October 2025
Intermediate to advanced
46 pages
54m
English
Content preview from Platform as a Product
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Chapter 7. The Future of Internal Platforms
There’s an old saying that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, and the second-best time is now. The same is true for preparing your internal platform for the future. Every day you delay making it more adaptable, measurable, and open to contribution, you limit its ability to support the business in the years ahead.
Platforms are already core to how software gets built, shipped, and operated. The next few years will reward teams that treat the platform as a living product; evolve it deliberately; and make smart bets on openness, orchestration, and automation.
This chapter provides guidance on open source and enterprise choices and outlines how to prepare for an AI-native world without losing sight of safety and outcomes.
Open Source and Enterprise Trade-Offs
Every internal platform blends built, bought, and borrowed capabilities. Deciding which route to take is a product decision, not just a procurement choice. The balance you strike will influence how quickly you can deliver value, how much flexibility you retain, and how your total cost of ownership evolves over time.
This section explores the main strengths and weaknesses of each option.
Open Source
Open source is a natural fit for parts of the platform where differentiation, portability, and ecosystem leverage matter most. Adopting CNCF-backed projects like Kubernetes, Crossplane, or Backstage can give you proven foundations with healthy contributor communities. Open ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.