#platform-engineering

#platform-engineering

The hard part is making hundreds of decisions that won't quietly compound into outages, cost blowouts, security gaps, or organizational gridlock. That's why, even when organizations are moving from cloud to cloud or swapping one set of managed services for another, they still need deep planning capabilities.

For twenty years, QCon has tracked the industry's major inflections. As the conference marks its 20th anniversary with its 2026 events, the editorial stance remains consistent: sessions are curated by senior engineers, focusing on what has actually worked (and failed) in production. The upcoming programs for QCon London (March 16-19) and QCon San Francisco (November 16-20) apply this lens to a new set of compounding decisions: moving AI from experiment to reliable production and validating the ROI of platform engineering.

We are building the first vertically integrated full-service platform for legal. We allow the end-to-end completion of legal requests with the help of AI agents and experts in the loop. Lawyers are trapped in the time-for-money model. Their expertise is sold by the hour. Lawyers are selling their most valuable asset, their intellect, in finite blocks of time, effectively capping their potential. nu:legal breaks this ceiling by allowing professionals to transform their knowledge into scalable, agentic services.

A little bit about myself. In my previous life, I was staff platform engineering. I focused a lot of development engineering and everything that basically was the sociotechnical aspect of our technical work. I recently was working as a CTO and co-founder of a startup, and nowadays I'm just doing advisory roles and a little bit of consulting while trying to think about the next big thing. Yes, so happy to be talking with you, Shane.

Software Architecture and Design Trends Report 2025 This report explores how architects are adapting to a world shaped by AI. As large language models (LLMs) become commonplace, attention is turning toward small, specialized models, agentic systems, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as practical design patterns. Architects are now being asked to balance efficiency, quality, sustainability, and decentralized decision-making. Culture and Methods Trends Report 2025 This report highlights a parallel tension.

As I was putting this talk together, I happened to be watching a lot of old cartoons and reading comics from the '80s and '90s. I noticed a pattern that I felt would be a great analogy for the message I want to get across today. In so many of these shows, you've got a villain or an evil organization working towards some world domination or other malignant aims, and these are our bad guys.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) published a blog post discussing how vCluster, an open-source project by Loft Labs, addresses key multi-tenancy obstacles in Kubernetes clusters by enabling "virtual clusters" within a single host cluster. This approach enables multiple tenants to have isolated control planes while sharing underlying compute resources, thereby reducing overhead without compromising isolation. Traditional namespace-based isolation in Kubernetes often falls short when tenants need to deploy cluster-scoped resources like custom resource definitions (CRDs)

Let's start with a story. Let me tell you about Alex. Alex is a staff engineer at a mid-sized tech company. They were promoted six months ago, after years of consistent delivery, mentoring teammates, and driving high impact projects. Alex has always been the go-to person from blocking gnarly tech problems. Leadership told them, you're exactly what we need at the staff level. At first, it felt great.

What started as do-it-yourself automation with Jenkins scripts and self-hosted Git servers has now become an increasingly complex ecosystem of tooling, governance and culture. The question now is whether companies really need to maintain all of that themselves. DaaS offers an alternative: managed pipelines, built-in security and a self-service developer experience without the operational burden. For start-ups and enterprises alike, DaaS is about survival in a world where time-to-market, compliance and scalability can't wait .