Internal-Developer-Platform on Chris Wagner

What My Homelab Pipeline Would Look Like as an Internal Developer Platform

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been building toward this over the last couple of weeks — writing about how platform engineering split off from DevOps as a discipline, and about the difference between “we all own operations” as a culture and a team whose actual job is building the platform other teams stand on. This post is where I stop talking about that distinction in the abstract and point it at something I’ve actually built.

DevOps Is a Culture. Platform Engineering Is a Product Team. That Difference Matters More Than People Admit

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I covered where platform engineering actually comes from last week — the short version is that it’s what happens when “you build it, you run it” hits an organisation large enough that nobody can hold the whole picture in their head any more. This week I want to sit with a distinction that gets blurred constantly, in job specs, in conference talks, in the way people casually use “DevOps team” and “platform team” as if they’re the same noun with a rebrand: they are not the same thing, in kind, not just in degree.

Platform Engineering Didn't Replace DevOps — It's DevOps Grown Up Enough to Ship as a Product

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I keep seeing some version of the same argument on LinkedIn: platform engineering is killing DevOps, or DevOps was always a fad and platform engineering is the “real” discipline that replaced it, or — my least favourite — that the two terms are just marketing labels for the same job with a new coat of paint every few years so vendors have something to sell at KubeCon. None of that matches what I’ve actually watched happen, either in my own homelab or in twenty-five years of building infrastructure for other people’s businesses. So this is post one of five where I want to work through it properly, using a pipeline I actually operate rather than a diagram borrowed from a vendor deck.