One Day in Midtown, a Week Around the World
Blink and you might have missed it: PlatformCon’s first-ever New York City “Live Day” lasted exactly eight frenetic hours at the Convene on West 46th. Yet that single day sat at the center of a much bigger constellation—a full week of virtual talks and training plus another Live Day at London’s 155 Bishopsgate the day before. Hybrid by design, the conference again drew more than 40,000 registrants and is on pace to top 100,000 session views before the week wraps.
Kelsey Hightower Sets the Tone
The NYC crowd—sold out weeks in advance—filed in early for a keynote from former Google Cloud luminary Kelsey Hightower. True to form, Kelsey kind of picked up where he left off at last year’s PlatformCon 2024, where he mixed war stories with sharp provocations: “Platforms aren’t magic APIs,” he insisted, “they’re agreements between humans about how work gets done.” This year he added, “Platform Engineering is about solving problems based on the actual use case…. Don’t forget one thing, make sure you train your own model. Continuously learn and be willing to adapt to new technologies and approaches.” His take landed because the room was wall-to-wall with practitioners who live those words every day.
Content That Skipped the Buzzwords
- Google & Google Cloud: Engineers unveiled an internal “golden-path scorecard” now used to measure platform ROI in weeks, not quarters.
- Thoughtworks: A panel dove into Conway’s Law 2.0—how platform teams reorganize to map to the future architecture, not just today’s org chart.
- Camille Fournier: Fresh off publishing “Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders” with O’Reilly, Camille outlined the manager’s playbook for saying “no” to one-off requests without killing developer goodwill.
Between sessions, the hallways buzzed with ad-hoc “water-cooler talks” on everything from developer experience metrics to securing ephemeral environments. That hallway track was so dense you almost needed traffic lights.
Hands-On Learning, Now With Credentials
Platformengineering.org doubled down on education this year. Six half-day workshops—GitOps patterns, SRE runbooks, Backstage scaffolding, and more—were standing-room only. For the first time the community also offered certification exams covering platform architecture fundamentals and internal developer platform (IDP) operations. Judging by the queues outside the testing rooms, the certs will soon decorate quite a few LinkedIn profiles.
A Mighty Expo in Miniature
The expo floor packed 18 vendors into what felt like a New-York-City-sized apartment. You could demo everything from multi-cluster cost optimization to AI-assisted policy as code—and still make it back upstairs before the next lightning talk. I ran into my friend Ian Amit, CEO of Gomboc, who took a classic practitioner’s approach: no booth, just shoes and business cards. “If you want to understand your users, go where they hang out,” he told me—and judging by the steady stream of platform engineers in line for coffee, he went to the right place.
What the Cameras Didn’t Miss
Techstrong.tv set up shop by the main escalator and live-streamed interviews all day (replays are already up on Techstrong.tv, YouTube and our OTT apps). A recurring theme from guests: Platform engineering isn’t new, but the name gives long-standing work the executive visibility it always deserved. Operators have built deployment pipelines, curated Kubernetes baselines, and automated secrets management for years; now the umbrella term helps budgets and roadmaps line up with that reality.
Energy You Could Bottle
If one metric captured the day, it was decibels. Breaks were loud—teams reuniting, Slack friends meeting IRL, vendor engineers swapping horror stories about multi-cloud IAM. That noise translates to momentum: conversations turned into whiteboard sketches, which turned into hallway commitments to open-source the next utility or schedule a brown-bag back at the office. The vibe felt less like a conference and more like an accelerator demo day.
Why It Matters
- Proof of Demand – The NYC Live Day sold out and London nearly did the same. In-person appetite is real, even for a community born on Zoom.
- Depth Over Hype – Sessions prioritized failure modes, governance, and product-thinking—evidence the field is maturing beyond “Install Kubernetes, declare victory.”
- Career Pathways – Certification tracks and management-focused content show that platform engineering is becoming a recognized profession, not just a role someone inherits.
- Ecosystem Gravity – From Google to early-stage startups, vendors see the IDP as the next big battleground. Their presence—and their customers’—underscores growing budgets.
Looking Ahead
PlatformCon organizers admit this is the first year they went “all-in” on physical gatherings. Judging by the turnout, expect multiple live cities (and bigger venues) in 2026. My personal prediction: we’ll see a dedicated security track, far more AI-augmented tooling, and maybe even a platform-engineering career fair.
Final Takeaway
Walking out into a balmy Midtown evening, I kept circling back to Kelsey Hightower’s refrain: platforms are about agreements between humans. The packed rooms, the standing-room workshops, the caffeine-fueled corridor debates—all signaled that the human side of platform engineering is finally catching up with the tooling. Call it whatever you like, but after PlatformCon 2025, there’s no denying: platform engineering has arrived, and practitioners are driving the agenda.
See you next year—wherever the community lands.