Skip to content
Michael Earls
  • Home
  • Blog
    • Lifestyle
    • Work & Leadership
    • Books & Learning
    • Security
    • Change
    • Cloud
    • Wine
    • Travel & Places
  • Direction
    • Before the World Wakes Up: Owning Your First Hour
    • Why Building Other People’s Legacies Is the Real Direction of Leadership
    • “Sounds Like Monday’s Problem” — A Lesson in Mental Boundaries
    • Morning Coffee, Quiet Time, and the Question: How Do I Become a Better Me in 2026?
    • The Digital Compass: Finding Direction in a Noisy World
    • Returning to Center — The Quiet Strength You Build Midweek
    • You Don’t Have 24 Hours. You Have 168.
    • Closing the Year: Reflecting on Change, Letting Go, and Setting Direction
  • Change
    • Week Three — When Change Gets Boring
    • Week Two — When Change Gets Quiet
    • From French Bread to Garlic Focaccia — What Bread Taught Me About Change (Again)
    • Week One — Change Is Already Happening
    • From Dutch Oven to Focaccia: What Bread Taught Me About Change
    • Closing the Year: Reflecting on Change, Letting Go, and Setting Direction
    • Awareness Before Change
    • Calibrating the Compass: When Goals Shift and Life Changes
    • From Streetlights to AI: Lessons in Fear, Change, and Opportunity
    • Reset the Compass, When the Wind Changes, So Should You
  • Cloud
    • Expert Mode, No Guardrails — But With Control
    • Single-Cloud First Was the Discipline — Now Let’s Talk About Movement
    • Single-Cloud First: Discipline, Not Dogma
    • Identity First: The Only Control Plane That Survives Every Cloud Decision
    • Agentic AI Isn’t Breaking Systems — It’s Exposing What We’ve Been Ignoring
    • Platform First: Paved Roads, Freedom, and the Cost of Both
  • Travel
  • Wine
Michael Earls
  • Home
  • Blog
    • Lifestyle
    • Work & Leadership
    • Books & Learning
    • Security
    • Change
    • Cloud
    • Wine
    • Travel & Places
  • Direction
    • Before the World Wakes Up: Owning Your First Hour
    • Why Building Other People’s Legacies Is the Real Direction of Leadership
    • “Sounds Like Monday’s Problem” — A Lesson in Mental Boundaries
    • Morning Coffee, Quiet Time, and the Question: How Do I Become a Better Me in 2026?
    • The Digital Compass: Finding Direction in a Noisy World
    • Returning to Center — The Quiet Strength You Build Midweek
    • You Don’t Have 24 Hours. You Have 168.
    • Closing the Year: Reflecting on Change, Letting Go, and Setting Direction
  • Change
    • Week Three — When Change Gets Boring
    • Week Two — When Change Gets Quiet
    • From French Bread to Garlic Focaccia — What Bread Taught Me About Change (Again)
    • Week One — Change Is Already Happening
    • From Dutch Oven to Focaccia: What Bread Taught Me About Change
    • Closing the Year: Reflecting on Change, Letting Go, and Setting Direction
    • Awareness Before Change
    • Calibrating the Compass: When Goals Shift and Life Changes
    • From Streetlights to AI: Lessons in Fear, Change, and Opportunity
    • Reset the Compass, When the Wind Changes, So Should You
  • Cloud
    • Expert Mode, No Guardrails — But With Control
    • Single-Cloud First Was the Discipline — Now Let’s Talk About Movement
    • Single-Cloud First: Discipline, Not Dogma
    • Identity First: The Only Control Plane That Survives Every Cloud Decision
    • Agentic AI Isn’t Breaking Systems — It’s Exposing What We’ve Been Ignoring
    • Platform First: Paved Roads, Freedom, and the Cost of Both
  • Travel
  • Wine

Posts Tagged ‘Cloud Platforms’

Platform First: Paved Roads, Freedom, and the Cost of Both

By mearls | January 20, 2026
Platform-first cloud architecture showing paved roads with guardrails guiding teams toward scalable and secure cloud platforms

Platforms don’t fail when teams go around them. They fail when the road no longer leads where work needs to go.

Read More
© 2025 The Official Website of Michael Earls. All rights reserved.