Giant Swarm surveyed hundreds of platform engineers at KubeCon in 2024 and 2026. Same top priority. Same structural constraints. Same story — almost.

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A two-year longitudinal survey of platform engineers at KubeCon EU (2024 and 2026, both in Amsterdam) reveals strikingly consistent findings: reliability and security remain the top priority, yet the structural obstacles — understaffing, tool sprawl, operational overload, and no time for automation — remain essentially unchanged. The cluster distribution shows two distinct populations: small teams running 1–5 clusters and large teams running 50+. Multi-cloud is rarely a deliberate strategy but an inherited reality across AWS, Azure, bare metal, and GCP. Most notably, 99 of 143 respondents plan to address their platform challenges using internal staff only — the same staff who identified staffing as their biggest constraint. The author frames this as the 'platform assembly tax': the compounding cost of maintaining an over-assembled platform with insufficient people and time.

Two years, same questions: what platform teams told us at KubeCon

Stability is still the goal. The gap to get there hasn't closed.

There are two distinct populations at this conference.

Multi-cloud isn't a strategy. It's an inheritance.