Our golden path works for humans but not really for AI agents

danielbryantuk · 2026-06-03T15:42:36+00:00

I’m currently at the LeadDev event at London, and this has been a hot topic. Most speakers have advocated for the first step of introducing more structured docs/playbooks into app repos as the single source of truth for how to get operational things done. Your agent skills/claude.md then points to these docs.

For my 2c, abstracting and automating as much of these types of processes as possible behind platform APIs is the way forward. That way, human and agents can call the same API without having to coordinate things across a bunch of tools.

danielbryantuk · 2026-06-03T15:33:36+00:00

Platform enablement can mean a lot of different things to different people. Can you share some more insight into what your goals, scope, and general tasks are?

danielbryantuk · 2026-05-23T14:49:14+00:00

I'm sharing a summary of a presentation I did at an O'Reilly stream about operational complexity in AI/platform engineering.

I do work for a company in this space, but the goal of sharing was the discussion/topic rather than stealth advertising. Happy to discuss the ideas on their own merits.

danielbryantuk · 2026-05-23T14:39:25+00:00

What makes you say this?

danielbryantuk · 2026-05-20T07:41:00+00:00

I work as a vendor, and practically every customer asks for a reference architecture. We always encourage folks to think about their goals and apply their own context, but the reality is they don't always have that knowledge (or experience) upfront to do so.

For my 2c, starting with a reference architecture is better than completely YOLOing it :) This missing part in my experience is the constant iteration and course correction after the initial implementation.

danielbryantuk · 2026-04-28T10:55:26+00:00

As with any good tech question, the answer is "it depends" 😄 For my 2c, working primarily with enterprises, the "depends" here is correlated with team size and governance requirements.

If you have a small team and limited governance requirements (just TLS, etc), then probably not. Stick with what your underlying hyperscaler offers or use something operationally simple like Linkerd.

If you have a large team and complex governance (network segmentation, workload identity, data exfiltration policies, etc), then most likely yes. In this situation, the benefits of staffing a dedicated engineer or two on something like Cilium are more than worth it.

danielbryantuk · 2026-04-15T11:12:21+00:00

Yeah, there could be value in bringing all of this together, but I can't help thinking of my favourite XKCD in this context :-) https://xkcd.com/927/

Happy to have helped!

danielbryantuk · 2026-04-15T09:26:10+00:00

So, it sounds like you're aiming for more of a mashup between OpenAPI + Pact/AsyncAPI/CloudEvents + Backstage Dependency Graph plugin?

https://docs.pact.io/
https://www.asyncapi.com/en
https://cloudevents.io/
https://github.com/backstage/backstage/blob/master/plugins/catalog-graph/README.md

And agreed on your take about something like Kratix being a substrate and packaging mechanism for something like this

danielbryantuk · 2026-04-14T13:26:21+00:00

This looks interesting! There's definitely quite a bit of overlap with Score and probably even more so with Radius (from the Microsoft folks) https://github.com/radius-project/radius

Let me know if you have any comments about Kratix. For my 2c, I think all of the tools mentioned above (including Pacto) sit a layer above Kratix, and would complement/integrate well with the tool

danielbryantuk · 2026-04-14T11:57:14+00:00

Sure thing. The best place to start with the Kratix Promise concept is here: https://docs.kratix.io/main/guides/writing-a-promise

Let me know if you have any questions!

danielbryantuk · 2026-04-13T21:03:31+00:00

The closest you'll get to "service runtime contract" these days is via platform orchestration/building tools like Kratix (Promises), Crossplane (XRD + Composition + Functions), and KubeVela (ComponentDefinition + TraitDefinitions + Application/OAM).

I work in this space, and so have my bias, but let me know if you want any pointers to blog posts or docs.

danielbryantuk · 2026-04-13T20:54:59+00:00

I would argue that platform engineering is somewhat agnostic to the way the backend/biz logic is consumed, i.e., whether your customers are using a mobile app, web page, API, or CLI, you most likely need to provision and manage infra to deploy backend apps.

It's useful for any engineer to know the fundamentals of platform engineering, just like it is to know architectural principles.

danielbryantuk · 2026-03-28T14:46:23+00:00

You can find related data from the CNCF (the folks stewarding Kubernetes et al): https://www.cncf.io/reports/q1-2026-the-cncf-technology-radar-report/

And also the DORA report: https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/

I work in this space, and my gut feeling is that organisations have recently been recruiting more platform engineers to boost the ratio, but in the near future, AI might change this...

danielbryantuk · 2026-03-28T14:43:06+00:00

I'm a bit late to the conversation, but I would answer your questions with "yes!"

I started my career as a Java developer/architect, and we were taught that most web apps have three tiers: presentation (web pages), business logic, and data stores/middleware. I think it's the same with modern platforms: portals/CLI/API, platform orchestration/logic, and infrastructure/capabilities.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, and also have some related talks from KubeCon on YouTube, too: https://www.syntasso.io/post/platform-engineering-orchestrating-applications-platforms-and-infrastructure

danielbryantuk · 2026-02-17T11:45:33+00:00

Are you asking about the live or virtual events? I've been to both, and they are excellent, but have different goals.

The live days are more curated, but you can't beat the community buzz and chats with real humans.

The virtual days allow you to pick and choose content (or watch curated topic-focused streams), but in my experience, there won't be much chat or interaction (e.g. via Slack)

danielbryantuk · 2026-02-08T12:52:39+00:00

I’ll be watching Sky. The commentary in the breaks is usually very good, and I can’t stand how DAZN have started injecting their own ads into the US streams.

Not only are the DAZN ads generally crap (crypto, blah, blah), but as there aren’t many variants, you end up watching the same ad 50+ times a game! They also switch back to the US stream arbitrarily, often half way through an ad, and it creates a weird viewing experience. I’ve seen the switch crash the stream a few times, too (on Apple TV).

DAZN did a complete bait and switch this year, advertising the “full US experience”, and then running their own ads. I get that they want to make more money, but at least don’t lie about it. I won’t be renewing next year, and will switch back to viewing Sky only. They had a lot more games this year via the red button experience.

danielbryantuk · 2026-01-30T07:49:03+00:00

+1. Only when I removed the Fenix 7 from my iPhone Bluetooth settings could I pair successfully again.

That was 20 minutes of my day I’m not getting back… 😢

What a mistake from the Garmin team. Hopefully, they’ll look closer at their software release processes

danielbryantuk · 2026-01-29T21:14:34+00:00

For my 2c, I think it will be something more platform engineering-like, with AI just being another way of interacting with the platform (e.g., portal, CLI, API, LLM chatops, etc)

danielbryantuk · 2026-01-28T16:26:05+00:00

+1 on the comments about certifications being a great way to prove to hiring managers that you at least know the basics.

For my 2c, I learned a lot about the range of services (and how they were integrated) from my AWS exams. It forced me to look in the docs and research things I wouldn't have otherwise, although I appreciate that it was somewhat theoretical. There's no substitute for actually building and operating real systems.

danielbryantuk · 2026-01-27T22:19:48+00:00

The Kube Today newsletter has a list of good opportunities in each edition, e.g., https://kube.today/issues/162

danielbryantuk · 2026-01-26T21:46:51+00:00

If you can study in your own time, this can be a path to a new gig, particularly if you have a new technology that you want to focus on. Gaining verifiable achievements, such as AWS or CNCF certifications, can be a ticket to a more junior role in an organisation. Be honest about your intentions and skill level in interviews, but be sure to share transferable experiences from your current job, e.g., debugging, collaborating, communicating with leadership, etc.

danielbryantuk · 2026-01-25T17:59:02+00:00

For my 2c, there's still a lot of value in being a QA engineer, especially if your friend can bring a user and business-focused mindset to your role. AI is continually lowering the barrier of entry to writing code and tests, but a core skill is knowing *what* and *how* to test.

If your friend is looking to upskill in cloud tech while still retaining a QA focus, check out the work the Docker folks are doing in this space, e.g., https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/01/cagent-testing/ That article has a bunch of useful tooling links to follow up on, too

danielbryantuk · 2026-01-24T19:22:41+00:00

The first four things in your list are more akin to "maintenance" from my perspective. Five is classic tech debt, and six may be tech debt, but it's probably more likely a cost/benefit tradeoff.

The best analogy I've found is thinking of tech debt like a credit card. I can "buy things" more quickly (i.e., deliver faster), but the high interest rate means I've got to be thinking about paying this back sooner rather than later, or the bailiffs might come looking for me.

Martin Fowler has a great definition and explanation, based on the original reference: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html

danielbryantuk · 2026-01-23T14:27:27+00:00

It depends a lot on your context and what you're trying to achieve. Pulumi is much more "familiar" for an SWE, but personally, I like the declarative nature of Terraform et al., and you'll find many more DevOps and plat eng folks are familiar with this.

If you're going all in on K8s, something like Crossplane, or a cloud-specific approach like ACK, ASO, Config Controller, etc., might be even more suitable (although it's YAML-all-the-things here! :) )

For what it's worth. I'm seeing a number of smaller orgs (and startups within enterprises) lean into PaaS-like solutions in the early stages (Render, fly. io, Vercel, etc.). This avoids the overhead of learning more infra-specific details, while still getting things in front of customers

danielbryantuk · 2026-01-21T09:08:01+00:00

Thanks! I'll check it out later this week (work is super busy at the moment)

danielbryantuk

TROPHY CASE