#111: 2024 in review

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly sip of platform engineering mulled wine. Every week we cover all things platform engineering from new community initiatives to best practices, learnings, and news. We’ve just got 2 more platform weeklies in this wild year of 2024. They’ll be great ones.

What’s hot this week:

• It’s your last chance to use your 2024 learning budget to join the platform engineering certification course
• In LATAM and looking for a new platform engineering job?
• Meet the first 30 platform engineering community ambassadors!

2024 in review

It’s been an incredible year. To think 365 days ago, we only just launched PlatformCon 2024. There was no certification course. This newsletter was almost 6x smaller. And half the articles shared in Slack were about whether the platform engineering “fad” would fade away.

In Platform Weekly #62 which closed off last year, I was still blown away by how platform engineering had begun to take over the world of cloud-native events. I was excited about the idea of Minimum Viable Platforms and how they might radically change the risk profile of a platform engineering initiative.?

It’s been 52 weeks since then. Let’s see how far we’ve come.

• Platform engineering goes mainstream: It was a big deal when Gartner put platform engineering on a hype cycle in 2022. This year… it was on 10. AND it had it’s own. Plus infrastructure platform engineering saw itself on 8 as well
• All in on learning: The community this year hosted 87 webinars. Launched the first-ever platform engineering certification track, Trainings for platform teams, and an ambassador program focused on building a community of experts within the community dedicated to helping us all learn and grow
• PlatformCon is officially huge: When I first dubbed PlatformCon, the world’s largest platform engineering event, it was tongue-in-cheek, as in 2022 it was the only one. Now there are dozens - and PlatformCon truly holds that title. 2024 featured the first ever in-person live day, the first hands-on workshops, and grew from 2 days to 5 days with over 30,000 people flowing through it

It’s not just these 3 points. 2024 was the year when standards and best practices for platform engineering really took off. The platform engineering reference architectures launched in 2023 were featured in almost 30% of talks at PC24.

Minimum Viable Platforms (MVP) were barely more than theory this time last year, and now more than 90% of platform teams I work with are embracing this model. It’s on the path to becoming the de-facto way enterprises approach platform initiatives.

And all this is just from the last year's days…

What will the next 365 days look like? Well, for that you’ll have to wait for next week.

But I can tell you that the community ain’t finished growing yet. We kick off in January right away with more platform engineering courses. We’ve got big things planned for PlatformCon. And there is a LOT planned with our first-ever group of Community Ambassadors.

I can’t wait.