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Platform Engineering in 2026: What It Is and Why DevOps Teams Are Adopting It

Platform engineering used to be the title on a few job adverts at Spotify and Netflix. In 2026 it is the default shape of any infrastructure team larger than a dozen people. The shift is worth understanding, because it is not just a rebrand of DevOps - it is a different operating model, with different tools, different incentives, and a different relationship to the developers it serves. This post is a plain-language walk through what platform engineering actually is, why the industry has converged on it, and how the arrival of AI agents is reshaping the discipline mid-flight. ...

April 22, 2026 · 8 min · James M

DevOps in the Age of AI Agents

For years, DevOps has been about breaking down silos and automating the software delivery lifecycle. We moved from manual deployments to Jenkins scripts, then to YAML-defined pipelines, and eventually to Infrastructure as Code (IaC). But in 2026, the bottleneck is no longer the speed of the pipeline - it’s the speed of human decision-making within that pipeline. We are entering the era of Agentic DevOps. From Automation to Autonomy Traditional DevOps automation follows a strict “if this, then that” logic. AI-driven DevOps uses reasoning models to handle the “I’m not sure, let me figure it out” scenarios that typically stall a release. ...

April 5, 2026 · 3 min · James M

DevOps Best Practices

“Best practice” is a phrase that should be treated with suspicion. What works for a fintech running 500 engineers rarely works for a five-person startup. The notes below are patterns I have seen hold up across multiple organisations - but always weighed against context, team size, and what the system is actually trying to do. Microservices Microservices solve organisational problems as much as technical ones. A service boundary is a team boundary in disguise. ...

December 16, 2023 · 4 min · James M

AWS re:Invent Slides (2022)

This is the set of re:Invent 2022 slide decks I found most useful when they were published, grouped by topic. Each entry links to the official AWS-hosted PDF and carries a short, plain-language note about what the session is useful for in practice - so you can decide which decks are worth reading before committing the time. For the full session video recordings, see the AWS Events channel on YouTube. DevOps Amazon’s approach to high-availability deployment The practices Amazon’s own delivery teams use to reach near-zero deployment failure rates. Most of the value is in the guardrail patterns - pre-production gates, automated rollback triggers, and how to design a release process that protects itself from human error. ...

December 3, 2022 · 4 min · James M

CI/CD Tools

CI/CD is the plumbing that turns a commit into running software. The tools below cover the full spectrum - from fully managed SaaS that you never have to operate, to self-hosted automation servers you tune yourself, to GitOps controllers that treat your Kubernetes cluster as the deployment target. How to choose A few questions that tend to cut through the vendor noise: Is your code in GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket? Staying in-ecosystem reduces integration effort dramatically Do you deploy to Kubernetes? GitOps tools like Argo CD and Flux are often a better fit than traditional pipelines Do you want to operate the control plane yourself? Jenkins gives you maximum flexibility and maximum operational burden How many parallel runners will you need at peak, and who pays for them? Hosted CI/CD platforms Low operational overhead, tight integration with their source-control parents, and usage-based pricing. ...

August 21, 2022 · 3 min · James M