What’s Next for Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE) in 2025: Our Strategy and Plans

Cat Morris
Aug 7
5 min read

Welcome to our first big Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE) strategy update for 2025! Sorry, it has taken us so long: we’ve been busy at Syntasso 😅

If you’re new here: Syntasso Kratix Enterprise (SKE) is THE Platform Orchestrator for enterprises. By providing key integrations and support, it levels up the open-source Kratix framework, enabling you to deliver internal platforms more efficiently. This makes it painless to build a platform that is ready for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 200.

Before we dive in, please note that this is our strategy, not a fixed roadmap. Think of it as the North Star guiding our journey, not a detailed itinerary. This is because at Syntasso, we care a lot about learning from how you use Kratix in the real world. We listen to feedback from platform engineers and contributors across the Kratix community every day. That means what we’re about to share may change as we discover new things that help you build better platforms.

Our Three Big Focus Areas for 2025

We’re focusing on three strategic pillars this year:

🎨 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

🎨 Make Promise writing delightful for contributors to your Platform

We often hear from users of SKE and Kratix that they see significant power in Promises. We see their eyes light up when the Promise they have written themselves is applied to the platform cluster, when they make a resource request, and when the pipeline stages fire off successfully. And while many people feel this joy today, we believe that by improving the Promise writing experience, we can enable even more people to experience that joy even sooner.

Introducing Promise writing SDKs

One of the first things we see the multi-team Kratix users do is create a set of libraries or SDKs to help their teammates get started. These are often very specific to their organisation, integrating with their specific identity systems or tools, and performing checks and validations required by their industry.

BUT! There are several key considerations that every Promise author needs to consider, including file linting and management, utilising API fields provided by your customers, and sharing information between pipeline stages. That’s what we’re thinking of making much, much simpler.

We’ll start with SDKs for our favourite languages—Go, Python, maybe even Rust for the adventurous. We’re also going to show you how to contribute SDKs for your preferred languages. This is about building a collaborative ecosystem around Promise writing, not just shipping tools from our own bubble.

A unified testing framework for Promises

Here at Syntasso, we advocate for the iterative development of your promises, building up complexity little by little. This allows you to get faster feedback on your Promise during development. Awesome! However, if you’ve written bespoke Promises, chances are you’ve rolled your own testing framework.

In 2025, we want to save you that effort. We’re gathering ideas from real-world users and will create a supported Kratix Promise Testing Framework. The framework will make testing the input/output file nature of Kratix trivial, including the chaining of those inputs and outputs across all the Stages in your Pipelines.

We believe that this, in conjunction with the Promise writing SDK, will make the experience of writing Promises amazing!

🛠️ Make Operating SKE in Enterprise Environments a Breeze

Building a platform isn’t easy. If it were, every company would already have one up and running.

Kratix already helps you manage complexity, but we know there’s more to do. Especially when it comes to:

More control over rollouts
Visibility into the state of your fleet
Easier troubleshooting when things go wrong

Natively perform progressive rollouts of resources

A considerable part of platform engineering is the day 2 experience. Keeping everything up-to-date and secure without impacting your developers is hard. It requires careful planning, controlled rollouts, and often a lot of manual monitoring of logs and dashboards to ensure it works as expected.

With Kratix, you can already manage upgrades using health checks. However, we know this is clunky and places a significant burden on the Promise authors and Platform Operators to ensure it works. We’re going to improve all this by providing rollout strategies for your platform resources. We’ll start with some simple patterns, gather your feedback, and see what direction you, the Platform Operators, need us to take.

Visibility into your Platform and Promises

When talking with our customers, triallers and community members, I hear two things more than anything else: “How do I know which Promises are healthy and available?” and “Something failed—how do I figure out what, where, and why?”

The flexibility Kratix gives you is amazing. But it can also make visibility tricky, especially if you’re not a seasoned Kubernetes veteran.

That’s why we’re investing in:

UIs for platform engineers that give you a clear view of the state of your fleet
AI-powered chatbots that can interpret platform status and answer natural-language questions
A better CLI experience for quick insights without needing to trawl logs for hours

🚀 Make Getting Started on Your Platform Journey Easy

The early days of building a platform can feel overwhelming. There is a great deal to consider, with numerous pain points to address. And really, you want to focus on delivering value, not reinventing basic components.

That’s why we’re investing in our Enterprise Promise Marketplace.

Enterprise Promise Marketplace

We’re collaborating with our enterprise customers to understand not only what the top things they need to provide as-a-service in their businesses are, but also what reusable pipeline stages would be valuable. For example, what checks and rules do they need to run against their resources? Where we see patterns, we add them to the marketplace!

Some early examples we’re hearing about are:

Core cloud resources (databases, storage, networks)
App-as-a-service for each cloud vendor
Enterprise must-haves like account creation and management, financial tracking and billing
AI guardrails - the best of innovative AI, but enterprise ready
Integrations with top enterprise tools like ServiceNow, Jira, and Okta

But don’t forget - we still have our open-source marketplace! If you want ideas of what to provide as-a-service, or to have examples to try out Kratix, that is still the best place to start.

Template Promises for Best Practices

Finally, we’ll be offering Template Promises that showcase the patterns and best practices we recommend and see across the community.

For example:

Using Terraform or Crossplane in Promises
Writing Compound Promises, especially those reliant on state from their child Promises
Integrating external secrets managers into Promises
Managing manual sign-offs (or long waits) in a Promise
… and so much more!

We believe this will make building common use cases into your Promises far simpler and get you into the deep value of Kratix much faster! And as always, we encourage our community to learn from others and build faster!

Wrapping Up: Let’s Build the Future of Platform Engineering Together

So, to summarise our 2025 strategy, we’re going to:

Make it easier and more fun to write Promises
Make running SKE in the enterprise feel effortless
Make it simple for new teams to get started

We’ve already made significant progress on some of these areas (and we’ll be putting out a Product Update blog soon to shout about it!), but there’s always more to do.

Your feedback is the most important ingredient in all of this. Got thoughts? Suggestions? Spotted something we’ve missed? We’d love to hear from you. Join us in the Kratix community Slack, or drop us a message.

Here’s to making platform engineering more delightful, more approachable, and more powerful in 2025.