Platform-Engineering on Chris Wagner

Why I Started Thinking Like a Platform-Engineering Product Owner, Not Just a DevOps Engineer

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few weeks I’ve been laying out how platform engineering grew out of DevOps practice, and what actually separates the two once you stop treating them as synonyms. This post is smaller than either of those, and more personal. It’s not an argument about where the industry is heading. It’s about a question I noticed I’d started asking myself before any other question, and what changed once I did.

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.

How I Actually Make Trade-off Calls — Not Just What I Build

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve already read the build logs — the k3s cluster, the storage classes, the failover drill — you know what I build. This post is about the part that doesn’t show up in a terraform apply output: how I actually decide something, in the moment a plan stops matching reality, and what I do about it afterward.

That’s a different question than “what technology did you pick,” and it’s the one I think actually separates senior from principal-level work. Anyone competent can execute a plan that goes to schedule. What I’m going to walk through is a plan that didn’t, twenty minutes into a homelab rebuild, and the small, unglamorous decision that followed it — because that decision is a better sample of how I’ll behave on your platform than any tool list is.

What I Build — A Technical Services Profile

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve landed here from LinkedIn or a referral, this is the longer answer to “what do you actually do?”

The short version: I design and build infrastructure, and increasingly I’m the one deciding what infrastructure gets built. I have done so for 25 years — across datacentres, managed service environments, banking platforms, and my own homelab — using everything from Windows Server and VMware to OpenStack, Red Hat, and modern cloud-native stacks on Kubernetes. My current role is setting cloud and containerisation strategy for a regulated banking platform: the reference architectures other engineering teams build against, the guardrails that keep a POPIA and PCI-DSS environment audit-ready, and the FinOps governance that keeps cloud spend accountable at group level.

GitOps Reached Maturity in 2026 — Here's What That Actually Looks Like Running Your Own Blog

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in the last year, “GitOps” quietly stopped being a talk track at KubeCon and started being the thing platform teams assume is already in place before a project even gets a name. Argo and Flux both sit at CNCF graduated status now, the highest maturity tier the foundation hands out, and the conference circuit has moved on from “should you adopt GitOps” to “how do you build a self-service golden path on top of it.” That’s the industry’s definition of maturity: a pattern boring enough that nobody has to argue for it any more.

I Run Kubernetes for a Bank and at Home. Here's When You Shouldn't.

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every eighteen months or so, the same argument does a lap of the internet. Someone writes “we moved off Kubernetes and cut our infra bill by 60%.” A few months later, someone else writes “we moved back to Kubernetes and here’s why.” Both posts get the same engagement, both are right about their own environment, and both get quoted afterwards as if they’d settled something universal. Neither side did.

I’m writing this because I sit on both ends of that argument at the same time, every day, and I don’t think either tribe is being honest with the other.