I’m Rian Bogle — engineering leader at Agility Robotics working at the intersection of robotics infrastructure, platform engineering, and security. Writing about what I’m learning and building: Kubernetes on hardware that walks, cloud architecture at scale, offline identity systems, and what it takes to run engineering teams building things that haven’t been built before.
The Hardest Part of Platform Engineering
The hardest part of platform engineering isn’t the platform. It’s integration. Connecting two systems means configuring secrets, establishing identities, setting up trust. It’s almost always manual work. Often bespoke. The kind of thing that can take an engineer a full day even when they’ve done it before — because every integration has its own surface area and its own quirks. We have IaC for systems. We have GitOps for deployments. But for integrations — the connective tissue that makes a platform actually work — what do we have? ...