Episode #068: Platform Engineering Goes Mainstream in 2026
Duration: 17 minutes | Speakers: Jordan & Alex | Target Audience: Platform engineers, engineering leaders, DevOps practitioners
Series: Platform Engineering 2026 Look Forward (Episode 2 of 5)
News Segment
| Story | Source | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| KEDA v2.18.3 & v2.17.3 | KEDA Releases | Security fix for CVE-2025-68476 in both current and LTS branches |
| Cloudflare Outage Analysis | SRE Weekly | Resilience engineering lessons on saturation and protective subsystems |
| Garage S3 Object Store | Reddit r/rust | Rust-based S3-compatible storage for edge/hybrid deployments |
This is the second episode in our five-part "Platform Engineering 2026 Look Forward Series." We explore the macro trend driving everything: platform engineering crossing the chasm from early adopter to mainstream. Gartner predicts 80% of software engineering organizations will have dedicated platform teams by 2026, up from 45% in 2022. But there's a 56% talent gap and nearly half of initiatives run on under $1M annually.
Key Takeaways
| Metric | Data Point | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Current adoption | 55% of organizations | Google 2025 |
| Projected adoption | 80% by 2026 | Gartner |
| Team age | 55% less than 2 years old | State of PE Vol 4 |
| Talent gap | 56% of organizations cite PE skills gap | Linux Foundation 2025 |
| Average salary | $172k (range $143k-$201k) | 2025 Q1 data |
| Budget constraint | 47.4% have less than $1M annual budget | State of PE Vol 4 |
The 5-Question Litmus Test
Are you doing genuine platform engineering or rebranded DevOps?
- Internal customers: Do you have developers who consume your platform?
- Developer satisfaction: Do you measure it as a key metric?
- Product roadmap: Do you have one for your platform capabilities?
- Self-service: Can developers deploy without filing tickets?
- Deprecation: Do you retire platform features when no longer needed?
If you're answering yes to most of these, you're doing platform engineering. If not, you might be a DevOps team with a new name.
Five Action Items for 2026
- Assess your position honestly - Answer the 5-question litmus test
- Plan for talent proactively - Upskill existing team or budget for premium hires
- Define success metrics - Developer satisfaction, self-service adoption, time to first deployment
- Size appropriately - Start at 3-5% of engineering headcount as baseline
- Consider certification - CNPA for entry-level, CNPE for senior validation
Resources
- State of Platform Engineering Report Vol 4
- CNPE Certification
- Gartner Hype Cycle for Platform Engineering 2025
- Linux Foundation 2025 State of Tech Talent Report
Full Transcript
Jordan: Before we dive into our main topic, let's cover some quick news from the platform engineering world.
Alex: KEDA, the Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaler, released versions 2.18.3 and 2.17.3 this week. Both releases patch CVE-2025-68476, so if you're running KEDA in production, you'll want to grab these updates. Security fixes across both the current and LTS branches is good to see.
Jordan: Speaking of production incidents, there's an excellent analysis from SRE Weekly on the recent Cloudflare outage. The author dives into what resilience engineers call "saturation," the pattern where systems hit limits they didn't know they had. The piece also highlights how subsystems designed to protect can sometimes inflict harm, and why detailed public writeups like Cloudflare's are actually evidence of good engineering culture, not something to criticize.
Alex: And for teams running self-hosted object storage, Garage is getting attention on Reddit. It's a Rust-based S3-compatible object store designed to be reliable enough to run outside traditional datacenters. For platform teams managing data infrastructure at the edge or in hybrid environments, it's worth evaluating.
Jordan: Good context as we talk about platform engineering maturity. This is episode two of our five-part Platform Engineering 2026 Look Forward Series. Last episode, we introduced the 60/30/10 framework for AI agent adoption. Today, we're zooming out to the macro trend that's driving everything: platform engineering going mainstream.
Alex: And by mainstream, we don't mean "trendy." We mean the kind of mainstream where Gartner is predicting 80% of software engineering organizations will have dedicated platform teams by 2026. That's up from 45% in 2022. This isn't hype anymore. This is structural change.
Jordan: Let me throw some numbers at you that set the stage. According to Google's 2025 surveys, 55% of organizations have already adopted platform engineering. In Kubernetes-heavy environments, over 60% of enterprises either have dedicated platform teams or are actively planning to build them this year. And here's the stat that really contextualizes where we are: 55% of platform teams are less than two years old.
Alex: That last number is crucial. We're in the early majority phase of adoption. The innovators and early adopters built their platforms in 2020 through 2023. Now the early majority is rushing in. That means patterns that worked for Netflix or Spotify or Uber are about to get stress-tested by thousands of organizations with very different constraints.
Jordan: Gartner's 2023 Hype Cycle predicted platform engineering would reach mainstream adoption in software engineering in two to five years. We're now firmly in that window. But the velocity of this adoption is unprecedented. It's faster than DevOps adoption was.
Alex: And there's one signal that tells me this has officially crossed the chasm: the CNPE certification. On November 11, 2025, at KubeCon Atlanta, CNCF announced the global availability of the Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineer certification. This is the first new hands-on certification from CNCF in five years.
Jordan: Wait, five years? The last one was CKS?
Alex: That's right. The last performance-based certification CNCF launched was the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist in 2020. The fact that they created a whole new certification for platform engineering tells you something about how seriously the industry is taking this discipline. And it's not an easy credential. The exam is 120 minutes, 17 hands-on tasks, covering five domains: Platform Architecture at 15%, GitOps and Continuous Delivery at 25%, Platform APIs and Self-Service at 25%, Observability and Operations at 20%, and Security at 15%.
Jordan: We covered the CNPE in depth in episode 66, so I won't rehash the exam details. But the meta-point is important: certification is a maturity signal. When CKA launched, it legitimized Kubernetes skills in enterprise hiring. When CNPE launched, it did the same for platform engineering.
Alex: Chris Aniszczyk, the CTO of CNCF, put it well in the announcement. He said, "Platform engineering teams are quickly becoming the backbone of organizations looking to scale modern infrastructure. With CNPE, we're defining what excellence looks like at the open source and enterprise level."
Jordan: But here's where we need to get uncomfortable. Because mainstream adoption isn't all roses. The State of Platform Engineering Report Volume 4 dropped some sobering data. Nearly half of platform initiatives, 47.4% specifically, are operating with an annual budget between zero and one million dollars. That's not a lot of runway for building internal developer platforms.
Alex: And the talent gap is real. The Linux Foundation's 2025 State of Tech Talent Report ranks platform engineering as one of the top five widening skills gaps, cited by 56% of organizations. The others in that list are AI and ML at 68%, cybersecurity at 65%, FinOps at 61%, and cloud computing at 59%.
Jordan: So we have this paradox: demand for platform engineering is exploding, but supply is severely constrained. You can't just post a job listing that says "Platform Engineer, must know Kubernetes, Terraform, GitOps, observability, security, and have product management skills." Those people exist, but they're already employed at places that pay extremely well and offer interesting problems.
Alex: The average platform engineer salary according to 2025 Q1 data sits at around $172,000, with a range from $143,000 to $201,000. That's not cheap. And here's an interesting trend: average salaries actually decreased slightly compared to the previous year, both in North America and Europe.
Jordan: That sounds concerning, but it's actually a healthy signal.
Alex: Exactly. In previous years, the role was dominated by highly senior, early-adopter specialists. Today, the discipline has gone mainstream, drawing in mid-level and junior talent. Platform engineering is democratizing. It's becoming a standard career path rather than an exclusive domain for the top 1% of engineers.
Jordan: So how are organizations actually solving the talent gap? Because you can't just wait for the market to produce more platform engineers.
Alex: The patterns I'm seeing are threefold. First, upskilling existing SREs and DevOps engineers. These folks already have the infrastructure knowledge. You're adding product thinking and developer experience skills. Second, creating formal platform engineering career ladders within organizations. This gives people a growth path and makes internal mobility possible. And third, a growing market for fractional platform engineering consulting. Smaller orgs that can't afford a full team are bringing in specialists to set up their IDP foundations.
Jordan: Let's address the elephant in the room. Because every time platform engineering comes up in a Hacker News thread or a Reddit discussion, someone drops the claim: "Platform engineering is just DevOps rebranded for LinkedIn clout."
Alex: It's a legitimate critique that deserves a thoughtful response. Here's the criticism stated plainly: Platform engineering is DevOps rebranded for VC pitches and LinkedIn clout. It's the same infra work just wrapped in a prettier interface and sold as "product thinking."
Jordan: And there's evidence for this view. Title drift is real. When recruiters discover that the best DevOps candidates now call themselves platform engineers, job postings change overnight, even if no one plans to build an actual platform. You end up with people doing the exact same sysadmin work they've always done, just with a new title on their LinkedIn profile.
Alex: I've seen this pattern too. Teams that used to call themselves SysAdmins, then rebranded to DevOps because it was cooler and paid better, are now doing the same thing and rebranding to platform teams for the same wrong reasons.
Jordan: So where's the actual distinction? What makes platform engineering genuinely different from DevOps?
Alex: The key insight is that DevOps is a philosophy and culture, while platform engineering is a discipline and practice. DevOps broke down silos and improved collaboration, but its purest vision, where everybody does everything, faces practical limitations at scale. Totally cross-functional teams work well at small organizations but struggle when engineering teams grow beyond 20 people, because people naturally have different specializations and preferences.
Jordan: The way I think about it: DevOps gets you started, but platform engineering helps you scale. Platform engineering operationalizes DevOps principles by creating a dedicated team that builds and maintains the platform as a product.
Alex: That's the key phrase: "platform as a product." The litmus test for whether you're doing real platform engineering versus rebranded DevOps comes down to five questions. One: Do you have internal customers, meaning developers who consume your platform? Two: Do you measure developer satisfaction as a key metric? Three: Do you have a product roadmap for your platform capabilities? Four: Can developers self-serve without filing tickets? And five: Do you deprecate platform features when they're no longer needed?
Jordan: If you're answering yes to most of those, you're probably doing platform engineering. If you're answering no, you might just be a DevOps team with a new name.
Alex: And honestly, that's fine. Not every organization needs a full internal developer platform. The danger is pretending you're doing platform engineering when you're not, because then you won't invest appropriately and you won't get the outcomes you're hoping for.
Jordan: Let's talk about team sizing because that's a practical question engineering leaders face. If I'm building a platform team, how big should it be relative to the developers it serves?
Alex: There's no single correct answer, but the data gives us some benchmarks. Research from DX shows that companies with under 1,000 engineers allocate on average about 18 to 19% of their headcount toward centralized productivity teams, which includes platform engineering. The range is wide though, anywhere from 8% to 37%.
Jordan: Will Larson, who led and scaled SRE and platform engineering at Uber, provides another data point. When Uber's engineering team grew to over 2,000 people, his platform team scaled to about 70. That's roughly a 3.5% ratio.
Alex: The variance comes from several factors. How mature is your platform? Early-stage platforms need more investment. How complex is your tech stack? Multi-cloud, polyglot environments need more platform support. What are your compliance requirements? Regulated industries often need more guardrails. And how self-service is your platform? Highly mature platforms can be leaner.
Jordan: What team structure patterns are you seeing work?
Alex: There are four common models. The embedded model puts platform engineers directly into product teams. This gives you tight feedback loops but can lead to fragmentation. The centralized model has a core platform team serving all product teams. This gives consistency but can become a bottleneck. The hybrid model combines a central core team with embedded liaisons in product teams. And the federated model creates a standards body with mostly autonomous teams that conform to shared interfaces.
Jordan: Most organizations I see start centralized and move toward hybrid as they scale.
Alex: That's the typical progression. You need to build initial credibility and establish patterns before you can distribute responsibility.
Jordan: So what does mainstream adoption actually mean for practitioners? Let's break it down for different audiences.
Alex: For individual engineers, platform engineering is becoming a standard career path, not just for the top 1% anymore. Certification like CNPE provides a portable credential that transfers between organizations. But competition is increasing as the talent pool grows. The opportunity is in specialization: security-focused platform engineering, data platform engineering, AI infrastructure platform engineering.
Jordan: For organizations, platform engineering is shifting from competitive advantage to table stakes. If 80% of your competitors have platform teams by 2026 and you don't, you're at a disadvantage for developer productivity and talent retention.
Alex: The vendor ecosystem is maturing rapidly. Backstage, Port, Cortex, and a dozen other internal developer portal solutions are making the "buy versus build" decision clearer. For many organizations, the answer is increasingly "buy a foundation and customize" rather than "build from scratch."
Jordan: For the industry as a whole, we're seeing platform engineering conferences, communities, and media proliferating. Best practices are crystallizing. And importantly, failure patterns are becoming documented. We're learning what doesn't work as much as what does.
Alex: One interesting development: "Platform Engineer" is now appearing as a formal job family in HR systems at large enterprises. That's a subtle but significant sign of institutionalization.
Jordan: Let's close with five action items for 2026 that listeners can take away.
Alex: First, assess your position honestly. Are you doing genuine platform engineering or rebranded DevOps? Answer those five litmus test questions. There's no shame in being early on the journey, but be honest about where you are.
Jordan: Second, plan for talent proactively. Either budget to upskill your existing team, which is usually more feasible, or budget for premium hires, which is expensive but sometimes necessary for seeding a new capability.
Alex: Third, define success metrics before you scale. Developer satisfaction, self-service adoption rate, time to first deployment. If you don't measure it, you can't prove value, and platform teams without demonstrable value get cut when budgets tighten.
Jordan: Fourth, size appropriately. Start with something in the range of 3 to 5% of engineering headcount as a baseline, then adjust based on demand. Underfunding platform teams is a common failure mode.
Alex: And fifth, consider certification. CNPA provides entry-level validation for folks transitioning into platform engineering. CNPE validates senior expertise. These credentials are becoming meaningful in hiring decisions.
Jordan: Here's the thing that strikes me about all of this. Platform engineering went from "what's that?" to "everyone needs it" in about three years. That's remarkably fast for enterprise technology adoption.
Alex: And the implication is clear: the question isn't if your organization will adopt platform engineering, it's how well you'll do it. The organizations that treat platforms as products, that invest in developer experience, that measure outcomes, those are the ones that will outperform.
Jordan: That's a perfect segue to our next episode. If platform engineering is going mainstream, how do we actually measure success? DORA metrics aren't enough. We're going to introduce the SPACE framework, the DX Core 4, and explore why developer happiness is becoming a first-class metric.
Alex: The cognitive load problem is real, and the metrics we've been using don't capture it. That's episode three of our Look Forward series.
Jordan: Until then, the fundamentals remain constant. Treat your platform as a product, know your customers, and measure the outcomes that matter.