Platform Engineering at QCon San Francisco 2026

In 2009, every big enterprise said "continuous delivery won't work here." In 2026, the same rooms say "the dark factory won't work here." It was never about the technology being ready. It's about the organization being ready. Readiness is a socio-technical problem, not a technical one.

Agentic tools amplify what’s already in the codebase. The agent works through your code, your architecture decisions, and the documentation around them. It follows what it can read and guesses at the rest.

Three years ago on the QCon SF stage, I made the case for “Acceleration, Autonomy, and Accountability” as the pillars of a successful platform. Those pillars haven't moved. AI has just rewritten what each one requires, and the platform team's job along with it.

In late 2024, Netflix made a bet: consolidate the vast majority of our relational database use cases onto a single engine: Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

We have all seen the moment: the platform goes live, the launch deck looks sharp, the portal is polished, the golden paths are documented, and yet teams quietly continue doing things the old way. Not always because the platform is bad, but because adoption was assumed, not owned.

Data platform sits at the intersection of infrastructure, governance, operations, and user experience.