There is a specific kind of organizational dysfunction that doesn’t show up in sprint velocity metrics or deployment frequency dashboards. It lives in Slack threads where a senior engineer is, for the third time this week, helping a product team figure out why their staging environment behaves differently from production. It lives in the postmortem where someone admits, with genuine embarrassment, that a misconfigured resource limit brought down a service because the relevant YAML file was copied from a two-year-old deployment that nobody remembers creating. It lives in the quiet calculation a platform team lead makes when she realizes her team of six is fielding forty tickets a week, almost none of which required human judgment, and almost all of which could have been prevented by infrastructure that didn’t exist yet.
This dysfunction has a name now, though it took the industry a while to agree on one. Platform engineering. The practice of building deliberate, opinionated abstractions between developers and the underlying complexity of modern infrastructure. And in 2025, it stopped being a trend and started being a reckoning.