Table of Contents
32 chapters across 9 parts — covering the full lifecycle of platform engineering in 2026.
Front Matter
About This Book
About the 2026 Edition
Author's Note: The Maturity of Platform Engineering as a Discipline
Part I
Foundations
01What Is Platform Engineering?
02The Platform Engineering Landscape in 2026
03Platform Engineering Principles
Part II
Building the Internal Developer Platform
04IDP Architecture and Core Components
05Developer Portals — The Front Door
06Infrastructure as Code and Platform Automation
07Container Orchestration and the Kubernetes Layer
08GitOps and Continuous Delivery
09Continuous Integration — Tooling, Architecture, and the CI Golden Path
10Developer Environments and Inner Loop
11Secrets, Identity and Access Management
Part III
Platform Observability
12Observability Strategy and Architecture
13Observability Tooling — Best of Breed in 2026
14Platform SLOs, Alerting and On-Call
Part IV
Platform Security
15Supply Chain Security
16Runtime and Cluster Security
17Compliance as Code and Regulatory Readiness
Part V
FinOps and Platform Economics
18FinOps on the Platform
19Platform ROI and Business Case
Part VI
AI and the Evolving Platform
20AI-Assisted Platform Engineering
21Building AI/ML Platforms
22Platform Engineering in the Age of Agentic AI
Part VII
Organisational and Operational Patterns
23Team Topologies for Platform Teams
24Platform Adoption and Developer Experience
25Platform Roadmaps and Maturity Models
Part VIII
Reference Architectures and Case Studies
26Reference Architecture — Cloud-Native Platform on AWS
27Reference Architecture — Cloud-Native Platform on GCP
28Reference Architecture — Cloud-Native Platform on Azure
29Reference Architecture — Multi-Cloud and Hybrid
30Case Studies
Part IX
Future Roadmap
31The Next 3 Years — Where Platform Engineering Is Heading
32The Living Edition Philosophy
Back Matter
Appendix A — Tool Versions and Release State as of Early 2026
Appendix B — Tool Selection Quick-Reference Table
Appendix C — Staying Current
Glossary of Terms
Tool Reference Index
Further Reading and References
Index