Platform Engineering Monthly — July 2025
Welcome to the twentieth edition of Platform Engineering Monthly! Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
📰 News
The future is not self-hosted — A nicely honest read on self-hosting: niche hobbyism won’t scale beyond tech nerds. I’m intrigued—and terrified—by the idea of a community‑hosted Internet. 🔗 https://www.drewlyton.com/story/the-future-is-not-self-hosted/
Supply chain attack alert: npm “is” package infected — The popular npm package “is” was compromised with cross‑platform malware. Ends poorly. 🔗 https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/24/not_pretty_not_windowsonly_npm/
Introducing Kiro — Yet another VSCode AI-fork. I signed up to ~1) play spec-driven dev and ~2) get free Claude code—but it turns out I wasn’t alone in that idea… as FYI AWS slapped usage limits on it. 🔗 https://kiro.dev/blog/introducing-kiro/
AWS offers bigger free tier—$200 in credits — The drug dealer’s back with a stronger fix. Looks like AWS is just catching up here. 🔗 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-free-tier-update-new-customers-can-get-started-and-explore-aws-with-up-to-200-in-credits/
Amazon Q self-destructs — Summary says it all: a hacker PR got merged, told Amazon Q to nuke your infra, and Amazon shipped it! 🔗 https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/amazon-q-now-with-helpful-ai-powered-self-destruct-capabilities/
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
Prometheus labels: Understanding and best practices — A neat CNCF post on why labels matter and how to structure them. 🔗 https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/07/22/prometheus-labels-understanding-and-best-practices/
Nothing But Nix for GitHub Actions — How to get tons of performance and storage for free on GitHub Actions. Bonus: it's also talked about on this linuxmatters.sh episode. 🔗 https://wimpysworld.com/posts/nothing-but-nix-github-actions/
Webinar: The art of the possible with MCP Servers — I hosted a webinar on building internal dev platforms with MCP servers and Kratix. Less “how-to,” more “what could be possible.” 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/events/7346810420655022081
📁 Interesting Projects
theProtector — Bash observability done simply. Why complicate things? 🔗 https://github.com/IHATEGIVINGAUSERNAME/theProtector
kgateway — A new Envoy-based gateway just accepted into CNCF. Worth checking out for cloud-native ingress. 🔗 https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/07/23/project-spotlight-kgateway/
FossFLOW — A shiny open-source infrastructure diagramming tool. Pro-level mapping without enterprise lock-in. 🔗 https://github.com/stan-smith/FossFLOW
vet — Adds extra security around those
curl | bash
commands you probably shouldn’t run. 🔗 https://github.com/vet-run/vet
📅 Events
5 Takeaways from PlatformCon 2025: From “great” platforms to doing AI right (Webinar)
📅 July 31, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CEST
🔗 https://platformengineering.org/events/5-takeaways-from-platformcon-2025-from-great-platforms-to-doing-ai-right-2025-07-31DevOpsCon New York (with Platform Engineering Summit)
📅 September 29–October 2, 2025
🔗 https://devopscon.ioConf42 Platform Engineering 2025
📅 September 4, 2025 | Online
🔗 https://www.conf42.com/platform2025KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (India)
📅 August 13–15, 2025 | Hyderabad, India
🔗 https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-india/
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