🎉 Syntasso 2025 Wrapped: The Year in Platform Engineering
- Ntongha Ekot
- Dec 31, 2025
- 4 min read
As 2025 draws to a close, we wanted to share our thoughts as to why platform engineering has firmly moved into its next phase.
Across organisations of all sizes, teams have progressed beyond early tooling experiments and are now focused on building internal platforms as products that deliver sustained value. The most successful efforts this year prioritised developer experience, operational safety, and long-term scalability, not just faster pipelines or shinier portals.
This year, we continued to engage with the community at major events, ship improvements to Kratix, and expand the conversation around platform engineering, all while exploring what matters most to platform builders.
To reflect on what resonated most with our readers, this post looks back at the ten most-read articles on the Syntasso blog in 2025. Together, they capture the challenges platform teams are grappling with today and highlight how internal developer platforms are evolving, from portals and pipelines toward orchestration, governance, and product thinking.
This post explores how platform teams can scale effectively by separating what must be tailored to their organisation from what should be shared across teams. It advocates starting with a small, focused platform and evolving it over time using product thinking.
Key highlights:
Start by understanding why you need a platform and what is unique vs. common across teams.
Leverage existing tools and cloud services rather than reinventing them.
Treat platforms as products, evolving from a Minimum Viable Platform to the Thinnest Viable Platform to prevent bloat
Takeaway: Success in platform engineering comes from simplicity + relevance. Start small, build product thinking, and prune relentlessly.
This article reframes platform engineering as an orchestration challenge, not a tooling problem. It explains the gap between infrastructure and applications and why platforms must coordinate workflows, state, and lifecycle.
Key highlights:
Platform engineering is about orchestrating apps and infrastructure together
Tools like Backstage or Terraform are not the platform themselves
Effective platforms reduce cognitive load by centralising complexity
Takeaway: In 2025, platform success means bridging gaps with orchestration, not assembling tools in isolation.
This post outlines three common antipatterns that limit platform effectiveness: ticket-driven workflows, unsafe low-level access, and polished portals that fail to scale.
Key highlights:
Tickets slow teams and block flow
Raw cloud access creates unsafe abstractions
Rigid templates and portals look good, but don’t scale
Takeaway: Successful platforms enable people, not just automate tasks. Beware of superficial solutions that bottleneck teams.
A hands-on guide covering Terraform variable fundamentals, including types, precedence, and best practices for structuring infrastructure as code.
Key highlights:
Variables increase flexibility and avoid hardcoding
Covers input/output variables, precedence rules, data types, and structure
Takeaway: Even in 2025, mastering Terraform fundamentals remains critical for reliable, maintainable infrastructure code.
This article introduces a practical framework for evaluating internal developer platforms based on outcomes rather than tools.
Key highlights:
Speed: on-demand, API-driven self-service
Safety: compliant, well-governed abstractions
Efficiency: fleet-wide operations and drift detection
Scalability: enabling multi-team contribution
Takeaway: A platform’s worth in 2025 isn’t in features, but in measured outcomes across four core pillars.
This post explores how Kratix and Crossplane can be used together to build flexible internal platforms. Crossplane provides declarative infrastructure APIs, while Kratix adds orchestration and workflow management. Together, they support scalable and repeatable platform delivery across environments.
Key highlights:
Crossplane provides declarative, Kubernetes-native infrastructure APIs
Kratix adds orchestration, scheduling, and workflow management
Together, they enable repeatable platform delivery across environments
Takeaway: The strongest platforms combine declarative infrastructure with orchestration layers to deliver composable platform APIs
This article clarifies the distinction between developer portals and platform orchestration, and why they should remain decoupled.
Key highlights:
Backstage provides the developer UX
Kratix acts as the platform engine
Separating UI from orchestration improves maintainability and evolution
Takeaway: In 2025, portals and platforms should be paired, not merged, letting UX shine while orchestration runs under the hood.
A practical walkthrough showing how Kratix can be used to provision and manage Amazon RDS as a self-service platform capability.
Key highlights:
Step-by-step example of managing RDS with Kratix
Demonstrates how promises abstract infrastructure complexity
Takeaway: Practical guides like this show how platforms turn complex infrastructure into consumable, self-service services.
This post examines the rise of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and their role in AI-augmented cloud-native workflows.
Key highlights:
MCP servers enable secure, schema-driven AI interaction with tools
Covers integrations across Kubernetes, Argo CD, Prometheus, Slack, GitHub, and cloud providers
Highlights emerging trends for AI-powered operations
Takeaway: AI-augmented workflows powered by MCP servers are becoming foundational to cloud-native engineering.
This article challenges the idea that portals and pipelines alone constitute a platform, arguing for deeper lifecycle ownership.
Key highlights:
Portals and pipelines often shift operational burden to users
Lack of lifecycle governance leads to drift and ownership gaps
Real platforms manage state, responsibility, and change over time
Takeaway: 2025’s big lesson: real platforms orchestrate lifecycle and governance, not just automations and buttons.
What the Most-Read Posts Reveal About Platforms
Taken together, the most-read Syntasso blog posts of 2025 reveal a clear shift in platform engineering. Teams are moving away from surface-level solutions and toward deeper architectural thinking rooted in orchestration, governance, and product mindset.
As platform engineering continues to mature, the goal remains unchanged: build platforms that scale with the organisation, reduce cognitive load for developers, and support change over time. These principles will continue to shape internal developer platforms well beyond 2025.
Happy holidays to all those who celebrate, and we look forward to helping you on your platform-building journey in 2026!
Comments