One of the main trends in 2022 was Platform as Product, discussed by Manuel Pais, co-author of the book “Team Topologies" in a great talk at PlatformCon. Which are the 2022 trends that were more relevant for you? Which are the trends you foresee will drive the discourse in 2023? https://dzone.com/articles/platform-engineering-trends-you-need-to-know

Its interesting in the past year I have seen a lot of saas products that consider themselves a IDP but are very paas like, ie: point your repo at it and we magically generate a container and helm chart from it and deploy it to kubernetes ( they also magically create a kube cluster for you ), while thats great for a early startup ( and a valid platform to use ) once you hit your stable growth/enterprise stage you want to be able to start editing helm/docker files with more options, which a lot of those platforms dont expose, also on not being able to edit the kube cluster that it magically got created so im curious to see what will end up happening with those platforms, that also ignores the huge segment of the market that needs to have compliance/data isolation/has to run in house.

That's really interesting. I've been seeing similar. I think what's going on there—at least in part—is a market-size driven decision. There are thousands more startups that are able to use the beginner PaaS model than startups that make it to the point where they can use an advanced PaaS that gives them those options that you need when you grow. (My company does, e.g, ISO etc., but I do think advanced PaaS's are much, much rarer). It's easier to justify pursuing a market of smaller customers in fundraising rounds than justify fighting established players like RedHat for the massive, blue whale-sized customers. Trout are just more common. And VCs want to see a giant potential pool of trout, rather than a small market with customers that take a long time to close. There is a middle ground but some VCs believe the middle ground is where companies go to die. In my opinion, this bias from the money side of things would nurture new startups and offerings away from the middle and enterprise areas of the market. The larger but lower-paying, higher churn market is also a well-trodden path and at least one of the leaders in that space has been struggling for a while. So those customers are looking for somewhere to go and these newer companies smell blood in the water. My 2 cents! YMMV. 🙂