DevOps is Dead? Long Live DevOps-Powered Platforms
DevOps.com, Friday, June 27th, 2025
I knew PlatformCon 2025's first New York City Live Day would bring the usual debates about whether platform engineering is the new DevOps. What I didn't expect was a guy roaming the lobby in a white sash screaming, in block-letter embroidery, 'Platform Engineering is Dead.'
If the goal was to provoke, mission accomplished - but the irony was thick. You could barely move in the sold-out Convene space, shoulder-to-shoulder with more than 400 practitioners eager to compare Terraform modules, golden paths and OpenTelemetry pipelines.
PlatformCon's final registration numbers - 40,000+ virtual sign-ups and a projected 100,000 session views - tell a different story: Platform engineering is very much alive. And the biggest takeaway for me, a DevOps believer, is that the rivalry between DevOps and platform engineering has quietly faded. Instead, we're watching an overdue reconciliation that promises to make every release pipeline faster, safer and a lot more fun.