know, we, we haven't been on in a while, but we've got a really good excuse. My friend Luca here is now a papa. He had a baby, and the little knower is over a month.

Yeah, over a month older already, right? Over six weeks, I think. Yeah.

Six weeks. And, but it was as it always is, you, you know, you could tell people, but until you live it, you don't understand it. Uh, it was, it was more than you bargained for, but better than expected, right.

Luka. Hundred percent. It's been, it's been a bliss and, um, and a roller coaster in the last six weeks.

Uh, but yeah, it's, it's, it's been awesome. But yeah, not too much time to record podcasts, unfortunately. No, no.

But hey, let, let's, we'll jump right into it. Um, you know, so what's been going on while you've been busy? A lot, a lot, right?

I really, yeah. I really feel like when we look back five years from now, these last, let's say three months, November, December, January, February, four months are going to go down as sort of the pivotal months where the a ai, it hasn't caught up to the hype. I don't think it'll ever catch up to the hype, but AI got real, right?

I, I think the releases of, of philanthropic Claude and, and, uh, AI Codex Codex in November and December were watershed releases where it stopped being a toy and became Oh my God. Yeah. Production tool, right?

Yeah. This thing works. Yep.

It's a production tool. And, and I think what we've seen since then too is like with the release of Claude Opus and, and some of the security tools and using it to find vulnerabilities. I know in the security world, my friends are full.

I, I don't mean to be crude, but they're crapping themselves. I would, right? There are so many, we're finding so many vulnerabilities.

How the heck are we going to keep up with this? Because if, if we could find them, the bad guys can find them too. And it's so, it, it's really changing the game we're seeing, you know, and I'm not here to doom and gloom it, but if you work in front of a screen and you are not leveraging AI in your job, someone else is, and they may take your job, you may not lose your job to ai, but someone else is using it and they may replace you, Luca, in, in terms of platform engineering, that doesn't exist in a vacuum either, right?

Platform engineers are being tasked with, Hey, we gotta build this new vulnerability scanning right into the platform, right? We need to scan code as we're writing it, as we're putting it in the pipeline. We need to fix code, we need to understand up, we need to instrument our platforms better.

We need to AI our platforms. And do we need a separate platform for ai, a new platform for ai? What does that mean?

Do we need two platforms? Do, do we make one new platform? org in the community.

What are you hearing? Yeah, what are you seeing? Yeah, like you said, I think it's a super, super interesting time.

I think I was reading like a couple of, uh, tweets or X posts, whatever, um, uh, on this like kind of like, Hey, Q1, 2026 will be looked back on as sort of like this like tech singularity type of thing. Um, which, who knows? It might at the same time, it's like we keep saying this, you know, because it keeps accelerating.

So, you know, probably Q2 is gonna be even phaser. Uh, but what I think it is crazy, crazy now is like obviously the, you know, AI is coming first for like, you know, coding and software and you know, then it's like, you know, if you look at, um, the, the releases of, of Anthropic, I think it's really interesting. And, and like, and this is actually, I don't know if you listened to this podcast with Elon on, on the, you know, the three hours conversation, uh, with the, with the PayPal guy, no, sorry, the Stripe guy.

Um, and um, right, you know, they're talking about all sorts of like crazy stuff and rockets and so on. But like one interesting, I've thought, like, there're like a couple of interesting things around like how is he planning to monetize xai and how are they seeing also like people like philanthropic, you know? And it's like, well, yeah, like you could look at this and like, okay, well their CapEx is through the roof.

They're spending crazy amounts of money. Um, how are they gonna ever make it up in like licensing? You know?

And they're like, well, we don't have to make it up as licensing. We can just go disrupt like, you know, trillion dollar industries and just like, take that revenue essentially. Like, 'cause 'cause once to your point, right?

Like if you're, I think if your job is sitting in front of a screen today, like any of those like white collar jobs and just like desktop jobs, like none of those are safe, essentially. Um, they can, they can, they're gonna go after, you know, each, each one of them 1, 1 1 after the other. And I think Elon made an interesting point that was like, you know, I don't even need to go and do crazy stuff.

I don't need to go and like replace their, like rocket scientists. I can go replace like, um, you know, the 1% of the global population that does, um, uh, support in call centers. You know, like that's like half a trillion industry that you can com.

You know, you can just take like, you know, a, a fraction of that and that already pays for the entire CapEx of, of like data centers and so on. So I thought that was interesting. And I think if you look at like what philanthropic has been doing the last few weeks seems that it's like that kind of playbook.

And I don't know if like Dario is, like shorting is like making money on like shorting companies, like right before he announces stuff, but he could, because it's like, you know, like the, the, like, you know, if you look at like Palo Alto networks, like, you know, all the, all the security, uh, tickers that we are familiar with, it's like, it's crazy. Like every time they release something they crater like 10, 15%. Um, you know, and, and there yeah, look, IBM with a co thing BM was down 13% this week because cobol Yeah.

So that's crazy. So that's, so that's happening and that's there. I think, you know, going back to your question like the, the platform, you know, we've been saying for like six months that, you know, AI really has overshadowed, I think a lot of the trends that we've talked about in IT enterprise for the last 18 months, two, three years, whatever, it's probably just turbocharged platform engineering.

Um, and I think we're seeing that still. Um, and in fact, I think it's, it's accelerated. Like I think what you're seeing with AI is either it's killing stuff faster and faster, or it's accelerating the need for other things faster and faster.

Um, and I think well designed platforms and well thought out, uh, golden paths and, you know, and also like the best practices and principles of platform engineering that we've been talking about, you and I on this podcast for the last year, plus, all of those things apply a hundred percent. You know, and in fact they're, they're, they're, you know, they're more needed than ever because you're going from application developers being the end users of your internal developer platform to now you have this concept of citizen developers, IE anybody in the, in the enterprise can be essentially developers. So your number of platform users is 1,000 xing.

And then you put ages on top of that and it's like, you know, getting another two or three orders of magnitudes, right? So, so all of a sudden now you, you, you, the need for, you know, a well streamlined set of workflows and processes and, you know, they're all sitting under this platform thing is, is increasingly, um, you know, enhanced. And, and, and, and, and you see this also in the data.

We, we keep serving platform engineering teams and you see the explosion of the responsibility of running and supporting AI workflows, AI workflows, AgTech stuff is gone from like five, 10% a year ago to like 30, 40% when we released data platform engineering report in November, December. And it's already Bronx instead, right? So I, I think clearly you're seeing this trend of offering teams, um, owning more and more the responsibility ultimately for the stack.

And to your point, you know, is this like an AI platform? Is this an AI set of workloads on top of the existing platform engineering, uh, stack? Um, I think it's both, honestly.

Um, I think it's like what we are seeing is enterprises that had their, you know, their housing order with, uh, with platform engineering, uh, initiatives already rolled out or rolling out can take advantage of AI much faster at scale. They can move from, um, you know, this like impressive day one demos to like actually day 100 operations at scale very, very easily. Because their mindset is there.

Some of the setup is there, obviously you need to tweak things, but more importantly, I think the mindset is there, right? Of like, Hey, we need to have like a solid backend and then, you know, plugging on top all these different things and you can, you know, basically roll over the same permissions to agents or, um, you know, if I'm a user and I, and I want to u and i, I want, and I have a set of like LLMs that are doing stuff for me, those LLMs can inherit my permissions. You know, and, and so there's, there's a set of stuff that can happen that can accelerate you as an enterprise if you already have platform engineering in place.

But I think it's also then a matter of like, how do you sell this ideas internally as usual, right. To the enterprise. And I think, you know, what I'm seeing, and you know, also just working directly with a lot of enterprise teams is you can go to rats.

One is, Hey, you wanna do ai? Great. You first need to do platform engineering.

Um, and then, you know, and then you can do AI and that works. And I think, again, it works, especially if you're already had some notion of what platform engineering was and you're already doing it. If you're kind of like you want to go AI native type of type of thing, then I think it's just a matter of like how us like people from the industry repackage the same principles into more AI native language.

It, you know, at the end of the day, it doesn't dramatically change the same way that platform engineering also hasn't invented anything specifically new, right? It's kind of like was, was, was mm-hmm. You know, sitting on, on the shoulders of giants before it.

And so here I think it's just a matter of like, it's yet another adoration and it's just really, you just need to adapt your lingo, uh, depending on the context and who you're talking to. So to me, Luca, the biggest thing is, you know, I've always believed platform engineering serves an internal audience, right? Developers, DevOps ops, and you know, SREs, I think that the biggest change that we've brought here is your new audience are agents.

They're not human. They're agents, right? And, and as much as we try to give them human characteristics, they're not, they're agents and you don't have to say thank you to them, but you've gotta have guardrails for them, right?

And you, and you, and, and we have to, it's almost like, I don't know if you've been following the MT book, you know, the mt book stuff or the open club. So the way they talk to each other when humans aren't around right? Is almost like a different mm-hmm.

Language, a different way of communicating. I think that is true. And we need to build that into our platforms.

And it, and this is hard when you think about it, right? How do you design golden path for agents to interact in a language and manner that's kind of alien to us, right? That we may not even understand, right?

But they do. But we need to design the, the environment they're gonna do that in with guardrails that are not going to, you know, let us, you know, go off the edge here, go off the cliff. It's, it's almost like, do we need agents to build, do we need AI and agents to build this next iteration of our platforms that are optimized?

'cause we may have 10 XA hundred x agents for every person in the organization that we're servicing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Like I, to your point, I don't think you even need to necessarily like, you know, speak their language, right? It's really just about like, what are the, what are the guardrails, what are the golden paths? Like, I think there's, you know, um, Gregor Hoka has this helpful, um, analogy that I think is becoming increasing more helpful now with, with, you know, in this agentic world, which was this, this idea of the like, you know, kinda like the paved road that we talked about.

Um, but really where it's kind of like, hey, you can think of like an initial kind of like, uh, pretty sort of like rusty Brownfield enterprise setups at this kind of just like dirt road with, you know, that's like really bumpy with a bunch of like, you know, holes in it and stuff like that. Um, you know, potholes and so on. Um, and then, you know, basically you go and, and, and really what you do with platform engineering is you put like, asphalt on top and then like all of a sudden you can actually drive your car instead of like, you know, 40 miles an hour.

You can, you can, you can drive like a hundred miles an hour, right? And you can have more cars. And I think like, that's helpful thinking like, you know, about agents is really just about like taking that road and making it into like an eight lane, like, you know, like highway super highway of like, you know, that's, that's now the type of like volume that needs to run through that thing.

Like it's, it's the same thing, right? Uh, conceptually it's the same thing. You want to have the same type of permissions.

You wanna have the same type of like security and governance built in and enforced by design across the platform and the different workflows and the different teams and the different new types of users. You just have a lot more of them, you know, and, and so, and, and, and so you just need to like, expand that thing. And, and the asphalt needs to be perfect 'cause they're gonna go way faster than a hundred miles an hour, right?

Um, but I think conceptually nothing is different really, which is again, why I go back to the fact that this really can be a golden era opportunity, I think for platform engineers and platform engineering organizations, or generally like IT organizations that are following platform engineering best practices. Because, um, if you have that, that's, I think that's really the competitive advantage. You know, like, like the, the ai the AI space is moving so fast, like we were saying at the beginning, right?

Like it's, it's, it's crazy like week over week, it's hard to keep up. Um, but we know that enterprises don't move at that speed. And so what can you do as an enterprise?

You know, like I think, like I've, I've talked to, I'm talking to like a lot of, uh, enterprise leaders who like, um, are to your point, right? Like they're freaking out. They're like, okay, you know, I get, I get bombarded by all this stuff.

Like, okay, like, you know, developers are doing all these crazy things, agents that now do this stuff. 001% of teams, like philanthropic itself, right? They're dog fooding, all the stuff, of course.

So they're way ahead of the curve, which is why they can like ship stuff every week, essentially. But, you know, you have to benchmark yourself, I think, as an enterprise to other enterprise around you. And they're not doing, like, they're as stack as you, they're like as, you know, frozen as you.

Um, and I think the, the, the key difference there is like, okay, how do I actually, you know, start executing on a plan that's not just like ai, ai, ai for the sake of ai, but it's actually deconstructing in reverse engineering, okay, what do I need to, to deploy AI at scale? Okay, so well designed platform, okay, how do I do that? And, and like start making progress that way.

Um, you know, as opposed to, okay, like what's the latest, coolest new thing that I can try and play around with? Because that's just like a, a cool demo, but it's not gonna scale. And you know, again, in a sense, we've already seen this, right?

We've actually already seen this, like one of the main anti-patterns and struggles that we've talked about here, uh, of, of platform engineering teams is actually sort of this like, tragedy of the commons of like, you know, you might have a good target reference architecture for your internal developer platform, and you might have like a good roadmap to get there, but then, you know, some of your platform teams and some of your platform engineers might get distracted by the shun new tech that like, comes around the corner and is like, ah, but I wanna play around with that. It's a lot more interesting. Maybe it's better for my cv, right?

Looks better on my LinkedIn or whatever. And that's, and that's kind of the strategy of the commons where like, well, from an organizational perspective, it would be better to just follow the roadmap and like, you know, build and just like, you know, leverage this compounding effects, um, but from the selfish, you know, point of view of an individual contributor, you know, they might wanna play with something specific, right? And I think we gotta be really careful, uh, because this dichotomy just went like a hundred x with ai, right?

Because like every week you have a new excuse to like, go and play with the next thing. Yeah. That, and that is, so we're running along on time.

I wanted to learn something else, but we'll, we're gonna pick this up in our next episode. And that is, I think one of the biggest challenges we're seeing with all this AI is a question of scale, a hundred percent, right? And security and the scale is just, well, it's the, it that's the challenge in security is the scale of it, right?

The, it's a challenge all around, and the amount of code that's being generated, the amount of apps, the amount of infrastructure, the it's scale. Um, but I, I want to end today's note with some platform continuous. Yes, we, so what's happening?

There's a lot happening and there's a lot in the, in the pipeline that's gonna be announced soon. Um, but we are, um, so we have obviously the main event, um, this is end of June, uh, this year, um, last week of June, we're gonna do, uh, you know, the usual full week of platform engineering. This is the number one celebration I think around the world for platform engineers.

We're expecting 50 to 60,000 people to connect virtually. com, um, and you can sign up for all the virtual stuff. Um, I think what was especially interesting last year from the virtual standpoint was the virtual, uh, workshop program.

We had, um, I think 30, 40 virtual workshops, two to three hours long each, uh, and each one of those had around 250 registrations. Um, you know, 50, 60 plus people actually getting hands-on voting, doing stuff. Um, so I think that's super interesting.

Um, and, and again, that's open for everybody. Um, and otherwise we meet in person across two live days. One in London on the 23rd, um, and one in in New York on the 25th of June.

Um, and so you're giving yourself time to get in this, so we're not doing the back to back thing this time. We're actually having one thing between, um, which I think is gonna be really helpful also, because actually a lot of our partners, a lot of our sponsors are also doing both. Um, so my goal is if we can grow Platform Con in 27 to a place where we can actually get a, like, we can actually charter a jet for everybody to fly between one and the next, that would be really cool.

Um, but, so that's, that, that would be, that's, that's, um, our main event Platform Con, and then we're very excited about what's, um, you know, basically going to New Horizons, new frontiers with Platform Con. Um, we're bringing it to, um, new continents. Um, and so stay tuned for that.

Uh, we're, we're hoping to announce, uh, at least two new locations, um, between, you know, this and next week, but certainly by the time we record the next episode, um, I think we can announce them. Um, and, um, and so there's at least two more live days coming, obviously. Um, I think the community's already familiar with Paris.

We did Paris, uh, last year in October. Uh, it's coming back on the 24th of September. Um, so again, uh, in Q3 at the end of Q3 this year.

Um, and so that's, that's already a fixed apartment. Um, stay tuned for more. We're very excited.

Um, but I think, you know, 26 is the year the Powerful Economy is going global, so it's uh, it's exciting. Very cool. com, right?

You can check it all out there, Luca. Congratulations. Thank you again on Noah.

Uh, I don't know if it's time for a feeding there, but hopefully we'll be back in the next, our next show in two weeks. We'll continue the conversation. Who knows what'll happen with AI back.

Yeah. Excited to be talking more. Alrighty, absolutely, Luca Gte.

Thanks, Alan here on the Platform Engineering Show. It's good to have my partner here back. We'll be back in two weeks with more.

But until then, this Alan Shimmel. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye.