Spargine 10 (v2026.10.7.1), released on July 1, 2026, introduces NuGet packages for .NET 10, featuring new types, methods, and performance enhancements. The update allows for trimmable libraries, reducing application sizes and improving startup times. Community contributions are encouraged, and detailed benchmarks are available on GitHub.

In June I read the source of Hermes Agent and OpenClaw to pick a runtime for my agent fleet. In October I read it again and three of my conclusions were wrong. What changed, where each one still leads, what each one costs, and how to choose.

We're excited to announce the release of the 2026 Future of Platform Engineering report. The report examines why organizations adopt platforms, what shapes their decisions along the way, and what high-performing platform teams do differently.

Platform Engineering has moved from a frontier practice to a mainstream industry standard. It's now an established discipline with recognizable patterns and a maturing body of evidence. The report draws on primary survey data from 379 technical platform practitioners worldwide, and a review of the current literature to establish where the discipline now stands.

A consistent theme runs through the findings, separating platforms that succeed from those that struggle. The decisions and practices around the technology determine success: how adoption is managed, how clearly the strategy is set, and how engaged the leadership is.

Why teams actually build platforms

Organizations adopt platforms primarily for automation and efficiency purposes. Developer experience is still a consideration, but less of a priority for most. When they explain why the initiative was funded, automation comes first. This was a consistent finding in our previous report, the 2025 Platform Engineering Pulse report.

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:img{ src="/blog/img/future-of-platform-engineering/benefits-reasons.png" alt="Top 10 reasons for adopting platforms" loading="lazy" } :figcaption[Top 10 reasons for adopting platforms (multi-select)]

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The motivation behind platform adoption is important as it shapes how success is measured. A platform funded for efficiency reasons and later judged on developer experience will look like a failure that isn't one. Teams that name their primary motivation early have a clearer basis for knowing whether the platform worked.

The organizational constraint to success is strategy

Struggling teams most often report a lack of clear strategy as their obstacle, ahead of the technical complexity of building a platform.

Organizations that predominantly build their platform features from scratch are also the most likely to report this gap. Of respondents building from scratch, 57.9% also cite a lack of a clear strategy as an obstacle. While this may suggest that teams are building without a plan, many engineers build to work out a problem, which makes the build a method rather than a problem. This would explain why these two often turn up together.

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:img{ src="/blog/img/future-of-platform-engineering/obstacles-build-buy.png" alt="Heatmap of obstacles by dominant build approach" loading="lazy" } :figcaption[Build-versus-buy feature implementation due to a lack of a clear strategy and technical complexity. Heatmap showing the percentage of respondents selecting the obstacle by dominant build approach.]

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A result that caught us off guard

Among teams reporting mandatory adoption, 62.2% achieved most of their goals (high-performers). For respondents reporting optional platform adoption, this sits at roughly 27.5%.

This was an unexpected finding. Industry advice that comes up again and again in Platform Engineering is, don't force adoption, treat the platform like a product, and let it earn its users. We assumed that optional adoption would track more with high-performing teams and strong outcomes, but we found the opposite.

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:img{ src="/blog/img/future-of-platform-engineering/goals-adoption-strategy.png" alt="Goal delivery by adoption strategy" loading="lazy" } :figcaption[Goal delivery by adoption strategy]

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The tension here is real, but it doesn't mean that everyone else is doing it wrong. It's two different questions getting two different answers. Mandatory adoption is the stronger signal for whether a platform delivers on the goals it set. Optional adoption speaks to something else entirely: a platform that earns its place because developers choose it rather than because they're asked to, which is a success worth having in its own right.

Mandatory adoption also doesn't move on its own. In the network analysis, it clusters with stronger leadership direction, higher job satisfaction, and greater confidence in budget safety, and those measures correlate with one another about as much as each correlates with goal delivery. Mandatory adoption without the leadership engagement and budget security is unlikely to produce the same result. What appears as a decision about adoption is usually a decision about how much of the organization is behind the platform.

Who's actually getting value from AI?

Teams reporting the most positive impacts from AI were the platforms offering features we classified as advanced, like ephemeral environments, cost control, and code coverage. Adopting these features actually shifted platforms from no AI impact to a positive AI impact on software delivery speed and stability. The difference was in which capabilities a platform had, not how many it had.

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:img{ src="/blog/img/future-of-platform-engineering/ai-impact-features-software.png" alt="Features ranked by AI impact on software delivery speed and stability" loading="lazy" } :figcaption[Features ranked by AI impact on software delivery speed and stability]

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That is consistent with how DORA described AI in 2025, as an amplifier of the system it enters. Where the foundations are solid, the gains compound, and where they aren't, the friction is amplified instead. Teams on mature, well-designed platforms get more out of AI than teams with ad hoc setups.

What this means for platforms

The patterns associated with successful platform teams emerged in organizational decisions: how clearly the strategy is set, how engaged the leadership is, and how adoption is handled. This is an encouraging result. The platforms that deliver well are the ones where people agreed what the platform was for and committed to it.

Platform Engineering is maturing, and the patterns are becoming clear enough to learn from. Read the report for the full analysis, including how teams measure success and what high-performing teams do differently.

Happy deployments!

Let's celebrate the 18th anniversary of Small Basic together! Why not check out our community?

• Small Basic Enthusiasts (Facebook Group)
• Small Basic Forum (litdev.uk)

We are still enjoying playing with Small Basic!

Most of you will know by now that the cost of memory has risen very steeply over the past two years and continues to increase; like other companies, we have had to raise the prices of many of our products in order to keep up with the cost of production.

During our last round of price increases, in April, we were able to hold down the price of the 1GB and 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 products, while increasing the price of higher-density variants. This has now become unsustainable, and from today we are increasing the price of the 2GB variants by $12.50, to $67.50 for Raspberry Pi 4 and $77.50 for Raspberry Pi 5. 

Prices for other products, including the 1GB variants of Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 and the 2GB variants of Compute Module 4 and Compute Module 5, remain unchanged.

Whether you’re an individual customer or a business, price increases obviously impact your plans: we encourage you to make sure the Raspberry Pi products you buy are a good match for your requirements, and that you’re not paying for headroom you don’t need. For example, you might consider whether a less recent model, such as the perennially popular Raspberry Pi 3B, 3A+ or or 3B+, might deliver the performance your project requires at a lower cost, and you’ll certainly want to make sure you’re not paying for more RAM than you need. Raspberry Pi Official Magazine provides some guidance on how to make the most of your memory; if you’re a business customer and you’d like advice on memory optimisation for your application, get in touch with us at industry@raspberrypi.com.

As always, make sure you’re buying from one of our Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers. These trusted partners abide by our official published maximum prices, so you can be confident that you’re not paying more than you need to; there are over a hundred of them across every continent except Antarctica, and several of them ship worldwide, so there’s almost certainly one serving your region. We’re aware that some unauthorised vendors are using inflated pricing, and even supplying products that aren’t what they seem to be – avoid this risk by sticking to our Approved Resellers.

The current memory supply circumstances are very challenging, but, as we’ve said before, they won’t last forever. The price of memory will eventually subside, and we look forward to reversing our own price increases when it does.

The post Price increases for 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Announcing Gemini 4 Argon, our frontier model for real-world coding, enterprise knowledge work, and cyber defense, rolling out soon.