CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024

In times of limited budgets and tech organizations aiming to gain efficiency and cut costs, showing the positive impact of platform engineering from the start is crucial. However, as platform engineering is still in the early stages, there is a lack of clarity on what to measure, how to measure, and how to present results to other stakeholders and budget holders. In this panel, thought leaders and practitioners will discuss the goals organizations aim to achieve with platform engineering, how to define success criteria and transform them into measurable metrics, and the relationships between different kinds of indicators, such as leading vs. lagging indicators, depending on the context. Join this discussion with Nathen Harvey (DORA, Google), Mallory Haigh (Humanitec), Kirk Hoganson (BambooHR) and Guillaume Caya-Letourneau (Workleap) moderated by Heather Joslyn (The Newstack - TNS).

In our presentation, we will share how The New York Times has crafted a developer platform interface that is both straightforward and powerful, a transformation offering significant value to the wider cloud-native community. Attendees will gain firsthand insights into the effective strategies employed for abstracting Kubernetes complexities, ensuring that control and customization are not compromised.

Attendees will walk away understanding how we created:

- A set of user personas that allow us to make more mindful trade-off decisions between simplicity and extensibility.

- A process that makes feedback from our users transparent, centralized, and actionable.

- A capability maturity model that enables us to confidently roll out adoption of new features with feedback points along the way.

- An intentional marketing strategy that incorporates The Chasm framework and innovation-adoption gap.

FICO’s platform engineering team is constantly researching new tools to help accelerate delivery of solutions to our customers. We reviewed various tools enabling our teams to write sophisticated automation pipelines. Learn how we leverage Crossplane and Dapr to build Composition pipelines for increased deployment flexibility and velocity.

We’ll explore:

• Overview of the FICO® Platform and strategic business objectives driving our tool selection. 
• Explore Crossplane Functions for dynamic resource generation, database interactions, secret management and more.
• Combine Dapr’s building blocks with Crossplane to streamline your DevOps workflows to increase deployment flexibility and velocity.
•  Building Anything-as-Code (AaC) pipelines using Crossplane’s Composition Functions aided by Dapr to separate user logic from boilerplate code.

Gain technical insights and practical knowledge on new tools to increase velocity and flexibility of your team’s workflows and AaC deployments.

If you’re a developer, then security may be the last thing on your mind. Perhaps you’ve even had a very negative experience with your Platform Engineering team and Information Security (InfoSec) in your organization: telling you what you can and can’t do, waiting for access to tools and cloud services. All this can be a real damper on developer productivity. But what if we told you that there was a way in which security concerns could be met, while also allowing developers the ability to develop in peace, with minimal red tape?

In this session, Adriana and Marino will explore how policy-as-code improves Developer Experience (DevEx):

• What is policy as code and its benefits 
• Challenges of Policy as code
• Silos between Developers and Security teams
• How Policy as code can help bridge the silos
• Best practices for securing a platform with Policy as code

In the rapidly evolving financial services landscape, the ability to innovate at scale is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge and meeting customer expectations. This talk delves into the strategic, product and technical aspects of creating and managing developer platforms aka shield platform in U.S. Bank that drives innovation, enhance efficiency, and support scalable growth to achieve business goals such as cloud migration , digital transformation etc. The Shield Platform (an internal development platform) is a set of curated services to mitigate common challenges involved with building software. It does this by providing a series of frameworks, integrations, and automations to deliver applications and infrastructure to the cloud. Each service provided within the platform supplies its own controls and guardrails in accordance to security and compliance best practices. We will walk through our journey to build secure & reliable internal developer platform.

The story of a shift from on an premise container orchestration platform to a cloud based, feature rich, platform that became the first of it's kind in the company. We will share the challenges we saw in the "current state" on-premise platform (infra scalability, observability gaps, inconsistent security design, usability for customers, etc). We will discuss the process used to design the new platform including inclusion of customer feedback, how tooling was selected, how each was used to addressed the gaps and significantly improve the platform, and strategies on ensuring success for consumers of all skill levels. A few tools used include Amazon EKS, Tetrate (observability, security, and access control patterns), Karpenter (automate node scaling, ensure 99.99% HA, control cost, and address infra DR needs), Velero (automate cluster configuration backups and restores), Cloudability (cost reporting), and integration with service now for automated CI creation and deletion of CI's.

Most of the developer platform consoles I saw are getting it completely wrong, and I honestly cannot understand why. For decades now we know that a good UI is a dumb UI. A good UI does not contain much logic. UIs rely on APIs to discover what can be done and what information is needed to do whatever should be done. Yet, when I see developer portal UIs, more often than not, they do not try to rely on APIs. Instead, they are doing their best to ignore them, to bypass them, to use their internal APIs, and to do too much for no good reason.

Adopting a cloud-native platform is a significant step that goes beyond just financial investment. It includes investing in the right people, refining processes, and setting supportive policies. This panel, featuring panelists’ perspectives from startups, end-users, and vendors, will discuss the types of investment beyond budget that’s required. It will then focus on how to communicate this investment strategy to the C-suite to gain buy-in. It will showcase real-world examples on how platforms can help with faster product launches, cost savings, and increased customer satisfaction and discuss how to track and demonstrate key performance metrics that the C-suite cares about. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of what the C-suite cares about and how a cloud-native platform aligns with overall business goals and delivers lasting value.

Join us onsite for drinks and appetizers with fellow co-located attendees from Tuesday's CNCF-hosted Co-located Events.

Attendees from all CNCF Co-located Events are welcome.