Every castle needs a strong foundation. But lately, it feels like the foundations of our software delivery castles — the very DevOps tools we rely on every day — are starting to crack.
In just the first half of 2025, we’ve seen wave after wave of incidents: GitHub outages rippling across developer pipelines, Jira vulnerabilities exposing project data, GitLab service degradations frustrating teams mid-release, and supply chain compromises sneaking malicious packages into trusted registries.
These aren’t minor blips. They are alarms. And for those of us in platform engineering, the alarms couldn’t be louder: What happens when the very tools we depend on to build, secure, and ship software aren’t themselves reliable or secure?
The Scale of the Problem
A recent industry survey cataloged hundreds of incidents tied to DevOps platforms in just six months. The patterns are stark:
- Outages and degradations. Whether from cloud service instability, scaling failures, or infrastructure missteps, downtime at GitHub or GitLab doesn’t just inconvenience one team — it disrupts global software delivery chains.
- Security breaches. We’ve seen compromised packages, leaked credentials and exposed APIs in some of the very tools we trust to manage security.
When your source code, build pipeline and deployment orchestration all rely on SaaS platforms with global reach, a single outage or breach can halt or compromise thousands of organizations at once.
Why Platform Engineering Should Care
Some might shrug: “It happens. All software has bugs.” True enough. But platform engineering is about more than integrating tools — it’s about building reliable ecosystems that developers and businesses can trust.
Outages and security threats strike at the heart of this mission:
- Single points of failure. Most organizations centralize DevOps tooling. That means one vendor hiccup cascades everywhere.
- Trust erosion. If your security scanners, artifact repositories, or CI/CD systems are themselves compromised, how can teams have confidence in their releases?
- Productivity drain. When tools break, developers grind to a halt. The cost in lost time and frustration is enormous.
- Risk amplification. As AI-native and agentic workflows take root, they depend on these same tools. Fragile foundations mean fragile AI.
For platform engineers, this isn’t a peripheral issue. It’s core to our charter.
The Roots of Fragility
Why are these tools — the bedrock of DevOps — showing cracks? A few culprits stand out:
- Overreliance on SaaS. Many organizations outsource critical delivery functions to cloud-based tools with opaque SLAs. When outages hit, there’s little recourse.
- Integration complexity. Modern toolchains are Frankensteinian, stitched together with plugins, scripts and third-party modules. Every addition increases the odds of failure.
- AI feature rush. Vendors are racing to bolt AI into their platforms. But many of these features ship without hardened security or reliability testing.
- Vendor monoculture. A handful of companies dominate. When one stumbles, the ripple effect is industry-wide.
These aren’t isolated hiccups. They’re structural weaknesses.
How Platform Engineering Must Respond
If outages and breaches are the new normal, platform engineers must shift from tool integration to resilience architecture. Here’s what that means:
- Resilience by design. Don’t assume vendor uptime. Build fallback paths, local caches and even self-hosted alternatives for critical workflows.
- Security posture management. Continuously monitor your toolchain. Audit permissions, rotate credentials, and patch religiously. Treat your DevOps stack like production code.
- Vendor accountability. Push for transparency in SLAs and incident reporting. If your provider can’t explain how they’ll recover from a breach, ask why you’re entrusting them with your pipeline.
- Shift-left reliability. Apply DevOps best practices to your own tooling. Observability, chaos engineering, and DR drills shouldn’t stop at production apps — they should include the systems that build those apps.
Platform engineering isn’t about blind trust. It’s about designing for failure, so failure doesn’t take you down.
Shimmy’s Take
We’ve built the digital economy on a handful of DevOps tools. For the most part, they’ve served us well. But the cracks are showing. Outages and breaches aren’t just annoyances — they’re existential risks for companies that ship software at speed and scale.
I’ve said it before: Platform engineering isn’t just a practice, it’s a mindset. We can’t be mere consumers of tools. We must be the architects of resilience.
That means questioning assumptions. If your pipeline dies when GitHub goes dark, do you really have a resilient platform? If a compromised dependency can flow unchecked into production, do you really have security?
The mantra has to be: Trust, but verify — and always design for failure. That’s how we move from fragile foundations to resilient platforms.
Closing Call to Action
When was the last time your team simulated a CI/CD outage? Practiced a vendor lockout drill? Ran a red-team exercise on your DevOps stack?
If your answer is “never,” the foundation under your castle may be weaker than you think.
As platform leaders, we must stop assuming stability and start engineering for it. Because in the AI-native, cloud-native era, the next big outage or breach isn’t a question of if — it’s a question of when.
And when it comes, the organizations that survive won’t be those with the fanciest tools. They’ll be the ones whose platforms were built to endure.