Over the past two decades, DevOps has helped bridge the gap between development and operations, unlocking faster delivery cycles and more reliable software systems. But today, as enterprises scale to thousands of applications and teams, DevOps as we know it is reaching its limits. The future is not about asking every developer to become an infrastructure expert, it’s about industrializing how software is built and operated.

Platform engineering is that industrialization moment. Just as the factory floor revolutionized manufacturing with assembly lines and specialized machinery, platform engineering provides the “factory floor” for modern software. Through opinionated platforms and curated golden paths, enterprises empower developers to self-serve infrastructure and deploy software securely, without needing to understand the complexities beneath. The platform becomes the assembly line: automated, standardized, and reliable.

In this talk, we’ll explore why platform engineering is replacing DevOps as the defining operating model of enterprise software. We’ll look at how golden paths, internal developer platforms, and self-service abstractions enable organizations to scale innovation without scaling cognitive load. And we’ll ask: what happens when software finally achieves its industrialization moment?