Don't Call It A Platform

Sam Newman criticizes the current state of platform engineering in the software development industry, arguing that it is more about hiding the complexity of the software than about enabling developers.

They claim that Kubernetes, which is widely used in platform engineering, is not developer-friendly, and the plethora of products that have arisen around it has created a complex ecosystem. The author argues that the focus should be on empowering developers and making their experience easy, and that platform engineering teams should be outcome-oriented, rather than just tool-oriented. Newman suggests that the term "platform engineering" is misleading, and that "delivery enablement" would be a more appropriate name for the teams that support developers.