Platform Engineering Monthly — November 2025
Welcome to the twenty-fourth edition of Platform Engineering Monthly(2 years!). Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
📰 News
The Cloudflare Outage That Broke the Internet — Hot off the heels of a major AWS outage, Cloudflare comes with another big impact outage. It’ll be interesting to see if this is a new pattern that’s emerging in cloud infrastructure, and if architectural decisions will start to take account of these events.
CNCF Retires the Ingress Nginx Controller for Kubernetes — PSA if you’re reliant on the nginx controller it will be EOLed in March of next year, which is a pretty quick turn-around if you’re heavily reliant on this.
My $1k AWS mistake — Many of us (including myself) have made some costly mistakes on AWS and had to deal with some less than fun surprise bills at the end of the month. It comes down to Cloud providers having billing as a lagging indicator where alerts are your only options, rather than strict spending limits. Whether it’s opportunistic money-making dark patterns or simply too difficult to implement properly, the impact is a pretty poor experience for a customer.
This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services — When your AWS bill is over 100% of your revenue, you might want to take a bit of glance at Cost Centre once in a while.
Shai-Hulud 2.0 Supply Chain Attack: 25K+ npm Repos Exposed — If it’s not internet breaking events, it’s NPM supply chain attacks.
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
Tutorial: Implement a Nginx Gateway Fabric as an Alternative to Ingress — If you’re looking for a replacement to the soon-to-be deprecated official Nginx Ingress Controller, feels relevant considering the news from the CNCF.
Terraform Workbook - Your Guide to Infra as Code (IaC) - Want to get started with terraform, this tutorial provides a nice structure to get started with.
Building a CI/CD Pipeline Runner from Scratch in Python — Part Python tutorial, part CI/CD exercise. It’s likely not going to replace your existing setup, but it’s sometimes good to build things from scratch for fun.
📁 Interesting Projects (and Books!)
Coolify — An open-source, self-hostable PaaS alternative to Vercel, Heroku & Netlify.
Zarf - Air gapped Kubernetes, super useful if you're working within a locked down network environment.
cronmaster — If you ever felt like managing cron needed more dependencies on NPM.
Kubernetes Autoscaling — I got my hands on an early review copy and if you’re in that niche, it’s a pretty comprehensive read. Covers tools like HPA, VPA, KEDA, and Karpenter. Not sponsored, just a book I really enjoyed!
📅 Events
AWS re:Invent 2025 — Las Vegas · 1–5 December 2025
The cloud giant’s annual conference, with sessions on observability, AI integration, and platform automation.DevOpsCon Munich 2025 (incl. Platform Engineering Summit) — Munich / Online · 1–5 December 2025
Conference for CI/CD, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, and DevSecOps, featuring a dedicated Platform Engineering Summit on internal platforms, self-service, and DevEx.ContainerDays London 2026 — London · 11–12 February 2026
Cloud-native and Kubernetes conference with strong focus on platform engineering, AI-powered platforms, and hands-on workshops for platform and DevOps teams.QCon London 2026 (Platform Engineering Track) — London · 16–18 March 2026
Practitioner-driven software conference with a full platform engineering topic track covering IDPs, paved paths, and socio-technical architecture for platform teams.KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 — Amsterdam · 23–26 March 2026
CNCF’s flagship cloud-native event, where platform teams can dive into Kubernetes, service meshes, observability, and the broader ecosystem powering modern platforms.CNCF Platform Engineering Day @ KubeCon EU — Amsterdam · 23 March 2026
Co-located event dedicated to platform engineering, internal developer platforms, Backstage/IDP ecosystems, and real-world lessons from platform teams across industries.
Have platform engineering tips to share? Reply to this email or connect with me on LinkedIn.

