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2025 Kratix Product Update: Platform Engineering, Lessons Learned, and What’s Next

TL;DR



I’m back, and Daniel, our head of Product Marketing and king of content strategy, has once* again politely asked that I create some content to update everyone on what the Syntasso Product Engineering team has been up to over the last 12 months. And if you check out some of our recent Product Updates, you’ll see we’ve been pretty busy! 


This update is full of the cool things we’ve been up to over the past year, from new features to our collaboration with customers. But before we dig into that, let's refresh ourselves on what our 2025 strategy was and whether we followed it…


*It may have been more than once. And this may be a bit of a pattern. I’ve been somewhat consistently writing Product Announcements. Daniel, what more do you want from me?!




Reflecting on the 2025 SKE & Kratix Product Strategy


When reviewing the Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE) Product Strategy, I had two thoughts. Thought number 1: A diagram really does make everything much clearer. Thought number 2: I can’t really get mad at Daniel nagging me;  who publishes a 2025 strategy in August?


Our strategy had 3 parts, focusing on three core platform engineering personas: 


  • 🎨 Make Promise writing delightful for contributors to your Platform

  • 🛠️ Make operating SKE in an enterprise environment a breeze

  • 🚀 Make getting started on your Platform journey easy


So far, so good. We still hyperfixate on making Platform Engineering teams’ lives easier.

Let’s check out the next level down. Here, I dove into what we planned to do for each of those groups. 


The Syntasso roadmap for 2025. For Promise writers: Make Promise writing delightful with Promise writing SDKs and Promise testing framework. There is a green check mark. For Platform Operators: Make operating SKE a breeze with Native progressive resource rollouts and visibility into platform and Promsies with a green check. For new Platform Teams: Make getting started easy with Promise marketplace for Enterprises and best-practice template promises, with a grimacing emoji.
SKE's 2025 Product roadmap. We did everything we hoped for Promise Writers and Platform Operators, but we weren't so great for New Platform teams

Hmmm, at first glance, maybe not so good.



For Promise writers and Operators, we smashed it! We have blogs and docs for our SDKs, Promise testing framework, fleet upgrades to support progressive resource rollouts, and a shiny SKE GUI that gives you visibility into your Kratix Platform.


So what happened to what we planned to build for New Platform Engineering teams? We learnt we should do something different.



How We Helped New Platform Teams Get Started with Kratix


When I wrote the SKE Product Strategy in August, we had a hypothesis that having some template Promises and more Promises on our Kratix Marketplace would make all the difference to teams getting started with Kratix. 


We asked these customers and community members, and they said, “Yes! We’d love a better Kratix marketplace!” But would quickly follow with, “More importantly, we have all this custom Terraform for our core business services that we want as Promises.”


The data backed this up, and observations of customer behaviour showed they were all about the Promise building CLI. 

 

Meghan Trainor meme from her "all about that bass" music video, except the text says "All about that CLI"
I’m leading the charge for a bubblegum pink Kratix rebrand.

So this year, we made it possible to generate Promises from Crossplane XRDs and Terraform Modules. We’ve seen teams generate hundreds of Promises in a fraction of the time they were expecting, thanks to these investments. This dramatically reduces time-to-first-platform for those teams.



SKE Proof of Value (POV): Pairing with Platform Teams to Build Real Platforms


We’ve also been trialling Proof of Values* with our customers to get them started with Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE). 


In these sessions, we work very closely with them to define their platform goals, then design and build part of it with SKE. We work super closely with these teams: they get our hands-on support to learn about SKE and build their internal developer platform, and in return, we learn first-hand how people are building platforms, how they onboard with our product, and what features we are missing. 


This process is invaluable for testing the value and usability of each release from fresh eyes.    


If you’re looking to trial SKE and are interested in the Proof of Value process, visit syntasso.io and click the “Book a demo” button in the top right corner.


*These Proof of Values are similar to your traditional POCs, but focus more closely on the value you are hoping to achieve with an internal developer platform, and not just a check-box activity to see if the product does what it says it does.



What’s Next for Kratix & SKE in 2026


2025 has been an INCREDIBLE year for the Syntasso team. We’ve had unreal adoption of Kratix from both open-source users and enterprise customers. We published our Platform as a Product report with O'Reilly and received amazing feedback. We’ve seen more mentions of Kratix in community blogs and talks than ever before. 


This signals to me that we’re on the right track for the product, so in 2026, we’ll be doubling down on the people and personas we served in 2025. Of course, we had to have a little team celebration first: 


The syntasso team sitting around a large table at a taco restaurant. Everyone is smiling and having a lovely time.
The Syntasso Christmas party - proof that we do actually celebrate our successes.

For Promise Writers, we’ll be making it easier to manage long-running pipelines. Think about waiting for manual approval from your compliance team, or waiting for a large database to be created before creating another service that relies on it.


For Platform Operators, we’re continuing to invest in Fleet Management to make it easy for SKE users to configure the batches and schedules for resource upgrades. Canary rollouts will be a breeze.


And perhaps most excitingly, for New Platform Teams, we’ll be upgrading our Portal integrations and SKE GUI. We’ll be releasing a brand new Cortex integration. It’s fair to say that their team is amazing, and we see great synergy between our products. 


Also, the reaction to and use of the SKE GUI have been unprecedented, so we’ll deepen its value there too to make understanding your platform even easier.


This is just a tease for what we’re planning! Early next year, representatives from every team at Syntasso will come together to align our ideas with the outcomes our customers seek. I’ll then share with all of you what exciting things we have coming (hopefully a little earlier than August this time!)



Daniel says I need to write a CTA, so please click one of these links


2025 was the year that took Kratix and SKE to the next level. Beyond shiny day-one demos, we’re helping teams with the messy, evolving, long-lived platforms that actually exist in enterprises.


If you’re already using Kratix, thank you for putting it through its paces, telling us where it hurts, and showing us use cases we didn’t know existed. That feedback is genuinely shaping what we build next. 


If you’re new here and curious whether Kratix or SKE could work for your platform, you’ve got options: 



More updates coming in 2026. Hopefully, before August.

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