Co-authored with Diego Casati on the Azure Global Black Belts blog.
The scenario in this piece is familiar to anyone who has been on-call for a distributed system: a deployment fails at 2am, and resolving it means correlating logs across seventeen microservices, three monitoring systems, and a service mesh configuration change from last week. The technology scaled. The humans did not.
The argument here is that platform engineering’s real job is not building more tools - it is making the tools we have more humane. Golden paths, opinionated defaults, AI as the conversation layer between what a developer needs and what the platform knows. Not replacing expertise. Amplifying it and making it accessible at the moment it is needed.
This is the second post in a series Diego and I wrote on the human scale problem in platform engineering.