Earlier this year, I built a website called Find That Wine because I had a very specific itch.

In Norway, where I am from, wine is centralized through Vinmonopolet. That comes with a long list of political, cultural, and practical tradeoffs, but from a consumer perspective it has one very convenient side effect: discovery is easy. If you want to know whether a wine is available, who imports it, what it costs, and where it can be picked up, there is only one obvious place to look.

Denmark, where i currently live, is different. There is no wine monopoly. The market is more open, more fragmented, and in many ways more exciting. Independent shops, small importers, niche webshops, auction platforms, and specialist stores all coexist. That is part of what makes the Danish wine scene interesting. But it also makes discovery harder.

If you are looking for a specific producer, vintage, grape, region, or bottle, you often end up searching shop by shop. You might check one webshop, then another, then a few importers you remember from Instagram, then a private marketplace, then maybe a PDF price list somewhere. If you are lucky, you find what you were looking for. If you are not, you never know whether the wine was unavailable or whether you simply searched in the wrong place.

Find That Wine was my attempt to solve that problem.

In recent years of my career, I've spent time with organizations either already on their journey or just starting out with platform engineering. One thing they have had in common is their need to modernize and standardize, usually without being able to create a greenfield environment.

The biggest differences between them have been ambition, mandate, and organizational maturity. There’s no one-size-fits-all, of course, but there are some real common denominators I believe we should be able to identify, structure, and turn into a playbook of sorts. This blog post is my understanding of platform engineering as of 2026, influenced by new and old experience, combined with the great resources already written and published by others. The goal: thriving in a modern world.

To better enable a common understanding of the subject, we all need to know what a platform engineering team's output normally is and how ambition, mandate, and organizational maturity influence the final product.

Platform Engineering Definition​

There are as many definitions of any IT buzzword as there are grains of sand in the universe. However, some common understandings do exist. One definition by Microsoft states the following:

Recently i gave a talk at the Cloud Native Day in Bergen about Chaos Engineering titled "Chaos engineering in practice - Do you need multicloud redundancy?".

I thought it was a fun talk and since we sadly did not record the talks, I figured that I should write a blog post instead! I already have a script (although written in Norwegian) to accompany the presentation, so why not translate it and publish most of the contents here?

Here goes!

Welcome to this written version of my talk!​

Pic by Håkon Broder Lund