CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024

YAML is prolific in the Kubernetes ecosystem as it is the language of choice to express intent in a declarative manner. As more companies build internal developer platforms (IDPs) on Kubernetes, many have found that building for enterprise needs can reach a level of complexity of hundreds of thousands of “declarative” lines, resulting in a platform that is challenging to maintain. But we don’t have to rely solely on a no-code approach to build our platforms - there is an entire spectrum from no-code to full-code available to us. In this talk, we will explore this spectrum in depth through the lens of a platform team’s journey to build an enterprise grade infrastructure control plane on Kubernetes with Crossplane. We will share all the lessons learned starting from declarative no-code and then evolving over time to a full-code approach using Golang, as well as how this journey had a major impact on their developer experience, testing, operations, stability, and more.