Cloud Native Platform Engineering Community – Event

Blog: Cloud Native Platform Engineering Japan Kickoff in Japan!

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, everyone. I’m Ken Komazawa, Chief Architect at Red Hat.

Today, I’d like to share details about the Cloud Native Platform Engineering Japan Kickoff held on December 8th. This marks the first event of its kind in Japan organized by the CNCF community focused on platform engineering.

This event is organized by Cloud Native Platform Engineering Japan, a SIG of Cloud Native Community Japan ( CNCJ), which is the Japanese chapter of the CNCF. The group’s mission is to “spread awareness about platform engineering from the CNCF’s perspective! Let practitioners gather to share insights, collaborate closely with upstream projects, and connect Japan with the world!”

I am also participating as one of the organizers. As shown in the slide below, it was announced at the LF Japan Community Days on October 21st.

The story for launching this community began with a conversation between Nakamura-san, Head of OSPO at Hitachi and a member of the CNCF Governing Board, and Vincent, APAC CTO at Red Hat. They discussed how platform engineering activities in Japan and Asia lagged behind those in Europe and the US, concluding that establishing a dedicated community in Japan would be beneficial. That’s how Nakamura-san and I connected.

Coinciding with the launch of the CNCF’s platform engineering certification, CNPA (Cloud Native Platform Engineering Associate), I approached Nakamura-san with the idea, “Why don’t we localize it into Japanese?” This sparked our communication, and this group came together to volunteer and drive forward such activities.

Hayakawa-san from LINE Yahoo has been involved in the CNCF Platform Engineering Technical Community Group from early on and also had connections to the domestic community in Japan (Platform Engineering Kaigi/Meetup), so he serves as the leader of this group.

Tabata-san from Hitachi is also a Keycloak committer and actively promotes the community in security fields like the CNCF TAG Security and Compliance. He joined this community, leveraging his operational experience. (He is also a CNCF Ambassador.)

Furthermore, Matsuda-san from Hitachi is a Kubestronaut (a superhuman holding all Kubernetes certifications) and enthusiastically joined, eager to contribute to this community! (He is the only Kubestronaut in the Chugoku region of Japan!)

Okabe-san is a university student and a Mercari intern, but he was the driving force behind this project’s planning and execution, pushing things forward energetically. Okabe-san is also a CNCF Ambassador and a leader with a strong presence in the OSS community.

And after this event, we even had Aoyama-san from CyberAgent join us! With Aoyama-san—who also organizes events like Kubernetes Meetup and Cloud Native Days—participating, our community operations team has become even stronger.

What should I do among such diverse and talented members!?

I serve as an architect at Red Hat. As an ambassador for Japan, I believe I can take on the role of promoting “ The Open Source Way"—the approach Red Hat has practiced to build a business around open source. The Open Source Way, a development model that drives developer innovation through open decision-making while enhancing transparency, should be highly compatible with platform engineering—which maximizes developer experience as an internal platform.

While working at Red Hat, this approach to organizational management and mindset can start to feel like second nature. Yet putting it into practice is extremely challenging, and much of it remains tacit knowledge, largely unknown outside the company. I hope to use this community to share how Red Hat has developed software and coexisted with the open source community.

That was a long introduction, but I’d like to briefly introduce the event’s content.

Keynote

Vincent delivered the keynote titled “Bridging the Gap”. His message was that platform engineering activities, grounded in both internal and external community initiatives, will shape the future of software development in Japan. The challenges of IT talent shortages and skill gaps within end-user companies are more severe compared to Europe and the US. To improve this, companies should advance internal “innersource” activities (activities that openly share knowledge within the company to build collective intelligence). As one key measure for this, the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) becomes crucial.

Platform Engineering from CNCF’s Perspective

Next, Hayakawa-san from LINE Yahoo introduced platform engineering from the CNCF’s perspective. CNCF provides resources such as the Platforms Whitepaper, which outlines the role, value, and measurement methods of platform engineering, along with how to establish platform teams; a Maturity Model to review platform outcomes and identify improvement opportunities; and a certification program for platform engineering. In this way, CNCF is a community that shares the foundational knowledge and theory for practicing platform engineering, supporting the formation of common understanding and best practices within the cloud-native field.

Hayakawa-san serves as the Product Owner for his company’s internal platform. Drawing on his in-house experience, he actively provides feedback to the CNCF and shares insights within the community. His discussions are highly persuasive, grounded in practical experience with mission-critical infrastructure at his company, including best practices for multi-tenant operations in Kubernetes and infrastructure automation.

Avoiding Pitfalls When Adopting Gateway API: Secure-by-Default Design Achieved with Kuadrant and Keycloak

Next, Matsuda-san from Hitachi gave a technical presentation titled “Avoiding Pitfalls When Adopting Gateway API: Secure-by-Default Design Achieved with Kuadrant and Keycloak”. He explained Kubernetes architecture by personifying it as a family structure, making it both easy to understand and enjoyable.

In increasingly complex platforms, it is crucial that security is built in from the design phase. How can we clearly communicate to engineers how the Kubernetes ecosystem addresses security challenges? I believe this is one of the most critical tasks within the domain of platform engineering.

Matsuda-san is a Kubestronaut (the only one in the Chugoku region of Japan). He provides such clear explanations through his blog and other channels, making him an incredibly valuable and reassuring team member.

The Evolution of Platform Engineering at Mercari

Finally, Rafael, Engineering Manager of the Engineering Enablement group at Mercari, gave a presentation on the evolution of platform engineering at Mercari.

He specifically outlined the challenges and countermeasures in platform engineering efforts from 2018 to the present. He explained that the platform team needed to become an enabler focused on developer success, not just a tool provider. To foster an inner-source culture, they shifted to a structure where domain expert teams lead the community, ensuring the platform team itself doesn’t become a bottleneck.

Mercari, where Okabe-san works, has achieved a culture distinct from typical Japanese organizations. This makes it a highly insightful experience for other companies to learn from.

Summary

This kickoff meeting covered the content described above.

For Japanese engineers, this kickoff aimed to pose the question: “What kind of impact can platform engineering activities have?”

As part of your company’s business activities, platform engineering can serve as a powerful driving force. Let’s not only accumulate this experience internally as inner-source activities, but also share it externally. Doing so creates a positive feedback loop: it contributes positively to the open-source community (outer-source), which is recognized as enhancing your corporate brand, ultimately benefiting your company.

We ask for your continued cooperation to keep energizing this community!

Bonus: A Thinking Framework for Platform Engineering

Below is my perspective on the overall landscape of platform engineering. I see three overlapping problem domains: “Platform as a Product”, which treats internal platforms as products; “Platform as Engineering”, which views them as an extension of software engineering; and “Platform as Organization & Architecture”, which considers them as organizational and architectural challenges. By framing it this way, I believe we can position platform teams as core functions within corporate strategy and design, enabling the planning of investments.

Below is a list of excellent books to guide you. The three logos at the bottom represent open-source practice communities based on Red Hat’s experience. If you can adapt and implement the ideas and practices they convey to suit your own company, you should be able to build a platform that maximizes your business value.

Let’s all practice platform engineering together!

Blog: TAG App Delivery at Kubecon EU 2025

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 20:04:39 +0100

KubeCon EU 2025 is only a week away!

The TAG App Delivery is excited to bring together cloud-native application developers and framework builders to meet each other and share insights and knowledge. Our goal is to make cloud development better for all by gathering feedback, finding synergies and guiding both users and projects.

TAG booth

You can find the TAG App Delivery at our booth TAG - A in the project pavilion, where we will have lightning talks and showcase the work of the platforms and artifact working groups.

You can find a map of the Project Pavilion booths here

Schedule

We will continuously update the below schedule as more information becomes available. You can also subscribe to the TAG KubeCon Calendar to conveniently keep up to date with our activites. Times are in BST.

Tuesday, April 1st: Co-located Events

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
07:15 - 08:45	Costa Coffee , East Entrace, Excel, London	Platform Coffee Meetup	CNCF Platforms Working Group
09:00 - 19:00	Level 1 Hall Entrance N10 Room F	Platform Engineering Day
09:00 - 17:30	Level 0 ICC Capital Hall Room I	BackstageCon
09:00 - 17:30	Level 1 Hall Entrance S10 Room A	ArgoCon
09:00 - 17:30	Level 3 ICC Capital Suite 14-16	OpenTofu Day
16:55 - 17:25	Level 1 - Hall Entrance N10 - Room H	Panel: Navigating the Platform Revolution: From Bottom-Up Innovation To Product Thinking	Antoine Bermon, SNCF; Kanika Gera, Adobe ; Louis Bichard, Gitpod; Christina Kraus, meshcloud

Wednesday, April 2nd: Conference Day 1

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
07:15 - 08:45	Costa Coffee , East Entrace, Excel, London	Platform Coffee Meetup	CNCF Platforms Working Group
10:30 - 12:00	Booth TAG-A	Open Booth	TAG Leads
12:00 - 12:10	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Lightning-Fast Local AI App Development with Podman”	Daniel Oh
12:15 - 12:25	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Build Your Perfect App Delivery Model: Customizing Standards with Crossplane XRDs”	Sarah Murphy
12:30 - 12:40	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Platform Engineering untold thruths: is it just an infrastructure matter?”	Graziano Casto
12:45- 12:55	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Platformization: Perceiving Platform Patterns”	Ram Iyengar
13:00 - 14:30	Booth TAG-A	Platforms Working Group	WG Leads
14:30- 16:00	Booth TAG-A	App Development Working Group	WG Leads
16:00 - 18:00	Booth TAG-A	Open Booth	TAG Leads
18:00- 20:00	Booth TAG-A	KubeCrawl	TAG Leads

Thursday, April 3rd: Conference Day 2

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
07:15 - 08:45	Costa Coffee , East Entrace, Excel, London	Platform Coffee Meetup	CNCF Platforms Working Group
10:30 - 12:00	Booth TAG-A	Open Booth	TAG Leads
12:00 - 12:10	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Scale Before It Hurts: KEDA for Data-Intensive Apps”	Graziano Casto & Alessandro Cannarella
12:12 - 12:22	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Extensibility and Portability with Radius for Platform Engineers”	Johnathan Smith
12:25 - 12:35	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Is there a tool for this? - App Developer Edition”	Alexandra Aldershaab
12:37 - 12:47	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Your Application Delivery Ran Over My CI/CD: Expanding Beyond Pipeline Thinking”	Luke Philips
12:50 - 13:00	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “GitOps for Everything with Pluggable PipeCD”	Tetsuya Kikuchi
13:00 - 14:30	Booth TAG-A	Infrastructure Lifecycle Working Group	WG Leads
14:30- 16:00	Booth TAG-A	Artifacts Working Group	WG Leads
16:00 - 17:00	Booth TAG-A	Open Booth	TAG Leads

Friday, April 4th: Conference Day 3

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
07:15 - 08:45	Costa Coffee , East Entrace, Excel, London	Platform Coffee Meetup	CNCF Platforms Working Group
10:30 - 12:00	Booth TAG-A	Open Booth	TAG Leads
12:00 - 12:10	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Continuous Promotion - Take full advantage of your Cloud Native Infrastructure”	Christian Hernandez
12:15 - 12:25	Booth TAG-A	Lightning Talk - “Navigating the Cloud-Native Inner and Outer Loop for Developer Productivity”	Mona Borham
12:30 - 14:00	Booth TAG-A	Open Booth	TAG Leads

Blog: TAG App Delivery at Kubecon NA (Salt Lake City) 2024

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 13:04:39 +0100

KubeCon NA 2024 is almost here!
The TAG App Delivery is excited to bring together cloud-native application developers and framework builders to meet each other and share insights and knowledge. Our goal is to make cloud development better for all by gathering feedback, finding synergies and guiding both users and projects.

TAG booth

You can find the TAG App Delivery at our booth Kiosk 4A in the project pavilion,

Lightning Talks

Will have lightning talks and showcase the work of the platforms and artifact working groups at the TAG booth.

If you would like to submit a Lightning Talk, please use this form: Lightning Talk Submission Form

Please note the following requirements to submit a talk proposal

The topic should be relevant to the TAG app-delivery. If in doubt, refer to our charter
When submitting project presentations, keep in mind that we will only accept CNCF projects, or projects submitted to CNCF sandbox.
Lightning talks will be a maximum of 10 minutes, a computer display can not be guaranteed.

The call for proposals ends November 8th. If your talk is accepted, we will notify you by November 9th. If you did not hear back from us, your submission has unfortunately not been accepted.

Schedule

We will continuously update the below schedule as more information becomes available. You can also subscribe to the TAG KubeCon Calendar to conveniently keep up to date with our activites.

Tuesday: Co-located Events

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
7:15am MST	Cupla Coffee - 77 W 200 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84101	“Platform Coffee” meetup	Platforms WG (sponsor TBD)
9:10am MST	Salt Palace - Level 1 - Grand Ballroom G	Platform Working Group Update	Platform Working Group Leads
10:40am MST	Salt Palace - Level 1 - Grand Ballroom G	Portals and Platforms, Two Ps in a Pod? How Good Interfaces Make for Good Operability	Jorge Lainfiesta, Rootly & Abby Bangser, Syntasso
11:15am MST	Salt Palace - Level 1 - Grand Ballroom G	Lightning Talk: Are You Really Ready to Adopt a Platform?	Atulpriya Sharma, InfraCloud Technologies

Wednesday: Conference Day 1

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
7:15am MST	Cupla Coffee - 77 W 200 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84101	“Platform Coffee” meetup	Platforms WG (sponsor TBD)
11:15am MST	Hyatt Regency - Level 2 - Salt Lake Ballroom C	The State of Cloud Native Business Value in 2024	Danielle Cook, StackGen; Simon Forster, Stackegy; Catherine Paganini, Buoyant; Colin Griffin, Krumware; Robbie Glenn, Glennium
10:45am - 3:15pm	Kiosk 3B	Microcks, The open source, cloud native tool for API Mocking and Testing	Yacine Kheddache, Laurent Broudoux and community members
12:00pm - 1:30pm MST	Platforms Working Group (updated link March, 2026)	Platform Working Group Leads
1:35pm MST	Kiosk 4A	Lighning Talk - “You Can Score It! Shift Down to the Platform. Do Not Shift Left to the Developers.”	Mathieu Benoit
1:55pm MST	Kiosk 4A	Lighning Talk - “A Quick Dive into ArgoCD Sync Phases & Waves”	Colin Lacy
2:15pm MST	Kiosk 4A	Lighning Talk - “What’s Inside The Platform Fanny Pack?”	Ram Iyengar
2:30pm - 4:00pm MST	Artifacts Working Group	Artifacts Working Group Leads
5:25pm MST	Salt Palace - Level 1 - Grand Ballroom H	Creating Paved Paths for Platform Engineers	Ritesh Patel, Nirmata; Abby Bangser, Syntasso; Viktor Farcic, Upbound; Nicholas Morey, Akuity; Praseeda Sathaye, Amazon

Thursday: Conference Day 2

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
7:15am MST	Cupla Coffee - 77 W 200 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84101	“Platform Coffee” meetup	Platforms WG (sponsor TBD)
12:00pm - 1:30pm MST	App Development Working Group	App Development Working Group Leads
1:45pm - 5:00pm	Kiosk 5B	Microcks, The open source, cloud native tool for API Mocking and Testing	Yacine Kheddache, Laurent Broudoux and community members
1:35pm MST	Kiosk 4A	Lighning Talk - “A deep dive in Guidewire’s Cloud Platform with CrossPlane and Kubevela”	Jérôme Guionnet
1:55pm MST	Kiosk 4A	Lighning Talk - “Another Platform Engineering Story: Migration of Legacy PaaS and the Platform Team’s Contributions”	Hiroshi Hayakawa
2:15pm MST	Kiosk 4A	Lighning Talk - “Platform as a Product: Starting with the Personas”	Valentina Rodriguez Sosa
2:30pm MST	Salt Palace - Level 3 - 355 E	Applications, Platforms, and Infrastructure Oh My! What Is the TAG App Delivery Doing to Support You	Daniel Oh, Red Hat; Roberth Strand, Sopra Steria; Ryan Nowak, Microsoft; Abby Bangser, Syntasso

Friday: Conference Day 3

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
7:15am MST	Cupla Coffee - 77 W 200 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84101	“Platform Coffee” meetup	Platforms WG (sponsor TBD)
12:00pm - 1:30pm MST	Infrastructure Lifecycle Working Group	Infrastructure Lifecycle Working Group Leads
11:00am MST	Salt Palace - Level 1 - Grand Ballroom H	Platform Engineering in Financial Institutions: The Practitioner Panel	Paula Kennedy, Syntasso; Chris Plank, NatWest Bank; Suhail Patel, Monzo; Jinhong Brejnholt, Saxo Bank; Rachael Wonnacott, Fidelity International

Blog: Join the Infrastructure Lifecycle Working Group 💙

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Are you looking to influence the future of infrastructure management in cloud-native environments? The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee has recently approved the Infrastructure Lifecycle working group within the TAG App Delivery, and we need your expertise!

As cloud-native practices evolve, infrastructure needs are becoming more complex. IT professionals now face the challenge of managing workloads across different environments. These include cloud platforms, IoT edge devices, on-premises data centers, and hybrid setups. There were already considerable investments in both open-source and commercial solutions. However, IT professionals still look for standards that address the whole infrastructure lifecycle.

This working group aims to define technology-agnostic best practices in infrastructure lifecycle management. We will deliver a framework for managing the lifecycle of cloud-native infrastructure, with a focus on components such as:

Infrastructure as Code
Control Planes
State Management
Disaster Recovery
Automation
Testing
Observability

To accomplish our deliverable, we need your help in collaborating with relevant Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs), Working Groups (WGs), vendors, and end-users to integrate domain-specific expertise. Your participation will help us develop practical, real-world solutions that address the diverse needs of the community. Every voice matters, and we warmly welcome and encourage contributions from everyone interested in this field! 🎤

Co-chaired by Ryan Nowak (Microsoft), Bruno Schaatsbergen (HashiCorp), and Jochen Zehnder (Inventx) and various active members, the group brings together expertise from leading industry professionals.

Excited?

Are you a developer interested in shaping the future of cloud-native infrastructure lifecycle management? We’d love for you to be part of it! 💙 The charter provides more information about the working group’s goals and direction.

Bi-weekly meetings: Participate in our discussions on each month’s first and third Fridays.
CNCF Slack Channel: Connect with us on the #wg-infra-lifecycle channel on the CNCF Slack workspace.

Are you attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024? Don’t miss the chance to connect with the co-chairs and members of the Infrastructure Lifecycle Working Group at the TAG App Delivery booth to learn more about our initiatives!

- Ryan Nowak, Bruno Schaatsbergen, and Jochen Zehnder.

Blog: Platform Engineering At KubeCon EU 2024 - Recap

Mon, 06 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Talks

TAG App Delivery Platforms Working Group Update - Colin Griffin from Krumware provides an overview of what the Platforms Working Group is and how to get involved.
Sometimes, Lipstick Is Exactly What a Pig Needs! - Abby Bangser from Syntasso & Whitney Lee from VMware highlight the importance of investing in user interfaces and adoption for internal developer platforms, even more than perfecting the underlying technology.
Beyond Platform Thinking at Ritchie Brothers - Build Things No One Expects, in a Place No One Expect - Bryan Oliver from Thoughtworks & Ranbir Chawla from Ritchie Bros discuss how Ritchie Bros has expanded the capabilities of Kubernetes beyond just a delivery platform to drive their core enterprise.
Blueprints of Innovation: Engineering Paved Paths for a User-Friendly Developer Platform- Ahmed Bebars from The New York Times - provides valuable insights into the nuances of platform engineering in the cloud, giving a blueprint for implementing strategies in their organizations.
Building a Platform Engineering API Layer with kcp - Marvin Beckers from Kubermatic GmbH discusses how kcp supercharges platform engineering with a global control plane for all internal services.
Breaking the Mold: Unveiling Anti-Architectural Patterns in Platform as a Product - Vamshi Krishna Samudrala from American Airlines - discusses the intricate landscape of designing and implementing effective platforms.
Empowering Giants: Guide Your Enterprise with CNOE in Operational Tech Choices - Engin Diri from Pulumi introduces the CNOE Framework, and explores how participation can benefit organizations in overcoming challenges.
Designing for Success: UX Principles for Internal Developer Platforms - Kirsten Schwarzer from Octopus Deploy shows practical UX principles and tools you can use to design an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that your developers love using.
Boosting Developer Platform Teams with Product Thinking - Samantha Coffman from Spotify talks about the effectiveness of taking the product approach for building platforms.
Building an AI-Powered, Paved Road Platform with Cloud-Native OSS - Todd Ekenstam & Avni Sharma from Intuit share insights on how open-source projects, such as Open Application Model, Istio, Karpenter, Argo Rollouts, can be integrated and extended to build your AI-native application platform.
Unlocking Innovation: How NatWest Bank Uses Cloud Native Tools to Deliver Platform as a Product - Chris Plank from Natwest Group & Derik Evangelista from Syntasso discuss how they focused on a GitOps approach and incorporated a range of tools to enable platform users to have a seamless developer experience.
To K8S and Beyond – Maturing Your Platform Engineering Initiative - Nicki Watt, from OpenCredo shares insights on how the recently released CNCF platform maturity model can be used as part of a toolbox to help guide organisations think through.

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

Bloomberg’s Journey to a Multi-Cluster Workflow Orchestration Platform - Yao Lin & Reinhard Tartler from Bloomberg talk about how they investigated related projects and what inspiration we took from Karmada, OCM, and others to build their own orchestration platform.
Building a Large Scale Multi-Cloud Multi-Region SaaS Platform with Kubernetes Controllers- Sébastien Guilloux from Elastic describes an architecture made of hundreds of Kubernetes clusters, and talks about the challenges we have faced along the way to build a multi-cloud, multi-region platform.
Simplified Inner and Outer Cloud Native Developer Loops - Oleg Šelajev from AtomicJar & Alice Gibbons from Diagrid explore tools to simplify and improve developer productivity through a platform engineering and polyglot approach.
Building AI-Ready Platforms - Symphony for Developer and Platform Engineer - Thomas Vitale from Systematic & Lize Raes from LangChain4j share details to bridge the gap between platform engineers and developers, focusing on adapting your platform for AI while providing a smooth developer experience.
State of Platform Maturity in the Norwegian Public Sector - Hans Kristian Flaatten from the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration uses the newly published CNCF Platform Engineering Maturity Model to measure how mature their platforms are, and what technologies they have chosen.
Cultural Shifts: Fostering a Chaos First Mindset in Platform Engineering - Sayan Mondal from Harness & Raj Vadheraju from FIS talk about how organizations can enhance their platform engineering practices by leveraging chaos-first principles.

Day 2 - March 21

Unlocking New Platform Experiences with Open Interfaces - Thomas Vitale from Systematic & Mauricio “Salaboy” Salatino from Diagrid explore existing CNCF projects to implement an end-to-end experience to build platforms.
Keeping the Bricks Flowing: The LEGO Group’s Approach to Platform Engineering for Manufacturing - Mads Høgstedt Danquah & Jeppe Lund Andersen from The LEGO Group share their story of how the LEGO Group builds platforms and products that cope with constraints like 24/7 production, limited internet connectivity, high resilience and low latency.
Why Kubernetes Is Inappropriate for Platforms, and How to Make It Better. - Stefan Schimanski from Upbound; Mangirdas Judeikis from Cast AI; Sebastian Scheele from Kubermatic - extending Kube, adapting its architecture to be a better fit for a platform.

Day 3 - March 22

Rapid IDP Capability Development and Automated Testing at Autodesk - Jesse Sanford & Greg Haynes from Autodesk show how IDPBuilder can stand up a CNOE reference architecture in minutes, with nothing other than Docker as a pre-dependency.
Search at Shopify: Highly Available Platform for Data Resilience and Compliance - Leila Vayghan from Shopify show how Kafka is used for in-order and real-time indexing of millions of documents per minute to achieve high availability

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.

The Platform Lean Coffee meetup in progress. We've some REALLY amazing topics that we're discussing today.

Kudos to the WG-Platforms group at @CNCFTAGApp for this one.

Also thanks to our sponsors @syntasso @krumware @gitpod 🙏🏻😇 pic.twitter.com/NPMHZBlgQo
— Atulmaharaj 🥑 (@TheTechMaharaj) March 21, 2024

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 :)

Blog: TAG App Delivery at Kubecon EU 2024

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 13:04:39 +0100

KubeCon EU 2024 is only four more weeks away!
The TAG App Delivery is excited to bring together cloud-native application developers and framework builders to meet each other and share insights and knowledge. Our goal is to make cloud development better for all by gathering feedback, finding synergies and guiding both users and projects.

TAG booth

You can find the TAG App Delivery at our booth PP19-A in the project pavilion, where we will have lightning talks and showcase the work of the platforms and artifact working groups.

The CfP for lightning talks is now closed.

Please note the following requirements to submit a talk propsal

The topic should be relevant to the TAG app-delivery. If in doubt, refer to our charter
When submitting project presentations, keep in mind that we will only accept CNCF projects, or projects submitted to CNCF sandbox.
Lightning talks will be a maximum of 10 minutes, a computer display can not be guaranteed. The call for proposals ends March 3rd. If your talk is accepted, we will notify you by March 9th. If you did not hear back from us, your submission has unfortunately not been accepted.

TAG presentations

We will also have two presentations at KubeCon itself.

On Tuesday, Tech Lead Lian Li will give A Quick Look at the TAG App Delivery in the form of a lightning talk.

On Thursday, TAG chair Thomas Schuetz and Tech Lead Lian Li will talk about the everchanging landscape of cloud-native application delivery and how that influences the scope of our work in the TAG.

Schedule

We will continuously update the below schedule as more information becomes available. You can also subscribe to the TAG KubeCon Calendar to conveniently keep up to date with our activites.

Tuesday: Co-located Events

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
07:15 - 08:45	Le Bellune 35 Boulevard Victor 75015	Platform Lean Coffee	Coffee and pastries sponsored by GitPod
09:00 - 19:00	Level 7.1 Room B	Platform Engineering Day	Abby Bangser, Bryan Oliver, Colin Griffin
09:00 - 17:30	Level 7.1 Room C	BackstageCon
09:00 - 17:35	Level 7.3 Room S04	AppDeveloperCon	Mauricio Salatino
09:00 - 17:30	Level 7.3 Room N03	ArgoCon	Andre Marcelo-Tanner, Andrew Block, Scott Rigby
12:30 - 12:37	Level 7.1 Room D	A Quick Look at the TAG App Delivery	Lian Li
15:30 - 15:50	Gaumont Aquaboulevard	Openshift Commons panel From Platform Engineering to Developer Success
Lian Li, Thomas Schuetz, Atul Sharma, Mauricio Salatino

Wednesday: Conference Day 1

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
07:15 - 08:45	Le Bellune 35 Boulevard Victor 75015	Platform Lean Coffee	Coffee and pastries sponsored by Kratix
10:45 - 12:00	Booth PP19-A	Public Project Meeting	TAG leads
12:00 - 13:00	Booth PP19-A	Open Booth: WG Artifacts	Andrew Block
13:00 - 13:10	Booth PP19-A	OpenGitOps: Who we are and what we do	Christian Hernandez
13:17 - 13:27	Booth PP19-A	The state of GitOps Progressive Delivery 2024	Anton Weiss
13:34 - 13:44	Booth PP19-A	Self-service infrastructure with Backstage	Engin Diri
13:51 - 14:01	Booth PP19-A	Revolutionizing Container Image Building with kpack	Timo Salm
14:08 - 14:18	Booth PP19-A	Kubernetes Developer Experience Patterns	Lou Bichard
14:25 - 14:35	Booth PP19-A	Knative for App Delivery	Ali Ok
14:42 - 14:52	Booth PP19-A	Delivering next-gen applications with WebAssembly	Joonas Bergius

Thursday: Conference Day 2

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
07:15 - 08:45	Le Bellune 35 Boulevard Victor 75015	Platform Lean Coffee	Coffee and pastries sponsored by Krumware
10:30 - 10:40	Booth PP19-A	ArgoCD GitOps Bridge Pattern	Carlos Santana
10:47 - 10:57	Booth PP19-A	Empowering and Accelerating Cloud-Native Development with Buildpacks.io	Michael Murabito
11:04 - 11:14	Booth PP19-A	The BACK Stack	David Murphy
11:21 - 11:31	Booth PP19-A	Sustainable software development in Kubernetes	Davide Bianchi
11:38 - 11:48	Booth PP19-A	Bringing an Internal Developer Platform to Life	Andre Marcelo-Tanner
11:55 - 12:05	Booth PP19-A	Seamless service tracing with OpenTelemetry	Javier Fernandez Rodriguez
12:12 - 12:22	Booth PP19-A	Trace It Right: Observability-Powered Testing at the Speed of Light	Ken Hamric
12:30 - 13:30	Booth PP19-A	Open Booth: WG Platforms	David Stenglein, Bryan Oliver
15:25 - 16:00	Level 7.3 Room E05 - E06	Navigating the Depth of App Delivery Through Memes	Lian Li, Thomas Schuetz

Friday: Conference Day 3

Time	Location	Topic	Presenter
10:30 - 12:30	Booth PP19-A	Open Booth

Blog: TAG App Delivery at Kubecon Chicago

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000

At Kubecon Chicago TAG App Delivery will bring together maintainers and users of projects that enable cloud-native application delivery to meet and learn from each other. The TAG’s goals as always are to a) enable application delivery projects to learn from each other and from cloud application developers and b) make application delivery faster and more efficient for end users.

To this end the TAG will host a project meeting on Monday morning at the Marriott Marquis on Level 4, room name “Probability”; and booth 41 in the project pavilion at the conference center on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. At these venues we’ll be hosting talks and discussions about app delivery topics; if you’d like to share an open source project, a new idea, or just lead an open discussion please let us know by filling out this form. The project meeting will also be livestreamed to YouTube.

Here’s that info again:

Project meeting on Monday 11/6 from 8am-12pm at the Marriot Marquis, Level 4, room name Probability and YouTube.
Booth and meetup spot at project pavilion booth #P10 on the show floor each afternoon and evening
Form for presentation and discussion proposals: https://forms.gle/ZbNxrK5f72otckvj7

The TAG will also host a panel discussion on Tuesday at 3:25pm on the relevance of platforms and platform engineering for efficient cloud-native computing. Please join us!

Stop by our booth to chat about platforms, GitOps, artifacts and other app delivery topics and learn more about the TAG.

Pre-day meetup - Monday morning

The schedule for the project meeting on Monday morning will be as follows. The meeting will be live streamed and recorded too.

Time	Topic	Presenter
08:00	TAG General Review	TAG Leads
09:00	Sandbox submission review for Radius	Jonathan Smith, Microsoft
10:00	Learn about and discuss CNOE	Nima Kaviani, AWS
11:00	Workload Specifications: Your Best Friends In Platform Engineering	Atulpriya Sharma, InfraCloud
-	Automating the Deployment of Data Workloads to Kubernetes with ArgoCD, Argo Workflows, and Hera	Matt Menzenski, Payit
-	Beyond the Bundle: Porter and CNAB	Sarah Christoff, Microsoft
-	From Apps to Stacks: Delivering Reusable Analytic Stacks on Kubernetes	Robert Hodges, Altinity

Booth meetups - Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

The schedule for talks at the booth follows:

Date/Time	Topic
Nov 7 @ 17:00	Chat with participants from Platforms Panel
Nov 8 @ 15:00	Talks and discussions
-	Speed up your API delivery with Microcks
-	How to Build a GitOps Internal Developer Platform on Kubernetes
-	KubeConstellations: Platform Engineering Patterns
-	AAA framework & DCD capability map for Platform Engineering

See you in Chicago!

Blog: TAG App Delivery at Kubecon EU 2023

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

At Kubecon EU next week TAG App Delivery will bring together cloud-native application developers and framework builders to meet each other and share insights and knowledge. Our goal is to make cloud development better for all by gathering feedback, finding synergies and guiding both users and projects.

To this end the TAG will host the following lightning talk meetups. The list of talks and presenters follows below.

a pre-day meetup in RAI Room D301, Congress Center
a booth meetup on Wednesday 4/19 at 3:00pm in booth K1 in the CNCF Project Pavilion in the Solutions Hall
a booth meetup on Thursday 4/20 at 1:30pm in booth K1 in the CNCF Project Pavilion in the Solutions Hall

In addition to these meetings and talks, the TAG will host booth K1 in the project pavilion in the first half of each conference day. Stop by any time to chat with us and learn more about the TAG; initiatives related to operators, GitOps, Platforms and more; and App Delivery-related CNCF projects.

Also, if you work on an open source project related to app delivery and don’t have your own booth, you’re welcome to reserve the TAG booth for a session describing your project! Please DM Josh Gavant on CNCF Slack to coordinate.

Pre-day meetup - Tuesday

Time	Topic	Presenter
13:00	TAG General Review	TAG Leads
13:30	Lightning Talks on Application Delivery
–	Porting CloudFoundry Abstractions on Kubernetes	Ram Iyengar
–	Platform Maturity Model	Abby Bangser
–	Project Unox - A platform showcase experiment	Gopal Ramachandran
–	Burden of Responsibility in cloud-native App Development	Colin Griffin
–	Tailored Platforms on top of Kubernetes	Mauricio Salatino
14:30	TAG Work in Progress Review	WG Leads
–	Platforms	Josh Gavant
–	Operators	Jennifer Streyevitch
–	Artifacts	Andrew Block
–	GitOps	Scott Rigby
–	Other
15:30	Lightning Talks on Application Delivery
–	Capabilities of Portals	Josh Gavant
–	K8sGPT brings superpowers to everyone	Alex Jones
–	Enable secure self-service access to Kubernetes clusters with Paralus	Abhinav Mishra
–	Microcks intro: The Open-source Kubernetes Native tool for API Mocking and Testing	Yacine Kheddache
–	Identity-defined Microservice Networks	Karthik Prabhakar

Booth meetups - Wednesday and Thursday

As mentioned above, we’ll hold meetups with lightning talks on App Delivery topics at booth K1 on Wednesday at 3:00pm and Thursday at 1:30pm.

The schedule for the booth follows:

Date/Time	Topic	Presenter
Apr 19 @ 10:30 - 16:00	Booth open
Apr 19 @ 15:00 - 16:00	Meetup and Lightning Talks
–	ClickOps over GitOps	Laszlo Fogas
–	Implementing the pattern of “as-a-Service” (using Kratix)	Abby Bangser
–	Monitoring-As-Code with Crossplane	Matthias Luebken
–	Using GitOps for AWS Serverless Infrastructure	Carlos Santana
–	Far Beyond Virtual Clusters	Dario Tranchitella
–	GitOps made easy for any applications with PipeCD	Khanh Tran
Apr 20 @ 10:30 - 14:30	Booth open
Apr 20 @ 13:30 - 14:30	Meetup and presentations
–	ReleaseOps: GitOps for the People	Lian Li
–	Composable Platforms with Carvel	Thomas Vitale
–	Making “Tenants” first-class citizens in Kubernetes with Capsule	Dario Tranchitella
Apr 21 @ 10:30 - 12:30	Booth open

TAG presentation

Last but not least, join TAG leads on Thursday for a session describing how applications, operators, GitOps and platforms come together to enable efficient and delightful cloud-native application delivery.

Hope to see you in Amsterdam!

Blog: Infrastructure for Apps: Platforms for Cooperative Delivery

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TAG App Delivery formed the Cooperative Delivery working group in late 2021 to gather and report on emerging trends around coordinated delivery of infrastructure capabilities and applications. The TAG noted that while infrastructure teams are successfully adopting software development practices and deploying features and fixes continuously via the likes of GitOps and IaC (Infrastructure as Code), delivery of infrastructure capabilities is often not coordinated well with delivery of applications using that infrastructure. That is, there’s a gap in delivery between application and infrastructure and coordination/cooperation is needed to bridge that gap.

The primary goals of the group have been to a) confirm the hypothesis that there is a gap, b) clarify how it manifests for end users and c) identify and encourage emerging trends to facilitate cooperation. For example, the group’s first hypotheses mentioned the following existing trends:

GitOps: continuous idempotent reconciliation of configuration from declarative descriptors
Operators: reconciliation-oriented services
Pipelines: imperative orchestration of services and applications

In this article we’ll review new trends we’ve learned about from end users and from emerging CNCF projects like Backstage, Crossplane, Dapr, KubeVela and more.

We’ve also learned over the past year that while “cooperation” between infrastructure and application teams is what we seek to achieve, “cooperative delivery” is not a familiar term to most of our contributors. Recognizing that this cooperation is also the goal of “internal developer platforms” (IDPs) and the emerging platform engineering movement, we’re preparing to rename the working group Platforms.

We’re always seeking more input from users and contributors to guide us. Please consider sharing how your organization coordinates application and infrastructure delivery via this GitHub form and share your thoughts in GitHub or Slack.

Platform Engineering

Beyond our original hypotheses, an emerging trend we’ve noted for coordinating infrastructure and applications is platform engineering (PE) and particularly its principle of self-serviceable capabilities. Backstage, for example, is a popular portal framework for these emerging platforms. According to Humanitec lead Luca Galante, platform engineering is “the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era ( link).” Self-service describes the mechanism of cooperative delivery: a developer provisions and uses capabilities in their app on-demand by following documented steps.

In addition to its self-service paradigm, platform engineering also focuses on the needs of application developers and operators, the users of the platform. This increases PEs’ empathy for developers and other platform users and helps them gather feedback and iteratively improve to meet their needs, as product developers do for end customers. The shift in focus also better aligns platform development with an enterprise’s true value streams, rather than infrastructure teams being an out-of-band cost center. It’s not technical exactly, but empathetic relationships between platform engineering and application teams lead to better coordination of infrastructure capabilities and app requirements.

These platforms are typically built using foundational CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus, Backstage, Istio, Knative, Keptn and more.

Kubernetes for Everything

Another trend we’ve noted in projects like Crossplane is the adoption of the Kubernetes resource model for configuring and managing all types of infrastructure capabilities and application components. Users no longer provision only deployments, volumes and ingresses via the Kubernetes API; custom resource definitions (CRDs) now enable provisioning of databases, identities, message brokers, observability systems, and much more.

The GitOps movement demonstrated the value of continuous reconciliation for applications, and with so many resource types available developers can now reconcile infrastructure in the same way as applications. For those providing their own infrastructure capabilities, the Operator Framework is a popular foundation for custom Kubernetes-based reconciler implementations.

Capability Injection

Finally, we’ve noted projects like Dapr and KubeVela which seek to coordinate infrastructure capabilities for apps through inference and late resolution and injection of those capabilities. These projects often ask app developers to declare the capabilities they require, like databases and message brokers, and then resolve actual implementations at runtime, perhaps using sidecar containers or eBPF programs. Some projects like Istio can even inject capabilities transparently to the app developer.

Late resolution and injection loosens coupling of apps and infrastructure and is another form of “cooperative” delivery. Imagine getting a database from a different provider depending on the application’s context - an RDS instance in AWS, a CloudSQL instance in GCP, or a CloudNativePG instance on premises.

Conclusion

The mission of the Cooperative Delivery WG - soon to be the Platforms WG - is to gather feedback and highlight emerging trends that address gaps in coordination of infrastructure capabilities and applications. Join us in TAG App Delivery to advance this topic and others relevant to application and platform developers and operators.

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Blog: TAG App Delivery at Kubecon NA 2022

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Join CNCF TAG App Delivery and our working groups at Kubecon in Detroit October 24-28.

Many app delivery-related projects will be holding open office hours and maintaining booths in the project pavilion as detailed here.

A general meeting on the state of the TAG and some emerging app delivery patterns will be held Tuesday, October 25 1-5pm at Huntington Place. Find it on sched.com here.

The agenda for the TAG Meeting on Tuesday is here.

Finally, the Platforms WG will be gathering platform component providers in an “unmeetup” on Thursday 10/27 at 1:30pm, details in this doc.

See you in Detroit!