Platform Engineering Monthly — February 2026
Welcome to the twenty-seventh edition of Platform Engineering Monthly. As always, if you have any suggestions or ideas for the next edition, let me know!
📰 News
GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team
GitHub Actions at any real scale are really poor. It seems designed for a dead-simple project with basic CI needs but falls apart with anything more complex.
Heroku Is Finally Dead
I have fond memories of using Heroku for pet projects, but ultimately it wasn’t something many of my peers brought into their professional environments.
Firebase Misconfiguration Exposes 300M Messages From Chat & Ask AI Users
A reminder that misconfiguration at scale can expose enormous volumes of user data, especially in fast-moving AI products.
Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in ‘AI slop’ code contributions
Open source projects are continuing to pay the AI contribution tax and things are starting to creak at the seams.
📚 Learning
Improve Cost Visibility and Observability With AWS Cost Categories
A deeper look at hierarchical cost categories and programmatic implementation for better financial visibility in AWS.
The FOCUS Problem Nobody Talks About
If your company is starting to get serious about FinOps practices, the FOCUS open standard is worth looking into.
Go 1.26 Interactive Tour
I love this interactive Go tour, nothing beats running the code yourself and seeing what’s changed.
Scaling Nodes From Zero: The Bottleneck
Scaling Kubernetes nodes from zero to save money, with a good discussion of the startup latency trade-offs involved.
🧪 Interesting Projects
kinc
A nice, contained way to experiment with Kubernetes inside a single Podman container.
IDE Shepherd (Datadog Extension)
A much-needed extension by Datadog to provide real-time security monitoring directly inside your IDE.
klaw.sh
Kubectl, but for AI agents.
Dockge
A web-based tool for managing your Docker Compose files.
📅 Events
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026
Amsterdam — 23rd–26th March 2026
The big one. Expect heavy focus on platform engineering, internal developer platforms, security, and multi-cluster operations.
Platform Engineering Day Europe 2026
Amsterdam — 23rd March 2026
I’ll be speaking at Platform Engineering Day. If you’re attending KubeCon, come along. I’ll also be at the Syntasso booth, so come say hi!
DX Annual 2026
San Francisco — 16th April 2026
DX is hosting a conference focused on Platform Engineering leaders and developer experience.
PlatformCon 2026
Online — 22nd–26th June 2026
A good signal for where platform engineering thinking is heading without the travel overhead.
SREcon Americas 2026
Santa Clara — 24th-26th March 2026
Often adjacent to platform conversations, particularly around reliability engineering and operational maturity.
Have platform engineering tips to share? Reply to this email or connect with me on LinkedIn.