This year Cloud Native Summit (CNS) in Munich gathered adopters and technologists from open source and cloud native communities.
Compared to last year's Kubernetes Communities Days (KCD), the agenda dedicated many slots to Platform Engineering. This discipline can be seen as a way to fill gaps between different stakeholders of an Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Last year I wrote an article on this topic at the KCD Munich. This year I would like to share fresh ideas or principles from some talks given during the conference.
Identifying problems before solutions
Day 1 opened with a presentation of "Product thinking" approach made by Stéphane Di Cesare (Deutsche Kreditbank) and Dominik Schmidle (Giant Swarm). They reminded some core principles and techniques of "Platform Engineering" to manage the link between problem space and solution space.
Day 1 also closed with a panel discussion on "Platform Engineering" animated by Max Körbächer (Liquid Reply), focused on the adoption of IDPs by end users and within projects.
AI workloads on K8s
"Use platform engineering for AI workloads on K8s", that was the motto of the presentation given by Mario-Leander Reimer (QAware GmbH). He tackled emerging challenges for deploying Agentic AI workloads and introduced an example of what a platform should cover including quality plane and compliance plane. His talk is part of an open source initiative launched at QAware this year to mature the concepts of a dedicated control plane: the agentic layer.
Video 3 Architecting and Building a K8s-based AI Platform
Composable platforms on Kubernetes
Hossein Salahi (Liquid Reply) presented a reference implementation to streamline the delivery of services for developers. Some of the challenges were to link dev and ops, to manage services in configuration, to orchestrate infrastructure deployment and to manage access. For that purpose the open source tools Kratix codify a contract between dev and ops. Combined with Backstage, this abstraction allows services to be packaged and delivered to developers.
Video 4 Modular Platform Engineering with Kratix and Backstage
Reduce cognitive workloads
Interestingly the problem of cognitive workloads due to some platform complexity was a recurring theme. But Michel Murabito (Mia Platform) positioned platform engineering as a way to reduce cognitive workloads. He highlighted essential building blocks and features that can reduce mental burden.
Video 5 Creating a smooth Developer Experience
Involved user as contributor
Lian Li (lianmakesthings) told us a story of what can go wrong when building a platform based on real examples and some facts. She advocated some receipts that can improve communication among teams in an organisation and explain some benefits of having contributing users in the loop.
Video 6 Many Cooks, One Platform: Balancing Ownership and Contribution for the Perfect Broth
Convergence
Evelyn Osman (enmacc) discussed the importance of convergence when building a platform in order to avoid fragmentation in teams and solutions. She shared some important steps that foster innovations and better meet user expectations.
Video 7 Convergence on Platforms
Conclusion
This is not an exhaustive list of what was discussed, but somehow it made it clear that Platform Engineering approach can help picking the right solution in the open source landscape. Some enablers already provide a strong integration with Kubernetes to develop and publish new services on top of it. And depending on the organization, some shift in practices also might be required to follow the evolution of the platform at build and runtime. The conference was a great place to exchange with the community on technical and organization challenges.
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