Technology advocates are always looking for the next killer app, the next cure-all panacea, the next methodology breakthrough and the next (rest in peace) Twitter.
That pressure to reinvent and shake the status quo is now being felt across the platform engineering paradigm, largely because the honeymoon period is over, the impact of automated AI coding tools is starting to move into if not overdrive, then at least fifth gear… and the notion of what platform tooling efficiency really means at the command line is now being challenged in more practical and pragmatic ways.
These realities form an illustration of the sum thoughts gathered by Steve Fenton, in his role as director of developer relations at automated deployment process platform company Octopus Deploy.
Fenton explains that his perceptions in this space are drawn from working with the CNCF platform engineering community, talking to real-world developer-practitioners at events like PlatformCon, KubeCon, DevOps Live and Fast Flow Conf. He has also been doing some original research in the platform engineering space, so this is not armchair speculation.
Table Stakes Just Got Raised
“In terms of where platform engineering goes in 2026, we can say that table stakes just got higher; the increased scrutiny on this approach comes about because platform budgets will now come under pressure,” said Fenton.
He thinks that this whole pressure cooker effect here will intensify for teams that haven’t tracked their platform’s impact and for organizations that are accustomed to delivering projects rather than committing to long-term product development.
“When technology leaders don’t see a competitive benefit to the platform approach, they are likely to start reallocating platform team members to other areas. Development teams will be left stranded on a platform that may not be able to respond to their ongoing needs,” he said.
“So many teams are riding on the excitement of platform engineering and feel they don’t need to demonstrate where it adds value. This makes them highly vulnerable to being displaced by the next trend, or the one after that. Conversely, teams who are measuring the benefits the platform brings, even in low fidelity, are better prepared to survive when organizations reconsider where to invest people, time, and money.”
Methodology Good, Skills Better
Delivering software is a complex task, and many technology leaders avoid the complexity by turning to simplified process frameworks or trendy movements. To Fenton’s mind, developer productivity will now be driven by technical skills and less by the methodology in question… but what does that mean?
“Software delivery fluctuates between technical methods and management frameworks. The past year has seen a trend of improvement in methodologies and work practices and progress tends to be cyclical. At first, management frameworks appear simpler and offer an escape from complex techniques and practices. Eventually, management frameworks fail to deliver sustainable and reliable software delivery… and so teams return to technical routes. Our team predicts this will be the trend in 2026,” said Fenton.
We’ll find out which platforms were built to divide and manage the complexity and those that took a simplified view that ignores the technical realities. Where platform engineering has been used as a way to ignore the technical aspects of continuous delivery, the initiative will begin to lose traction and development teams will be left stranded on a platform that may not be able to respond to their ongoing needs. The more substantial platforms face a different problem, with the platform engineers taking on an increasingly complex workload.
The Octopus Deploy man thinks that software tools are now likely to rescue platform teams from high levels of complexity by introducing features that specifically target platform engineers, such as templates and policies. He insists the result here is clear, i.e., it will lighten the load on platform teams, reducing the amount of work that is ‘unique to an organization, but common to all teams’ in terms of actual work.