The Cost of "More with Less": A Reflection on Platform Scale and Hidden Complexity

Since I began working on platform teams, helping developers onboard, building internal tooling, and scaling infrastructure, one thing has become increasingly clear…

The complexity didn’t disappear. It just changed shape. #

At first, it was raw and obvious, as teams struggled with provisioning, CI/CD was stitched together with scripts, and onboarding meant hours of tribal knowledge transfer.

Back then, the pain was visible. What one engineer could hold in their head a decade ago was enough to ship with confidence.

Now, the platforms are smoother, providing powerful automation, GitOps pipelines, and golden paths. It looks like magic. But underneath that polish, something else is happening.

Automation Didn’t Make It Simple…It Made It Invisible #

The rise of new modern tooling, like DevSecOps, Kubernetes, and cloud-native everything, gave us incredible leverage, as the baked-in automation, configurations as code, and infrastructure as code made things a lot easier. They’re now abstract or hidden layers working behind the scenes, enabling teams to do more with less, but it's coming at a cost:

• Fewer people truly understand the full stack.
• Failures are harder to diagnose because the layers are deeper.
• Contracts and scopes haven’t caught up with the complexity of these ecosystems yet.

We write SOWs like we’re still delivering standalone software, but we’re not. We’re integrating into layered systems with moving parts, external dependencies, and organizational silos. And the kicker is, it’s easier than ever to assume things are aligned when they’re not.

That’s why I keep coming back to the train journey metaphor. Each team boards at a different stop. One team might still be laying tracks, while another is optimizing a high-speed junction.

If teams don’t recognize where to board or which track they’re on, they could end up designing platforms that derail.

The Illusion of Effortless Scale #

When stakeholders see a polished developer portal or a one-click deployment button, it creates the illusion of simplicity. But simplicity at the surface often means sophistication underneath that requires care, coordination, and continuous learning. That’s where SmoothGlue can help...

We’ve enabled speed. We’ve reduced toil. But we haven’t eliminated the complexity; we’ve just moved it into fewer people’s heads.

So What Now? #

Rejecting automation isn’t the answer. However, we do need to stay vigilant about its cost, and this can be achieved by requiring:

• Contracts that reflect integration, not just output.
• Onboarding that respects each team’s unique starting point.
• Platform teams that act less like service desks and more like translators, bridging the gap between intention and implementation.

Because scaling a platform isn’t just about building tools. It’s about building shared understanding in an environment where complexity is constant, even if hidden under the surface.