2025 Retrospective: The Year Platform Engineering Became the Standard

As 2025 comes to a close, we look back at a transformative year for the tech industry. If 2023 was the year of AI hype and 2024 was the year of AI experimentation, 2025 has been the year where Platform Engineering became the operational standard for the modern enterprise.

Key Trends of 2025

1. The IDP as a Product: The industry finally moved away from "Internal Portals" toward full-blown products with dedicated managers and adoption-focused roadmaps.
   • What changed: fewer tool catalogs, more guided journeys (golden paths) and measurable feedback.
2. AI-Enabled Operations: From AI Gateways to LLM-assisted incident response, AI has been integrated into the fabric of the delivery chain.
   • What changed: AI shifted from “chat” to workflows (alert triage, runbook drafts, incident summaries).
3. Governance by Design: Policy-as-code (Kyverno, OPA) and automated compliance became the default way to manage security in distributed systems.
   • What changed: policies moved from documents to tests embedded in CI/CD and clusters.
4. Engineering Economics (FinOps): Cost control shifted from a finance reporting task to an engineering discipline integrated into the platform.
   • What changed: budgets, quotas, and alerts became platform guardrails, not a monthly report.
5. Developer Experience (DevEx): Organizations started measuring and optimizing for developer flow, leading to happier and more productive teams.
   • What changed: “move faster” became “remove friction” (CI wait time, access, provisioning).

What 2025 taught us (practical takeaways)

• A good platform is a product: it has users, metrics, a backlog, and explicit trade-offs.
• Governance works best when it is automated and built into the default path.
• Cost and security are no longer “controls”; they are properties of the platform.

What’s Next for 2026?

We expect even more convergence between Platform Engineering, Data Engineering, and Security.

Three concrete bets:

1. Multi-domain platforms: internal products spanning app, data, and security with shared standards.
2. SRE for the IDP: SLOs and error budgets for portals, pipelines, and provisioning.
3. Verifiable supply chain: SBOMs, signing, and default policies that make secure delivery the easy path.

Conclusion

At Demkada, we've spent 2025 helping our clients build the foundations for this new era. As we head into 2026, the mission remains the same: accelerating delivery while strengthening control.

Happy New Year to all our readers!