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2025 was the year platform engineering grew up—and got a reality check. AI entered infrastructure in ways we couldn't ignore. Industry consensus finally emerged on what platforms should actually do. And Cloudflare went down six times to remind us that concentration risk isn't just theoretical.
In this special year-in-review episode, we look back at the ten stories that defined platform engineering in 2025:
✅ AI-native Kubernetes arrived (DRA GA, AI Conformance v1.0)✅ Platform engineering reached consensus—but 70% still fail✅ Infrastructure concentration risk became undeniable (AWS + Cloudflare)✅ IngressNightmare exposed 43% of cloud environments✅ Open source sustainability crisis (60% maintainers unpaid)✅ GPU waste: 13% average utilization = $4,350/month wasted per GPU✅ Service mesh sidecar era ended (Istio Ambient GA)✅ IaC consolidation (IBM + HashiCorp, CDKTF deprecated)✅ Gateway API became the standard✅ Agentic AI entered platform engineering
Top 5 Takeaways for 2026:1. AI infrastructure is now standardized—architect to avoid lock-in2. Platform engineering has a definition—use it3. Concentration risk is real—multi-region, multi-cloud, multi-CDN4. Open source needs funding—$2K/dev/year recommendation5. GPU waste is the new cloud waste—DRA and time-slicing are table stakes
Show notes: https://platformengineeringplaybook.io/podcasts/00059-platform-engineering-2025-year-in-review
