I’m just returning from Kubecon. It was simply amazing to meet so many of you in person. You actually exist, breathtaking! So many inspiring conversations with so many of you. From fellow colleagues building other parts of the developer toolchain, to users and implementing specialists. The Sangria was pretty amazing too.
I was at KubeCon in particular to prepare an exciting, upcoming open source specification that we will soon pitch as a CNCF sandbox project. I cannot wait to tell you more soon.
While the event was great, looking through my platform engineering lens I couldn’t help but notice that the tooling in our sector is still wildly underdeveloped. Sure, there are the usual suspects syncing messy files with a cluster. And there are the ever-growing beasts calling themselves DevOps Platforms and trying to be the “one to rule them all”. There are some new tools that now want you to throw everything you built already, every single pipeline, out of the window. Replacing it with technical approaches that are deeply questionable and untested but using their selling power to push it into the market. A large vendor with two letters probably presented the strangest one.
In the light of all of that, I am super happy that we can supplement with some amazing platform engineering content. PlatformCon is coming up in just two weeks, SO EXCITING! Here are some of my favorite highlights:
- Gregor Hohpe will talk about the main decisions and trade-offs you need to make when building an Internal Developer Platform in his PlatformCon keynote.
- The second keynote speaker, Nigel Kersten (Puppet’s Field CTO and co-author of the annual State of DevOps Report), will provide a prescription for platform engineering.
- Steve Spear will talk about the pervasive gaps between the best and the rest.
- Nicky Watt (CEO/CTO at OpenCredo) will explore a community-focused approach to building a robust platform for multiple engineering teams.
- The fabulous Galo Navarro will come up with some salesman tricks for platform engineers on how to sell platforming to their management.
- Paula Kennedy, COO at Syntasso will discuss whose (cognitive) load is it anyway that we constantly try to reduce by building platforms.
- Viktor Farcic (Upbound) wants to build an IDP out of Backstage, Crossplane and Argo CD in 15 minutes, let’s see how this will work out.
- Some might consider this boring, but internal developer documentation is super important for DevEx, so join Stefan Kolesnikowicz (Principle SRE at Achievers).
- Schuyler Bishop (Senior Director of Platform Engineering at NinjaHoldings) will tackle another topic that is constantly underrated: how important technical product management is for building an IDP.
I’m so much looking forward to seeing you there!
Cheers,
Kaspar
