The Syntasso team and I have returned home from a successful KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City! The sessions were very interesting, and we had a lot of great chats at the main event and the PlatEngDay colocated event. As I highlight at the end of this piece, KubeCon is really all about the community!
As usual, I wanted to share my top takeaways from KubeCon NA 2024:
Platform engineering has crossed the chasm
AI was visible in the talks but less so at the booths
Improving APIs, abstraction, and automation
The arrival of the (not so) late adopters: Banking on success
The cloud native startup scene still looks strong
Nobody gets fired for buying a portal
Day 2 is having a renaissance
Security and observability are still top of mind
Don't feed the (patent) trolls
The community rocks
Continue reading for more context!
Platform engineering has crossed the chasm
Platform engineering wasn’t just a buzzword at KubeCon this year—it was the word. It has well and truly crossed the chasm. From the multitude of booths selling platform picks and shovels to Kasper Nissen’s excellent keynote that married AI and platform engineering, the message was clear: platform engineering is now essential for scaling developer productivity and managing complexity.
Syntasso was sponsoring the PlatEngDay colocated day, and so I saw firsthand that the buzz surrounding the event was palpable. There was a lot of overlap (and attendee movement) between other nearby colo events, such as BackstageCon and Cloud Native + Kubernetes AI Day. This suggested to me that although platform engineering is a foundational practice, there are many other pieces required to complete the ultimate platform puzzle.
I had the opportunity to chat with many folks at the Syntasso booth and learned a lot. This was a self-selecting platform-focused audience, and I estimate a 40+/30/10 split between DevOps engineers, platform engineers and developers. The main challenges I identified were:
DevOps engineers: This group most commonly stated that the most tricky things were choosing the tools to assemble into a platform and managing “day 2” issues, such as upgrades, security patches, etc. (see below)
Platform engineers: For these folks, building a platform “fit for purpose” was a big challenge, alongside getting enough adoption to prove a return on investment
Developers: This cohort was focused on making it easier to get started with the platform and looking for guidance on how to use the platform effectively (portals and templates were mentioned as quick wins)
At the main KubeCon event, I had the opportunity to present “Platform Engineering for Software Developers and Architects” Even though I was in the 4 pm slot of the final day, the turnout was very good. Bridging the worlds of software developers and platform engineers appears vitally important.
Related to the popularity of platform engineering, several new Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certifications were also announced at the event. These included the Certified Cloud native Platform Engineer and the Certified Backstage Associate.
In their keynote session, Heroku also open-sourced the 12-factor app specification and website. There was some confusion on social media about what this exactly entailed, but I took away that they are looking to the community to help modernise these guidelines.
AI was visible in the talks but less so at the booths
At the previous two KubeCons, I noted that there appeared to be a lot of "AI washing" in the sponsor showcase, but this was notably absent this time. This isn’t a bad thing per se, but I was slightly puzzled by the flip-flop (are folks finally getting tired of the AI pitches?).
Several sessions and hallway track chatter focused on the benefits of developer-focused AI and copilots. There was also coverage of data engineering and running model training and inference on Kubernetes, but (with a few exceptions) there notably wasn’t much content on “AIOps”, i.e. using AI within DevOps contexts.
Improving APIs, abstraction, and automation
I'm biased here, as the "three As" of APIs, abstraction, and automation were partly the focus of my talk, but I also noticed these concepts gaining traction elsewhere.
Dapr (now graduated) is emerging as a standard API for building distributed apps. Kratix, KusionStack, and (newcomer on the block) kro are emerging as key abstractions in the platform orchestration layer. Dagger provides good APIs for CI/CD, and the Crossplane project, OpenTofu, and Pulumi dominate the abstractions and automation within the world of IaC.
Check out the slides from my talk below, and you can find the video on YouTube: "Platform Engineering for Software Developers and Architects."
Mauricio (salaboy) Salatino’s “KubeCon NA 2024 recap” provides more context about this topic and is well worth a read.
The arrival of the (not so) late adopters: Banking on success
One of my favourite sessions was, “Platform Engineering in Financial Institutions: The Practitioner Panel”. The adoption of cloud native tech appears strong in this sector, and even traditional (nee "late adopter") banks are embracing K8s and recruiting smart folks to join them. As Rachael Wonnacott said, "Compliance is just another engineering problem to be solved."
The session recording is well worth a watch:
My new breakfast buddy, Matt Menzenski, wrote a great summary of this session, “Financial Regulators are Platform Engineers.”
The cloud native startup scene still looks strong
At the other end of organisational spectrum, I was impressed to see a number of (non-AI) startups emerging or continuing to thrive at the sponsor showcase. The end of the ZIRP era has surely created a few casualties, but I didn't see the bloodbath that many (including me) were expecting by this time.
From the event, we heard that Buoyant, creators of service mesh Linkerd, are profitable, enterprise Kubernetes platform manager SpectroCloud raised a bunch more cash, and KubeCon keynoter and AI hyperscaler CoreWeave… well, let’s just say they are doing okay!
Nobody gets fired for buying a portal
Much like the old quip, “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM”, my conversations at the Syntasso booth led me to conclude that now it’s a case of “Nobody gets fired for buying a portal”.
I jest. Still, the demand for internal developer portals was very strong, to the point that a couple of folks I chatted with said that leadership had mandated initiating a portal rollout without clearly articulating related business goals.
There also appeared to be some conflation between platforms and portals (the latter being a component of the former). This topic was discussed in the fun and informative panel “Creating Paved Paths for Platform Engineers.”
If you’re in the market for a portal, I recommend you first chat with the Syntasso team to learn why you need to build your platform APIs and lifecycle first :-)
After this, I recommend chatting with the Backstage folks and Roadie (check out their KubeCon recap), Cortex, and Port IO. We also heard some emerging buzz about the Headlamp project for creating a user-friendly Kubernetes UI, and there have been more developments with a Headlamp Backstage integration since KubeCon.
Day 2 is having a renaissance
Many tools were focused on day 2 in the sponsor showcase, and despite my earlier mention of the absence of AI in this space, there were a few notable exceptions, such as resolve.ai’s incident management platform.
Chats I had at the Syntasso booth demonstrated that many DevOps engineers are getting burned on day 2 issues and are looking to build platforms for the long haul (not those that only support app bootstrapping).
Security and observability are still top of mind
Several great sessions were held about these topics, and many vendors delivered interesting solutions. The OpenTelemetry community (and related adoption within observability tooling) is clearly growing.
Regarding security, some folks I chatted with expressed concerns about security theatre, e.g. implementing projects to generate SBOMs but not knowing what to do with them.
Don't feed the (patent) trolls
This was the first topic of the opening keynote. Although this is a super important topic (particularly as the community and tech evolve), the placement of this felt a little jarring. In my opinion, it led to a somewhat fear-based welcoming of the event.
The tl;dr version is that the CNCF is actively fighting the people who add no value to the community and seek to extract rent.
The community rocks
I say this every year because it's true—the KubeCon (and larger cloud native) community rocks. I lost count of the times someone told me they primarily attend KubeCon for the people.
I’ll thank all of the Platform Working group folks, including my teammate Abby Bangser, for arranging a Platform Coffees unconference session every morning before the main event began.
An interesting side note is that we witnessed a wholesale migration of the cloud native community to Bluesky during the event (Kelsey Hightower's move in the weeks before was a strong catalyst).
You can find me there at https://bsky.app/profile/danielbryantuk.com
Wrapping up
I’d like to offer a big thank you to all of the organisers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees for another amazing event!
I look forward to seeing everyone at KubeCon EU 2025, which will be in my (and Syntasso’s) home city. We can’t wait to show you around.
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