profile

Steve Wade

Platform Engineering leaders are drowning in failed Kubernetes migrations. Get weekly stories of £3M disasters turned into 30-day wins, plus frameworks that actually work. No fluff, just battle-tested CNCF insights.

Featured Post

We deleted half our platform (revenue went up 30%)

The Platform Fix | Issue #004 Last Tuesday, a CTO called me in tears. Good tears. “Steve, we just deleted 50% of our platform. Everything runs better. Our AWS bill dropped £33K/month. Developers are actually… happy?” The secret? We used pink post-it notes. Here’s exactly what we did. THE GREAT PLATFORM PURGE OF 2024 Six months ago, this same CTO was drowning: 47 microservices (for 12 developers) 8 different ways to deploy 3 competing CI/CD systems 2 service meshes (yes, two) 0 documentation...

The Platform Fix | Issue #003 Three weeks ago, I sat in a retrospective where a senior developer finally snapped. “Your platform is like a prison. Every simple task requires five approvals, three tickets, and a blood sacrifice to the YAML gods.” The platform team was stunned. They’d spent two years building “developer-friendly” abstractions. Plot twist: Not one developer had been involved in the design. THE PLATFORM PERCEPTION GAP™ After interviewing 500+ developers about their platform...

The Platform Fix | Issue #002 At 2am on a Tuesday, my phone rang. “Steve, our service mesh is down. Everything’s broken. The entire platform team is panicking.” I asked one question: “What was it actually doing for you?” Silence. After 10 minutes of investigation, we discovered their £2M service mesh was handling… basic load balancing. Something their existing ingress controller already did. They’d spent 18 months implementing a solution to a problem they never had. HOW I LEARNED THIS THE...

The Platform Fix | Issue #001 Hello Reader— One Thursday, I walked into a boardroom full of panicked executives. "Steve, we're 18 months into our Kubernetes migration. £3M over budget. Zero apps in production. The board wants to kill it." Sound familiar? Here's the uncomfortable truth: Their migration was dead 12 months ago. They just didn't know it yet. After rescuing 50+ enterprise migrations, I've discovered that most fail in the first 90 days. Not because of technology - but because teams...