CNCF-hosted Co-located Events Europe 2025

Do you think platform engineering is too hard? Or is it just a buzzword? Is the CNCF landscape too tricky to visualize? If you’ve been in this industry long enough, you should know that platform engineering has been around for a long time.

Most of us have been trying to build developer platforms for decades, and most of us have failed at that. That begs the questions: “What is different now?” “Why will this time be different?” and “Do we have a chance to succeed?”

We’ll take a look at the past, the present, and the future of platform engineering. We’ll see what we were doing in the past, what we did wrong, and why we failed. Further on, we’ll see what we (the industry as a whole) are doing now and, more importantly, where we might go from here.

Get ready for the hard truths and challenges you will face when trying to build a platform based on Kubernetes. Join us for a pain-infused journey filled with challenges teams will face when building platforms to enable other teams.

Want to level up your engineering career? Product management and ownership skills will help you showcase the business value of IT investments and align technical solutions with company goals. Learn how modern engineering teams—regardless of size or industry—can thrive by adopting a product thinking mindset.

Join Stéphane (Cloud Engineer applying product thinking) and Cat (once engineer, now Product Manager) as they share actionable insights from their journey. You'll discover how embracing product management principles can help your team deliver more impactful results and gain greater ownership of what you build.

What you'll learn:
- How to use product discovery techniques to better understand user needs
- Which metrics matter most when measuring product success
- Practical frameworks for identifying real problems before jumping to solutions
- Tips for bringing product thinking to your engineering role

We often hear about the usage and benefits of Platform as a Product and Internal Developer Portals to reduce cognitive load on developers and increase velocity, but we rarely hear about the benefits to other teams.

Come listen to this talk and hear from different people and perspectives involved in NatWest Bank’s Platform as a Product journey over the last 2 years.

The Transformation Lead, the Architect/Product Owner, the Lead Engineer/Private Cloud IaaS Expert, the AWS Engineer/expert and the Partner/Supplier will be onstage talking about their individual experiences and journey. Is it a panel talk, is it a case study? Actually it’s both!

Each persona will spend a couple of minutes each talking about their own adventure before the session is opened up to audience participation in choosing which topics and questions are put to the panel to answer.

At StackGen, we found ourselves asking, "Are we actually getting better at delivering software?" With a growing team and mounting complexity, we turned to DORA metrics for clarity—and what a ride it’s been! In this talk, we’ll take you behind the scenes of how we used deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate to level up our engineering game.

Expect a blend of candid tales, technical tricks, and cultural ah-ha moments as we share the highs, lows, and lessons learned. From team skeptics to data enthusiasts, everyone walked away with something—and you will too. Whether you’re DORA-curious or already charting metrics, you’ll leave with actionable strategies to measure and improve performance in your organization.

If you’re ready to move from gut feelings to data-driven confidence, join us for a fresh take on turning DORA metrics into meaningful change.

Lemonade is one of the world's top-rated insurance companies, succeeding in a tough industry with well-established players.

As Lemonade scaled its engineering organization, the team adopted a highly distributed, services-oriented architecture to support rapid growth. While Kubernetes played a central role in this evolution, the shift also brought challenges—most notably, the disparity between Docker Compose-based local development environments and Kubernetes-based production environments.

In this session, Lemonade engineers will share their hands-on experience building and scaling t-env, Lemonade's internal platform powered by Kubernetes, Okteto, Grafana, and other open-source technologies. Attendees will learn why Lemonade invested in a platform, key lessons from addressing real-world challenges, the benefits of running both development and production environments in Kubernetes, and how a small platform team achieves all this while keeping maintenance costs surprisingly low.

Imagine orchestrating the technological backbone for 650 engineers working across various products- all with a team smaller than a typical startup’s founding team. This is not just their challenge; it’s their daily reality.

This talk will describe how a team of three platform engineers navigated regulatory landscapes, operational hurdles, and demanding change management requirements to manage 1,000 Kubernetes clusters for a private Swiss bank. Their approach: deploying a platform solely with CNCF components, custom operators, and a homemade managed Kubernetes service.

Top achievement? They can now update all clusters within a two-day window.

The session will share their journey, focusing on the emotional highs and lows that came with such a monumental challenge. From the initial overwhelming scope to the satisfaction of system-wide automation, you will learn how they managed not just technology but also the human emotions involved in transforming pressure into productivity.

Your CEO wants AI and they want it now. They want it now BUT you can’t just hand over all your confidential data to a Cloud or SaaS provider. Your CISO is losing sleep.

What options do you have to keep your CEO, your developers and security happy?

We’ll tell the story of how we set up an internal development platform (IDP) AROUND a self-hosted LLM on Kubernetes. From the outset our goal was to use Platform Engineering practices, so our engineers could benefit from "paved paths" for:

- Knowledge integrations (commonly known as RAG)
- API integrations, so you can connect your LLM to business applications
- Quality assurance tooling such as the LLM-as-a-judge pattern

This will be a live demo of how to stand up an entire IDP for GenAI apps that you can replicate yourself using open source tools. During the demo we’ll share the lessons learned along the way and how we ended up with the solution we use in production today.

Happy CEO? Yes. Happy CISO? Yes. Happy Developers? Hell Yes!

Delivering platforms as products is no easy feat—it’s like assembling a set with missing instructions and an endless pile of YAML bricks that don’t quite click together.

Two enthusiastic engineers from the LEGO Group share their story of building and leading Kubernetes-based platform teams—platforms that provide the foundational studs that keep the factories running smoothly and power cloud services supporting one of the world’s most cherished brands.

In this talk, you will learn how groups of platforms collaborated to deliver a coherent user experience via APIs and Baseplate—an internal development portal. You’ll discover how standardized telemetry enables end-users’ operations and how empathy and collaboration enables engineers to deliver great products.

Great platforms are like great LEGO builds: with the right bag of golden bricks that fit together in a system, you can enable users’ creativity and curiosity, letting them dream big and build even bigger.

Are you tired of waiting for DevOps to provision complex AWS, GCP, or Azure stacks? No more! At MyHeritage, we tackled this pain by creating a self-service platform that empowers developers to provision resources independently, freeing DevOps for more meaningful work. We’ll reveal how our Golden Path approach streamlines resource creation, enabling developers to focus on coding and solving business challenges instead of wrestling with infrastructure.

We’ll showcase pre-configured recipes that effortlessly provision cloud resources while embedding organizational standards, defaults, and compliance checks. Developers use high-level code to customize IaC recipes to their needs. GitOps then converts this code into OpenTofu, with IAM policies and configurations prepared by the platform team, and delivers it to production. Join us to discover how this approach eliminates delays and boosts cloud productivity.

With platform-as-a-product becoming more and more popular, platform teams realize that marketing and sales are part of the job. In this talk I'll share some hands-on tips on how to market your platform internally without a designated budget for it. Leverage free tools, creative ideas and the power of communities to drive adoption, spread the word and accompany the change in operating model.

Platform engineering is no longer just about building infrastructure—it’s about creating products that empower teams and businesses to innovate. But how do we transition from a technical, bottom-up approach to one that is truly user-centric?
This panel will bring together diverse perspectives from industry leaders who have led the charge in transforming platform offerings into cohesive, product-driven solutions. We’ll discuss how they’ve navigated the challenges of aligning with stakeholder needs, measuring success, and overcoming the risks of overengineering, all while ensuring the end-user remains at the heart of the product. From qualitative metrics to platform maturity models, this discussion will provide insights on how to build platforms that not only serve the infrastructure but are also recognized as strategic products.