KubeCrash Spring 2025

Lisa-Marie Namphy, CNCF Ambassador, Director Developer Relations, Intuit; Danielle Cook, CNCF Ambassador, Co-chair CNCF Cartografos Group

Hans Kristian Flaatten, Lead Platform Engineer; Audun Fauchald Strand, Principal Software Engineer, Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV)

Who said that Government Tech has to be boring? In Norway, the largest administration has been using Kubernetes for over 7 years! StatefulSets had just been introduced (alpha) and RBAC was still in beta. During this time we moved from quarterly releases to thousands of continuous releases each week across our fleet of cloud native applications!

Could we replicate the success we had at NAV for other agencies? Could we provide them with a fully managed platform as a service to let them focus on building new and innovative services for their users and not reinventing the wheel by building yet another platform?

In this session, Audun and Hans Kristian will share their experience building and operating one of the largest platforms of its kind in Norway, providing a fully fledged application development platform for more than 100 product teams. And how they set an ambitious goal of being able to provide their platform as a service to other agencies.

Jim Bugwadia, CEO & Founder Nirmata

Platform teams are the new superheroes of modern software delivery—but even superheroes need the right tools to succeed. Policy as Code gives platform engineers the superpowers to automate governance, enhance security, and streamline operations without slowing down developers. It isn’t just about rules, it’s about unlocking the full power of platform engineering.

In this talk, we’ll discuss how Policy as Code enables platform teams to build resilient, scalable, and self-service platforms while maintaining control, compliance, and good developer experience by showcasing how policies can be proactive, dynamic, and empowering, By the end, you’ll see how Policy as Code transforms platform engineering into a superhero's strategic advantage rather than their kryptonite.

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Sander Rodenhuis, Principal Architect, Akamai Technologies

Designing and building platforms to streamline the developer experience and reducing cognitive load when using Kubernetes can be a challenging process. Depending on who you’ll ask, you’ll get different answers to the question: “What would you expect from the platform?” This can be confusing for new platform initiatives, especially when the platform engineers involved are also biased because of previous experiences and knowledge. How can you make design decisions that result in a platform that can suit the needs of all? And should you?

At Akamai we also struggle with these questions. The Akamai App Platform for LKE is designed to provide an intuitive and easy developer experience by providing abstractions on top of a suite of complex Kubernetes projects. But how do you decide on the level of abstraction and how does this influence configurability freedom? There is an enormous space between providing a cf push experience on one hand and offering a dedicated cluster on the other. In this talk, Sander, Principal Architect at Akamai, will share some of the design decisions behind the Akamai App Platform and the tradeoffs we made.

Hazel Weakly, Pricipal Architect an Infrastructure Witch; Khallai Taylor, Sr. Observability & Monitoring Engineer, E.ON Digital Technology; Iris Dyrmishi, Senior Observability Engineer, Miro, CNCF Ambassador; Anusha Ragunathan, Principal Software Engineer, Intuit; moderated by Stevie Caldwell, Senior Technical Lead, Fairwinds

As platform engineering evolves to support scalable, self-service infrastructure, observability remains a critical yet complex challenge. How do teams ensure deep visibility without overwhelming developers with noise? How can organizations balance real-time insights with cost efficiency? This panel brings together observability and platform engineering experts to explore best practices for instrumenting platforms, correlating telemetry data, and driving actionable insights. Panelists will discuss real-world strategies for reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR), leveraging AI-driven observability, and aligning observability with business outcomes. Attendees will gain insights into how leading teams manage observability at scale, integrate open standards like OpenTelemetry, and foster a culture of proactive monitoring. Whether you're building internal developer platforms (IDPs) or optimizing existing infrastructure, this session will provide actionable takeaways for making observability a first-class citizen in platform engineering.

Guy Menahem, Co-Founder of The Platformers Community; CNCF Ambassador; Udi Hofesh, Co-Founder of The Platformers Community

Platform engineering is evolving at lightning speed, and The Platformers is here to bring the community together to share real-world experiences and lessons learned. In this lightning talk, The Platformers' co-founders Guy and Udi will introduce their community, share what they have learned from their live stream guests, and how you can get involved. Passionate about building, scaling, and improving platforms? Then, join The Platformers!

Flynn, Linkerd Tech Evangelist, Buoyant; Michele Mancioppi, Founding Engineer, Dash0

OpenTelemetry distributed tracing and metrics can provide powerful standards-based observability tools for your microservices applications, and Linkerd can now support OpenTelemetry directly rather than requiring translating from OpenCensus. 

In this session, Linkerd Tech Evangelist Flynn and Dash0's Michele Mancioppi will do a deep dive into the OpenTelemetry world, digging into how OpenTelemetry tracing and metrics work, how Linkerd interacts with them, and - sadly - why the extension is still called `linkerd-jaeger`. Join us to learn what's what with OpenTelemetry and Linkerd and get answers for all your distributed-tracing questions!

Bart Farrell, Content Creator, LearnK8s, CNCF Ambassador

How do you stay current with Kubernetes without drowning in information?This talk explores practical resources that support your Kubernetes journey. Having reliable sources matters when you're trying to build expertise in this complex ecosystem. Reading curated news helps you discover proven patterns and avoid common pitfalls, accelerating your learning without wasting time on low-quality content. Following industry events connects you with the community, where you can exchange ideas and learn from others' experiences - often more valuable than documentation alone. Understanding the job market gives you insight into which skills are in demand, helping you focus your learning on what matters most professionally. Listening to practitioners through podcasts provides real-world context and implementation stories that textbooks can't offer. The path to Kubernetes expertise doesn't have to be overwhelming. With the right resources, you can focus on learning rather than searching and building the skills needed for today's cloud-native world.

Katie Lamkin-Fulsher, Senior Product Manager, Platform and Open Source, Intuit; Michael Crenshaw, Staff Software Engineer, Intuit

Environment promotions are a critical part of modern software delivery, yet many teams struggle with limited visibility, complex approval processes, and inconsistent release gates. Developers often rely on multiple tools—for example: Jenkins, Blue Ocean, Argo CD—just to track what’s live, what’s deploying, and what’s next. Promotion status is buried in cluttered UIs, while setting up new quality gates takes weeks, forcing teams to create custom solutions that drift from standardized workflows.

This talk introduces a new project in Argo Labs, GitOps Promoter, that addresses these challenges by streamlining environment promotions and improving transparency. With a centralized promotion engine and view, developers can see exactly which commit is live, what’s being deployed, and what’s next—without switching tools.

We’ll explore automated release gates that enforce real-time failure insights to reduce change-induced incidents and improve software quality. These intelligent promotion workflows enable faster, safer releases by ensuring only validated changes progress through environments.

Attendees will leave with an understanding of our new framework for managing GitOps promotions with greater confidence, efficiency, and control.

Catherine Paganini, Merge Forward Founder, Director of Marketing, Buoyant; Anastasiia Gubska, SRE/DevOps Engineer, BT Group, CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing WG Mmber; Mark Campbell-Vincent, Engineer, Hashicorp, CNCF BIPOC Initiative Member

Despite many DEI initiatives, diversity in open source is still lacking. That's not only bad for underrepresented groups, it's also bad for open source (studies have shown time and again that diverse teams produce better outcomes). While there isn't much you can do about the industry's hiring practices, you can help make a difference! That's where Merge Forward comes in, a new community-driven Linux Foundation initiative focused on diversity and inclusion in open source.

As companies scale back on DEI efforts, community-driven change becomes essential, and allies play a key role. Minorities are, by definition, in the minority, and their advocacy alone has limits. Allies can amplify underrepresented voices, raise awareness among peers, and advocate for change. When allies stand for inclusivity, accessibility, and ethical responsibility, they can influence the industry's values and priorities.

Join this lighting talk to learn more about Merge Forward, hear from underrepresented voices, and find out what you can do to foster a more inclusive cloud native ecosystem.

Adriana Villela, Principal Developer Advocate, OTel End-User SIG Maintainer; Reese Lee, Developer Relations Engineer, New Relic,Tel End-User SIG Maintainer

As systems continue to evolve, they bring growing complexity with them: these include complexities in infrastructure and in software architecture. Having observable systems helps engineers manage this complexity. Many organizations rely on Kubernetes to run their software, and running the OpenTelemetry (OTel) Operator can help unlock the power of observability.

The OTel Operator is a great tool that helps make your life a little easier by managing OTel for you in your Kubernetes cluster, by:

• Managing the deployment of the OpenTelemetry Collector
• Managing the configuration of a fleet of OpenTelemetry Collectors via OpAMP integration
• Injecting and configuring auto-instrumentation into your pods

Unfortunately, the OTel Operator can seem daunting to the novice user, especially when it doesn’t behave as expected.

In this talk, Adriana and Reese will cover:

• An overview of the OTel Operator
• Common installation issues
• Common auto-instrumentation issues
• Common OTel Collector deployment issues
• …and how to tackle them all

Attendees will walk away from this session with a better understanding of how they can leverage the Operator, and be empowered to use it with confidence.

Alexa Nicole Griffith, Senior Software Engineer, Bloomberg; Ankita Chaudhari, Senior Technical Product Manager, Bloomberg

Scaling a Kubernetes platform is no fairy tale—it’s a quest with unexpected twists, chaos, and the occasional missing treasure map. In this talk, we’ll recount our journey taming the complexity of multi-cluster platforms with SLIs, SLOs, and observability dashboards. From defining meaningful metrics to designing actionable SLO dashboards, we’ll share insights, lessons learned, and practical tips for maintaining platform reliability — regardless of if you’re deploying in the cloud, on-prem or in a hybrid environment. Through real-life lessons and battle-tested strategies, we’ll dive into the role of SLIs and SLOs in helping ensure platform robustness, discuss how to design platform observability, and highlight best practices for maintaining reliability at scale. You’ll leave equipped with the knowledge to design observability practices that ensure your AI workloads run smoothly, even at scale. Join us as we demystify SLI/SLO strategies with practical examples from our AI platform.

Jake Walden, Technical Product Owner, Capital One; Brad Whitfield, Distinguished Engineer, Capital One

In this talk, we will dig into a typical platform engineering journey based on our industry experience. It all starts small, with initial efforts focused on building a minimal viable platform. As the platform begins to gain traction, the next steps involve slowly building partnerships and fostering collaboration across different teams within an organization.

We'll explore the critical aspects of scaling a platform, emphasizing the importance of establishing trust and effective communication channels. Leveraging Kubernetes' inherent capabilities, such as the control loop, we'll demonstrate how to create a more reliable, observable, auditable, and secure platform.

As the platform expands, we'll discuss strategies for managing growth and complexity. This includes the adoption of namespace-as-a-service (NaaS), managed infrastructure offerings, and patterns for building things like application platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) model to streamline the developer experience and reduce cognitive load for dev teams.

Join us to learn about the principles and best practices that drive successful platform engineering. This session is ideal for Kubernetes practitioners and platform engineers who are interested in the practical aspects of building and scaling a robust Kubernetes-based platform within a large enterprise.

Lisa-Marie Namphy, CNCF Ambassador, Director Developer Relations, Intuit; Danielle Cook, CNCF Ambassador, Co-chair CNCF Cartografos Group

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