Platform Engineering at KubeCon Paris

Without any surprise, Platform Engineering was again a big topic of discussion during KubeCon Paris 2024.

Published on

April 10, 2024

KubeCon Paris 2024 just ended! That was my 3rd KubeCon in-person, 1st in Europe, 2nd as both Cloud Native Ambassador (CNA) for the CNCF and Customer Success Engineer for Humanitec.

Without any surprise, Platform Engineering was again a big topic of discussion during KubeCon Paris 2024. And yes, AI/ML was everywhere too. But both are not incompatible! ;)

Developer empathy is critical! We need to work on making cloud native better for data scientists. There is a strong desire within CNCF to move in that direction.
— Arun Gupta

In comparison to the previous KubeCon Chicago 2023, I saw less talks and discussions about the building blocks of the Platforms, but instead KubeCon Paris 2024 was more about the capabilities and the interfaces with the Platforms. The focus was more about customer stories and best practices around Platform-as-Product and UX. Which I really appreciate!

Sometimes, Lipstick Is Exactly What a Pig Needs! — Abby Bangser, Syntasso & Whitney Lee, VMware

tl,dr

The TAG App Delivery and the WG Platforms did an amazing work to nurture and facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing with the community.
The first every PE Day was a huge success!
Platform Engineering was not only mentioned during the PE Day, but also across different other events.
PE talks are not just anymore about toolings and building blocks, the community is elevating the discussion with best practices around Platform-as-Product, the UX of Platforms, etc.
Yes, AI/ML was everywhere too, but at the end of the day you need a solid Platform Engineering practice to be successful with it ;)

TAG App Delivery and WG Platforms

During KubeCons, I always spend a quite good amount of time in the Projects Pavillon where I can meet and chat with the CNCF Projects maintainers as well as the CNCF communities leads and members such as the TAGs and WGs.

One of the TAGs I’m trying to be more involved with is the TAG App Delivery and one of its WGs: Platforms. And for this KubeCon Paris 2024 they were very proactive, look at what they announced a few weeks before the actual event: TAG App Delivery at Kubecon EU 2024 | CNCF TAG App Delivery.

Kudos to the leads, co-leads and the members, really well structured and organized in order to nurture how people can meet in-person, share knowledge and collaborate. Really much appreciated!

If you want to know more about what’s a TAG, what’s a WG, what the TAG App Delivery is covering and doing, same for the Platforms WG, how to get involved, etc. I invite you to watch these 2 sessions:

You can learn for example that 2 new WGs could be created soon under the TAG App Delivery: AppDev and Infra.

I attended 3/4 of the Platform Lean coffee breakfasts. I’m very glad I did. It was really great to be in-person and connect with the co-leads and members of the WG Platforms. Kudos to the organizers: Abby, Antoine, Colin, and Lou!

I also attended a couple of lightning talks scheduled at the TAG App Delivery booth. Very insightful!

Last but not least, I was also able to connect with the group of people who worked on the French translation of the CNCF glossary. They shared great insights and best practices since I want to start the translation of the Platforms glossary in French. More to come about that in the coming months.

Talks about Platform Engineering

Keynote: A 10-year Detour: The Future of Application Delivery in a Containerized World

Among a huge list of talks related to Platform Engineering, let me highlight 8 of them that I really enjoyed:

Keynote: A 10-year Detour: The Future of Application Delivery in a Containerized World — Solomon Hykes, Dagger.io (video) — What became Docker was created 16 years ago, in Paris, wow! Solomon is keeping the Kubernetes and CNCF community honest, reminding us that there is a lot more to do to improve the Developer Experience. “Behind every great product there is a factory, and every factory is unique”.
How Spotify Re-Created Our Entire Backend Without Skipping a Beat (video) — Cluster migration planning as Product Manager: “who’s using the platform?” and “what is our impact to our business?”. Support to kind of Developers: “I don’t want to do Kubernetes, I want to deal with an abstraction” versus “I want a cluster-as-a-service to keep control”. Principles and strategy: take the pain with zero developer interaction.
Sometimes, Lipstick Is Exactly What a Pig Needs! — Abby Bangser, Syntasso & Whitney Lee, VMware (video — presentation) — Key success criterias of your Platform: Autonomy, Contextual distance and Capabilities versus Interfaces.
AI-powered, paved road platform at Intuit (video — presentation). Application centric runtime (simplified workload specification), Traffic management and Developer friendly (debuggability tools — right in time debugging ephemeral container).
Designing for Success: UX Principles for Internal Developer Platforms (video — presentation). Design is about how it works (Steve Jobs). Build an onboarding user journey map. Think about simple users as well as advanced users.
Boosting Developer Platform Teams with Product Thinking (video). Product centricity: Value (why we do that? right thing to do? outcomes?) + Viability (who are our customers? will they use it? Empowered product person: Tech+UX+Eng with customer empathy. Developers have different context, incentives and needs.
Panel: Navigating the Path to Platform Engineering Excellence: A Comprehensive Guide — Cortney Nickerson, Kubeshop; William Rizzo, SUSE; Abby Bangser, Syntasso; Areti Panou, SAP SE; Aparna Subramanian, Shopify (video)
Product Market Misfit: Adventures in User Empathy (video — presentation) — User empathy is key. Ask your users, you’ll see assumptions versus reality results/learnings. Dog food your own work, shared perspectives comes from proximity. Never stop listening and learning from your users, invite critical feedback.

In addition to that, many other talks around Platform Engineering have been delivered, here is the list below.

From Platform Engineering Day:

Note: it was the first edition of the Platform Engineering Day, that I attended and according to me, and based on the feedback I heard, it was a huge success. Kudos to the organizers! I’m sure we’ll have a second edition in Salt Lake City!

Platform as Product from Ritchie Brothers (video). Removing Developer frictions is the higher priority.
Unlocking Innovation: How NatWest Bank Uses Cloud Native Tools to Deliver Platform as a Product (video). Golden paths: self-managed, self-orchestrated and self-service. “Customization is the enemy”.
To K8S and Beyond — Maturing Your Platform Engineering Initiative — Nicki Watt, OpenCredo (video — presentation) — A great and detailed walkthrough of the Platform Maturity Model of the CNCF WG Platforms. 4 maturity levels for 5 aspects to consider in order to check your own limitations and opportunities for improvement.

From AppDeveloperCon:

Note: For good reasons, Dapr is an important topic during AppDeveloperCon.

Application Modernization: From Concept to Kubernetes — George Hantzaras, MongoDB (video) — App modernization journey, how platform engineering could help modernize your apps along with your infrastructure.
Deploying Your Apps to Kubernetes Without the Boilerplate — Marc Nuri & Roland Huß, Red Hat (video — presentation) — Simplification of the Developers inner and outer loops. A Developer’s dilemna with Kuberentes: “From YAML FTW to WTF…”. Cross-language (helm, odo, tilt, scaffold) versus language specific (ko, jib, jkube) developer tools.
Unleashing the Power of Serverless on Kubernetes with Knative, Crossplane, Dapr, KEDA, and Friends — Viktor Farcic, Upbound (video) — A combination of Dapr and OpenFunction could simplify the interface of your Platform for your Developers.
Dapr and Wasm; a Symbiosis for Polyglot Application Development — Sven Pfennig & Christoph Voigt, Liquid Reply GmbH (video — presentation) — Another combination of Dapr and Wasm to simplify the interface of your Platform for your Developers.

From ArgoCon:

Platform Engineering with the Argo Ecosystem: The Elastic Story (video) — To simplify the Dev experience, abstracting the applicationsets with a custom configuration layer in CUE and proposing a custom proper promotion tool.

From BackstageCon:

Note: Backstage project just celebrated its 4th birthday!

Let’s Go Backstage: End to End IDP Tips & Tricks for Platform Engineers — Oshrat Nir & Guy Menahem (video) —Implementing Backstage still needs to invest time and a dedicated team. The outcomes could really improve the quality of your engineering: less context switching and increase docs reach and usage. The good news is that the new plugins system will simplify how to create and maintain your own Backstage instance.
How Did Backstage Make 500+ Developers Happy in a Highly Regulated Enterprise — Thomas Grønbæk, Bankdata A/S (video)— Improving and investing in DevEx is possible, even in an highly regulated enterprise. 5 core values: Enhance discoverability, enforce self service, minimize cognitive load, reduce wait time and high availability tool stacks. “If you create a cool plugin that solves bad DevEx in a compliance process you got a potential killer app”.

CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2024: How Did Backstage Make 500+ Developers H… (sched.com)

From Multi-TenancyCon:

Multi-Tenant vs. Micro-Clusters in Kubernetes-Driven Platform Engineering at Adobe (video — presentation) — Project Ethos for the Adobe Experience Platform providing a Namespace profile as a Service to onboard internal Developers/customers in a muti-tenant projects and clusters setup.

From Cloud Native StartupFest:

Note: this section is very important according to me, and I’m glad to see a dedicated colocated event for this. First, Open Source (OSS) won’t be there if companies were not making business and money on top of that. We are seeing a lot of startups struggling on making money on top of OSS, and recently we have seen a lot of products changing their licensing (Terraform, Linkerd, Redis). We shouldn’t avoid such discussions. Second, the Startup world is very inspiring for any Platform Engineering initiative out there: Product Market Fit, Funding, Marketing, Sales, etc.

Startup Lessons from 25 Years and Five Startups — Tim Enwall, Fermyon Technologies, Inc. (video — presentation) — Product Market fit, “Customers cash is 1000% better than Investors cash”, “You are always fundraising”, co-founders values alignment, build the best workplace ever (“amazing teams deliver outrageous results”), two essential traits: irrational belief + intimacy with fear and failure.
Panel: Venture Capital and Open Source, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — Kelsey Hightower; Aneel Lakhani, Crane Venture Partners, Megan Reynolds, Vertex & Michael Yamnitsky, Insight Partners (video) — True validation of a Product Market fit: “validating a real problem + find the first customer willing to fund/pay you for that”. “From being a tech person, you need to become a sales person as co-founder”. Be transparent about what not working today, and show that you are learning, solving real problems, etc.
Fireside Chat with Kelsey Hightower and Alex Polvi, CEO, CoreOS, Inc (video) — Wow! This one is amazing. I’m a big fan of Kelsey. He always mentions his time at CoreOS, that’s where now I understand how his own pivotal moment happened at CoreOS with Alex. Just listened and watched this one, if you want to know more.
Is Your OSS Project Ready to Spin off Into a Company? — Arsh Sharma & Ramiro Berrelleza, Okteto; Idit Levine, Solo.io; Madhuri Yechuri, Elotl Inc.; Shauli Rozen, ARMO (video) —” Is your project really used and getting feedback from real customers (instead of just having GitHub stars)?”

From OpenShift Commons Gathering:

Case Study: Bechtle IDP (video)— Bechtle’s IDP and OpenShift workloads in an Air-Gapped environment using Score and Humanitec Orchestrator.
From Platform Engineering to Developer Success — Video and presentation not yet available, more to come soon.

From KubeCon:

Note: Kubernetes just turned 10! Wow, time flies!

Simplified Inner and Outer Cloud Native Developer Loops (video) — Dapr and TestContainers as 2 layers of abstraction to simplify the Developer experience.
State of Platform Maturity in the Norwegian Public Sector (video — presentation) — Great overview of different initiative to accelerate innovation in the public sector in Norway, with Platform Engineering best practice. One example is with nais.io.
Platform Engineering with Project Bedrock at OVO Energy (presentation)— The need to build an internal developer platform to increase Developers productivity at scale.
Developers Demand UX for K8s! (video) — Walkthrough of the results of a 16 questions surveys confirming that authoring Kubernetes manifests and debugging in Kuberentes are hard. Developers need an abstraction layer.
Why Kubernetes Is Inappropriate for Platforms, and How to Make It Better (video — presentation) — The Platform challenges around the 3 main personas: Platform Owner, Service Provider and User.
Keeping the Bricks Flowing: The LEGO Group’s Approach to Platform Engineering for Manufacturing (video)— Product focus across the Organisation is a super power. User adoption is not a given, it must be earned. Engage with your end-users early. Stick to the 80/20 rule — save ambitions for later.
Navigating the Depth of App Delivery Through Memes (video) — Great overview of what’s a CNCF TAG, the TAG App Delivery (including the Platforms WG) and also talking about a potential new TAG App Development.
Rapid IDP Capability Development and Automated Testing at Autodesk (video) — How to deploy your IDP stack based on CNOE locally with a Kind cluster.
Cultural Shifts: Fostering a Chaos First Mindset in Platform Engineering (video)— Conducting chaos engineering experiments, to gain insights into how the platform behaves during unexpected events.

Score @ KubeCon Paris

Since we applied Score to become a CNCF sandbox project, we have been getting great discussions and interactions with the community. This Workload specification to abstract Kubernetes from the Developers resonates very well. Being in KubeCon Paris was a great opportunity to show some live demos, especially around the recent new features with score-compose init|generate. More contents and demos to come about this, great momentum here!

In collaboration with Atul from InfraCloud, we also released this blog article: Mastering Workload Specifications: Finding the Right Fit for Your Developers (infracloud.io).

Humanitec @ KubeCon Paris

Humanitec had a booth, I had booth duty slots and it was a blast. So many great discussions and demos with the community, prospects and customers.

Throughout the week we also ran 3 official events: an hands-on workshop with Score, Humanitec Orchestrator and Humanitec Portal; the House of Kube party and a Platform Engineering exclusive dinner.

So many great opportunities to chat and connect with the community, especially around our recent announcements:

As I’m now back to work with my own customers, I feel very re-energized from this week and very grateful for all the insightful discussions I had there.

Summary of the 4 days at KubeCon Paris 2024 by the CNCF

What others wrote about KubeCon Paris 2024

Yeah, I didn’t talk about AI/ML, which was a huge topic that’s for sure, but at the end of the day you’ll need a Platform for these apps too, isn’t it?!

You may want to hear what others have to say about their own experience: