"Baron traces the origin story back to his time building high-scale systems at Instana (which exited to IBM in 2020), where the reality of "always-on" platforms made one thing obvious: the tooling we rely on is often too low-level, too rigid, and too disconnected from real-world use cases. That gap has only widened as environments have exploded in complexity-more cloud providers, more managed services, more hybrid setups, more internal APIs, and "gillions" of tools stitched together into brittle workflows."
"One of the most interesting themes is the idea that, in the age of AI, we're all builders now. The same wave that's enabling "vibe coding" for non-traditional developers is also changing expectations for infrastructure work. Baron argues that classic IaC models, especially the provider ecosystem around tools like Terraform, were effectively designed for top-tier software engineers, even though many people operating in the broader DevOps and infrastructure world learned by scripting and iterating until the job gets done."
"Platform Engineering Labs' answer is to make infrastructure extensibility feel more like a natural part of the workflow. Instead of waiting on someone else to write a complex provider, or being stuck if you disagree with how it's implemented, teams can use AI-assisted development to create the integrations they need (GitLab, Jira, internal systems) quickly, then verify them against a robust test suite for safety and repeatability."
The origin traces back to building high-scale systems at Instana (which exited to IBM in 2020), where always-on platforms revealed that tooling is often too low-level, too rigid, and too disconnected from real-world use cases. Environments have exploded in complexity with more cloud providers, managed services, hybrid setups, internal APIs, and countless tools stitched into brittle workflows. AI is broadening who can build, enabling "vibe coding" and shifting expectations for infrastructure work. Classic IaC and provider ecosystems were designed for top-tier engineers, leaving many operators reliant on scripting and iteration. Platform Engineering Labs makes infrastructure extensibility a natural workflow, using AI-assisted development to create and test integrations rapidly while fostering open-source community and plugin ecosystems to reduce cycles and ceremony.
Read at DevOps.com
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