Hello and welcome to DevOps Dispatch. Today we’re diving into Steve Smith’s warning that in 2025 many platform engineering teams are still entangled in “ticketing hell.” Smith, VP of Technology at Scale at Equal Experts, asks us to consider: is platform engineering solving problems, or simply creating new ones? He points out that when platform teams default to tickets, approvals, and slow handoffs, they become bottlenecks that “block developer flow and slow down delivery.” Instead, he urges us to treat the platform as a true product—self-service, with clear APIs, automated pipelines, and built-in guardrails. He says we need to adopt a product mindset, engage developers as customers, and measure flow metrics instead of counting tickets. By shifting left on reliability engineering, embedding SRE practices, and empowering stream-aligned teams, we can finally escape the ticket queue. That’s your one-minute briefing on ending ticketing hell in platform engineering. Thanks for listening.
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