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Platform Engineering At KubeCon EU 2024 - Recap

By Atulpriya Sharma |

Exactly a month ago, Kubernetes users and experts gathered in the City of Lights, Paris, for KubeCon’s Europe edition. With over 12,000 in-person attendees, this KubeCon was amongst the largest in recent times.

While there was A LOT of attention and chatter around Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI, Platform Engineering was well represented. This was the first “Platform Engineering Day,” where enthusiasts had dedicated space to discuss anything and everything related to platform engineering.

In this KubeCon 2024 recap post, I’ll shed light on the platform engineering talks and discussions that took place at KubeCon.

TAG App Delivery & WG-Platforms at KubeCon EU

The TAG App Delivery is dedicated to supporting projects and initiatives related to delivering cloud-native applications, including building, packaging, deploying, managing, and operating them. One of the initiatives at TAG is the Platforms working group, which is dedicated to supporting, improving, and advancing the platform engineering initiatives.

At KubeCon EU, talks and sessions were organized at the booth to spread awareness about the group’s work. You can read more about it in our previous blog post. If you’re new to the TAG App Delivery or platforms working groups, you can watch the following talks to know more:

Platform Engineering Day

First up, I’ll share the amazing talks from the first edition of Platform Engineering Day. I remember entering the hall a little late and seeing the place full. People were standing and listening to the talks.

Platform Engineering Day - KubeCon EU 2024

Talks

Panel Discussions

  • Panel: Navigating the Path to Platform Engineering Excellence: A Comprehensive Guide- Cortney Nickerson from Kubeshop; William Rizzo from SUSE; Abby Bangser from Syntasso; Areti Panou from SAP SE and Aparna Subramanian from Shopify discussed actionable steps to ensure effective platform engineering and dissect critical considerations for anyone looking to invest in their own platform.
  • Panel: The Platform Rock-Paper-Scissors: Build, Adopt, Buy- Jorge Lainfiesta, Independent Contributor; Leena Mooneeram from Chainalysis; Victor Araujo from Wolt; Jinhong Brejnholt from Saxo Bank and Edgaras Petovradžius from LEGO share their thoughts on how to wrangle budgets, lock-ins, and licenses to make decisions as you put together the foundations of your platform

Talks and Panel Discussions at KubeCon

While Platform Engineering was one of the hottest co-located events at KubeCon 2024, talks and panel discussions took place in other co-located events, such as BackstageCon, AppDevCon, ArgoCon, MultitenancyCon, and OpenShift Commons to name a few.

Here’s a round-up of all of them:

Day 1 - March 20

Day 2 - March 21

Day 3 - March 22

Panel Discussions and On-Booth Talks

You see, there was so much chatter about platform engineering at KubeCon!

Apart from the talks in the main conference, there were panel discussions, and talks at other co-located events and the TAG App delivery booth as well. While we don’t have videos for all these talks, there were some interesting ones around self-service infrastructure with Backstage, and Kubernetes developer experience patterns, to name a few.

Lian, Thomas, Mauricio and Atul participated in a panel discussion - From Platform Engineering To Developer Success at the RedHat OpenCommons colocated event.

Based on my experience of attending KubeCons, this has to be one of the most prolific ones when it comes to platform engineering. The talks were engaging, the platform working group was active and the booth was abuzz.

With the CFPs for the KubeCon NA 2024 already open, share your interesting proposals on platform engineering and let the world know about the amazing things you’re doing.

Platform Coffee Meetups - Paris Edition

One of the things that I absolutely love about the platforms working group is the in-person coffee meetups that we organize during KubeCons. The first one I attended was in KubeCon Chicago and I loved the concept.

Anyone and everyone is invited to discuss anything and everything about platforms and platform engineering over a cup of coffee. It’s an amazing experience to learn about what is happening in the world of platform engineering and to meet the amazing people behind it.

This time, we had it for four days, and we had people turning up in great numbers each day. With Croissants, Pain au Chocolat, and Cafe Au Lait, we all discussed everything from what platforms actually mean to discussing the success criteria for platforms - these were some insightful discussions.

Key Takeaways

This was my second in-person KubeCon and fourth overall. It was also the second time I met the members of the platform working group in person. While we connect over calls monthly and work on exciting things like the Platform Whitepaper, Platform Maturity Model, and ongoing Platform as a Product paper, meeting in person is way better.

Further, a huge shoutout to the members of the TAG App delivery and WG Platforms who were helpful right from the day KubeCon was announced to being hyperactive during KubeCon. Further, the first Platform Engineering Day was a huge success, and rooms filled with people are a testament to the importance and interest in platform engineering.

Apart from being a part of a platform engineering panel, I got to listen to some interesting talks on how people navigate the platform engineering maze. I was particularly intrigued by discussions around customized measuring the success of platforms and AI-ready platforms. The one thing I absolutely enjoyed about the discussions was the focus on developer experience and its larger productivity aspects.

Join Us!

Being a part of this fun and intellectual group, I can vouch that this is one of the most interactive and helpful groups. Whether you’ve just learned about Platform Engineering or are professional building platforms for years, you’re welcome to join the platform working group and help us shape the future of platforms.

Join our WG-Platforms Slack to get started. Just drop a note to introduce yourself and let us know what you want. Someone from the team will help you get started :)