Platform Engineering Monthly — April 2025

Welcome to the seventeenth edition of Platform Engineering Monthly!

Apologies in advance for the avalanche of AI-related news this month. Honestly, the sheer volume of AI hype I'm filtering out is staggering — I mostly blame Google Next. Friendly reminder: if you spot good non-AI stuff, please send it my way for future editions!

📰 News

• Google Next 2025 Keynote Recap | Google — "Start with the prompt" and "focus on having fun" — interesting advice, considering Abi Noda’s latest research summary which suggests developers mostly just want to... code. Maybe AI can prompt developers to find new fun — like debugging CI failures.

• Google AI Extravaganza Next 2025 by the Numbers | Google — Last year I joked: 218 announcements, 53 mentions of AI, 47 of Gemini. This year? 231 announcements, 190 mentions of AI, 83 mentions of Gemini, 36 mentions of “models,” and “agents” dropped 87 times.

• Can You Get Rich Freelancing with LLMs? | DX — An experiment that might just be insane enough to work. Or not.

• Amazon CEO Shareholder Letter | Last Week in AWS — A pretty hilarious (and biting) read if you want a cynical take on the latest Amazon shareholder optimism.

• Agentic AI in Cloud: TL;DR Edition | The Register — Thankfully, The Register did what none of us wanted to: summarised the growing chaos around Cloud Agentic AI so you don't have to.

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• How to Hire a Platform Engineer | The New Stack — A practical guide if you're growing your team (or just want to sharpen your BS radar during interviews).

• Kubernetes Hardening Made Easy with Kube-bench | CNCF — A nice walkthrough and some excellent tooling to make Kubernetes security not sound like you need a PhD.

• Choosing Between Local and Cloud Dev Environments | The New Stack — Local vs Cloud: the eternal developer struggle, explained.

• Foundational Concepts in Platform Engineering | The New Stack — A good 101 if you’re onboarding new folks (or explaining your job to family over dinner).

📁 Interesting Projects

• Coolify | GitHub — A self-hostable Heroku/Vercel alternative. Yes, another one. But this one looks... kinda cool.

• Zev | GitHub — A simple CLI tool to help you remember terminal commands

• Awesome MCP Servers | GitHub — I’ve been playing around with MCP servers lately (especially putting them in front of Kratix tech) and this list has been a real goldmine.

📅 Events

• PlatformCon 2025
  📅 June 23–27, 2025
  🌍 Hybrid: Virtual sessions and in-person "Live Days" in London and New York
  Join over 40,000 platform engineers for a week of talks, panels, and workshops.

• DevOpsCon 2025
  📍 London: May 12–16
  📍 San Diego: May 19–23
  📍 Berlin: June 16–20
  📍 New York: Sept 29–Oct 2
  Focuses on cloud platforms, microservices, Kubernetes, automation, and continuous delivery. ​

• DevOps Pro Europe
  📅 May 20–23, 2025
  📍 Vilnius, Lithuania & Virtual
  Covers core DevOps concepts, patterns, and practices.

🎙️ Webinars

• Minimum Viable Platform 101: The Ultimate Platform Engineering Framework
  Mallory Haigh, Platform Engineering Workshop Host
  📅 April 29, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  Building your first MVP platform without tears.

• Platform Engineering: Why Hype Isn't Enough for Adoption
  Ajay Chankramath, CTO @ Brillio
  📅 April 30, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  What actually breaks platform initiatives after the first sprint.

• Identifying Vulnerabilities in Public Kubernetes Helm Charts
  Nigel Douglas, Head of DevRel @ Cloudsmith
  📅 May 20, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  Helm charts: great for convenience, also great for attackers. Yay security.

Have platform engineering tips to share? Reply to this email or connect with me on LinkedIn.