Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 15 hours ago
Somebody has to sit between the software teams and the infrastructure teams and translate what each one is actually asking for. Almost nobody staffs that job, and Caleb Washburn thinks that is the whole problem.
Then the story. An organisation says its platform is Kubernetes. Why? Because that is what the developers said they wanted. And when you talk to the developers: “We really want a self-service API that provides a lot of these capabilities for us, but the easiest thing for us to say is give us a Kubernetes cluster and get out of our way.”
Both sides walk away satisfied and nobody built a platform.
The paper this comes out of, “Why You Should Treat Your Platform as a Product”,
June 2026 revision, free, no gate:
vmware.com/docs/platform-as-a-product-wp
Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=g8n1hYFO1OE
Learn more about Tanzu Platform: vmware.com/products/app-platform/tanzu
Somebody has to sit between the software teams and the infrastructure teams and translate what each one is actually asking for. Almost nobody staffs that job, and Caleb Washburn thinks that is the whole problem.
Then the story. An organisation says its platform is Kubernetes. Why? Because that is what the developers said they wanted. And when you talk to the developers: “We really want a self-service API that provides a lot of these capabilities for us, but the easiest thing for us to say is give us a Kubernetes cluster and get out of our way.”
Both sides walk away satisfied and nobody built a platform.
The paper this comes out of, “Why You Should Treat Your Platform as a Product”,
June 2026 revision, free, no gate:
vmware.com/docs/platform-as-a-product-wp
Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=g8n1hYFO1OE
Learn more about Tanzu Platform: vmware.com/products/app-platform/tanzu
