Platform engineering is the latest buzzword in IT operations. And like all other buzzwords, it’s in danger of becoming meaningless—in danger of meaning whatever some company with a “platform engineering” product wants to sell. We’ve seen that happen to too many useful concepts: Edge computing meant everything from caches at a cloud provider’s data center to cell phones to unattended data collection nodes on remote islands. DevOps meant, well, whatever anyone wanted. Culture? Job title? A specialized group within IT?
