Internal platforms have become a cornerstone of modern software delivery, but not all platforms are created equal. Many promise self-service, consistency, and security, yet fail to scale or adapt to real-world demands. Too often, teams mistake a handful of automation scripts or workflow engines for a platform, only to discover brittle systems and growing operational debt.

To help engineering leaders avoid these traps, it’s useful to evaluate platforms using a clear framework. Based on work with dozens of enterprise teams, four key attributes consistently stand out: speed, safety, efficiency, and scalability. These properties determine whether a platform actually empowers developers and operations or becomes a source of friction.

Building the Right Foundations

Effective platforms start by enabling on-demand access to infrastructure and services through API-driven interfaces, governed by clear contracts. This accelerates delivery while reducing handoffs and manual work. It also enables the creation of “golden paths” that teams can adopt without forcing rigid standardisation.

At the same time, the platform must support bespoke, business-specific workflows. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, the goal is to provide reusable components, such as Helm charts or Terraform modules, that teams can customise within organisational guardrails.

Crucially, platforms must function at fleet scale. That means not only provisioning but also upgrading, monitoring, and governing services across environments. Support for drift detection, continuous reconciliation, and cross-team collaboration is essential.

And finally, modern platforms should operate in “multiplayer mode”, supporting both service producers and consumers. In large organisations, multiple teams often need to contribute platform features without bottlenecks or handoffs. Without a shared foundation for co-creation, think APIs, contract-driven development, and reusable abstractions, platform growth stalls and silos emerge.

The Four-Part Platform Scorecard

Let’s explore the four essential traits in more detail, along with metrics that can help evaluate real-world performance:

1. Speed: Time to First Deploy

The ability to spin up infrastructure or services in minutes, not days or weeks, is fundamental. Platforms should enable fast, API-first provisioning that keeps developers in flow and avoids ticket queues.

Key Indicator: Mean Time to First Deploy (MTTFD) — how long it takes from a service request to a running instance. Low MTTFD correlates with higher developer productivity and fewer handoffs.

2. Safety: Compliance Without Compromise

Safety means more than security; it’s about delivering tailored services that meet policy requirements without sacrificing flexibility. The best platforms allow developers to customise safely, using validated service configuration options, composable policy and governance checks, and controlled workflows.

Key Indicator: % of Services Running that are Policy-Compliant (SRPC) — percentage of services that are verifiably compliant with current policy. An SRPC is a leading indicator of platform health. It suggests that the platform is doing its job, not just accelerating delivery, but doing so safely, repeatably, and at scale.

3. Efficiency: Upgrade Without Toil

Efficiency surfaces in the platform’s ability to manage large fleets. Can services be upgraded centrally? Are policy changes easy to roll out across all environments? Or is every update a bespoke effort?

Key Indicator: Mean Time to Upgrade Service Instances (MTTUSI) — the time required to apply a change across all live instances. High MTTUSI signals a fragile or overly manual upgrade path.

4. Scalability: Enabling Co-Creation

A scalable platform enables others to extend it. This might involve good documentation and innersourcing models, standard APIs for contribution, or mechanisms for service discovery and governance. If only the core platform team can evolve it, you’re likely to encounter bottlenecks.

Key Indicator: Mean Time to Add a Service to the Platform (MTTASP) — from requirements defined to production-ready offering. Low MTTASP encourages experimentation and shared ownership.

Why Workflows Engines Alone Aren’t Enough

One common anti-pattern we’re seeing in the platform engineering community is an over-reliance on workflow engines as the foundation of the platform. While useful for automating tasks, workflows often lack lifecycle awareness, clear service boundaries, or upgrade mechanisms. Over time, this leads to fragmentation, technical debt, and a loss of platform trust.

If you notice long upgrade cycles, missing visibility, or divergent automation practices across teams, it’s likely that what you’ve built is a collection of scripts, and not a platform. A particularly telling signal is a high MTTUSI: if you can’t easily patch or update a service across all of your environments, you may be operating without true platform orchestration.

Preventing platform decay means designing for long-term consistency and maintainability, not just day-one delivery. It requires intentional abstractions, clear ownership boundaries, and a collaborative model for evolution.

Final Thoughts

Great platforms don’t emerge by accident. They’re intentionally built with an eye toward reducing friction, maintaining governance, and enabling collaboration at scale. The four-part scorecard — speed, safety, efficiency, and scalability — provides a practical approach to assessing and guiding the development of your platform.

No matter what tools or frameworks you adopt, the real question remains: is your platform making life easier for developers today, and will it still be sustainable six months from now?

Rethinking Internal Platforms: A Scorecard for Sustainable Software Delivery was originally published in ITNEXT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Platform Engineering was the hottest topic in the room at KubeCon, even edging out AI from my perspective!

After a busy month of conferencing in April, here are my top 10 observations from Platform Engineering Day and KubeCon EU, held in London!

1. KubeCon still has a tech- and tool-first mindset 👩‍💻
2. There is some “IDP” platform/portal confusion 🤔
3. People are starting to see portal-first pitfalls 🚧
4. There are platform-first visibility issues 🏗️
5. Leadership buy-in challenges are some of the most significant issues 🕴
6. Practitioner interests included CI/CD for apps, GitOps practices, and fleet management 👨‍💻
7. Early interest in running AI/ML workloads on K8s 🤖
8. Vendor focus was primarily on cost efficiency, resource optimisation, and security 💰
9. Market uncertainty will impact projects and products 📉
10. The CNCF community growth is still strong 👥

As usual, I’ll offer a massive thank you to all of the organisers, volunteers, attendees, speakers, and sponsors! I had so many amazing chats, and apologies to all the folks I didn’t get a chance to connect with (hit me up on email or socials for a Zoom chat!)

Our very own Abby Bangser is being welcomed to the KubeCon keynote stage!

1. Tech (and tool)-first mindset

The conversations remained deeply technical, with controllers, APIs, pipelines, and provisioning dominating the airwaves. And while that’s a natural reflection of the engineering audience, there’s a clear gap in conversations about platform strategy, organisational alignment, and change management.

If you’re building a platform, you need to do more than ship great tech; you also need to map the platform to business goals, bring stakeholders along for the ride, and design with end-users (developers) in mind. Tech solves nothing in isolation.

I talked about this phenomenon and provided some tips to overcome it in my talk, “Platform Engineering for Software Developers and Architects”:

And I heard a lot of good things about Camille Fournier’s and Ian Nowland’s talk (and I gave their recent O’Reilly book, Platform Engineering, a shout-out in my talk!)

2. “IDP” portal and platform confusion

The acronym “IDP” continues to cause chaos. Are we talking about Internal Developer Platforms or Internal Developer Portals? Spoiler: it depends on who you ask.

Why this matters: Confusion here causes real-world friction, especially when evaluating vendors, defining scope, or deciding whether to build, buy, or blend.

What you can do: Be explicit about your definitions. If you’re using both platforms and portals, document how they intersect. And when speaking with vendors or partners, clarify your context early.

3. Portal-first pitfalls

Teams starting with a portal-first approach are increasingly hitting walls. While portals may look shiny and promise quick wins, they can obscure the complexity of what lies beneath. Templates-as-a-service often break down when real-world use cases and lifecycle operations kick in.

I chatted with multiple teams at the booth who reported “portal fatigue” after launching a glossy interface backed by brittle automation and lacking an easy way for other teams in the organisation to contribute effectively (which we refer to as “platform democracy”).

Key lesson: If the underlying platform doesn’t support Day 2 operations — like upgrades, scaling, and security — you’ve built a facade, not a foundation.

Advice: Start with workflows and automation. Build the APIs and interfaces developers need — then surface them via a portal.

Abby and Phill shared the story of how The Access Group focused on platform APIs when kick-starting their latest hackathon series:

4. Platform-first visibility issues

On the flip side, teams that lead with infrastructure and API-based platforms are often invisible to leadership and business stakeholders. You’ve built something powerful, but without metrics, dashboards, or developer-facing interfaces, it’s hard to demonstrate value.

Why it’s risky: Platforms need funding, and funding needs visibility. Leadership wants a measurable impact: improved deployment frequency, reduced lead time, and lower support tickets.

What helps: Tie your internal metrics to frameworks like DORA, SPACE, or DevEx. Visualise usage. Show how the platform reduces toil and accelerates delivery.

To learn more, check out this panel, “How Do You Measure Developer Productivity?” with Jennifer Riggins, The New Stack; Cat Morris, Syntasso; Akshaya Aradhya, Oscilar; Laura Tacho, DX; and Helen Greul, Multiverse

5. Leadership buy-in challenges

This year saw an increase in conversations about how to promote the platform internally. From Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to Return on Investment (ROI), platform teams are learning to speak the business’s language.

What’s changing: Platform teams are being asked to justify budgets and show outcomes. The good news? There are now playbooks and case studies to help.

Pro tip: Don’t just show cost savings — show time-to-market gains, developer satisfaction improvements, and risk reductions.

Emerging pattern: A one-pager with a clear platform vision + usage metrics + anecdotal wins can be a surprisingly effective internal artefact.

6. Practitioner interests

Platform engineers and application developers attending KubeCon often live in different realities, but they overlap in interesting ways.

• App developers are laser-focused on CI/CD pipelines, build speed, and reliability.
• Platform and infra teams are thinking about GitOps, fleet management, and policy enforcement.

GitOps is the bridge that creates shared practices across dev and ops. This reinforces the need for composable platforms where teams can own and iterate on their piece of the puzzle without stepping on each other’s toes.

My colleague Abby and Sebi from Port provided a whistle-stop tour of CRDs for app developers (and others):

And my colleagues, Jake and Cat, explored several related platform-building topics in their talk:

7. AI/ML workloads

While it’s not yet a dominant theme, running AI/ML workloads on Kubernetes is starting to bubble up. Teams are beginning to ask:

• How do we package and deploy ML models?
• How do we track datasets and inference pipelines?
• Where does AI fit into our existing platform workflows?

Platform teams are starting to build reusable scaffolding for AI/ML. Think: model registry integration, GPU scheduling, and secure data access patterns. Expect to see “ML platform” specialisations emerge within larger platform engineering orgs in the next 12–18 months.

Christine Yen, CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb, provided an excellent keynote focusing on observability within this space:

8. Vendor focus

Unsurprisingly, vendor booths were packed with pitches around cost optimisation, resource efficiency, and security. Everyone is trying to reduce spending while staying secure, and platforms are seen as a way to achieve this.

Pro tip for buyers: Be wary of the “silver bullet” slide. Effective platforms require thoughtful design, not just tools. Vet vendors on how well they integrate with your existing workflows and governance.

Bonus: Ask how their product supports platform extensibility and multi-tenancy, which are critical for scale.

9. Market uncertainty

It’s rare to hear people talking about the stock market at a tech conference, but this year was different. Macroeconomic jitters, layoffs, and shifting priorities were very much part of the vibe.

Longer-term investments, such as platform building, are now under more scrutiny. Teams are being asked to deliver more with less — and prove value faster.

Our booth conversations with attendees beginning their platform building journey focused on keeping the initial platform scope small, showing wins early, and building iteratively. “Thin slice” approaches are more attractive than big-bang platform launches right now.

10. Community Growth

Despite all the uncertainty, the platform engineering community is on fire. The growth of Platform Coffees, two-track Platform Engineering Day events, and a flood of content and meetups shows that momentum is strong.

People are increasingly eager to share hard-won lessons and compare notes. Platform Engineering is no longer a fringe discipline — it’s a career path.

If you’re new to the space, my advice is to join the Slack groups, attend local meetups, or propose a talk to a future KubeCon or Platform Engineering Day. There’s room at the table, and the community is welcoming.

I hope to see you at KubeCon NA 2025 in Atlanta!

Platform engineering, AI, APIs, abstractions, portals, security, patent trolls, and more!

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 article, KubeCon is really all about the community!

As usual, I wanted to share my top takeaways from KubeCon NA 2024:

1. Platform engineering has crossed the chasm
2. AI was visible in the talks but less so at the booths
3. Improving APIs, abstraction, and automation
4. The arrival of the (not so) late adopters: Banking on success
5. The cloud native startup scene still looks strong
6. Nobody gets fired for buying a portal
7. Day 2 is having a renaissance
8. Security and observability are still top of mind
9. Don’t feed the (patent) trolls
10. 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 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 want 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.

This article was originally published on the Syntasso blog: “KubeCon NA 2024 Key Takeaways: A Recap of Our Time in Salt Lake City.”

Platform strategy, Team Topologies, IaC, SRE, metrics and more!

The Syntasso team is often asked for platform engineering book recommendations at conferences, via social media, and in Slack DMs. There’s typically a lot of agreement within the team around the best platform engineering books, but the ranking can be controversial! We’ve pooled together our collective top five recommendations for this blog post.

So, without further ado, here are our 2024 recommendations for the top five platform engineering books (in no particular order)!

Platform Strategy: Innovation Through Harmonization

By Gregor Hohpe

This book offers a comprehensive guide to designing and implementing scalable platforms that can adapt to the inevitable increasing demands (and change requests) of operating in an enterprise context.

Gregor is a seasoned software and platform architect. In this book, he delves into the strategic and practical aspects of building platforms that efficiently support multiple products and services. Key concepts include architectural decisions, governance models, and the challenges of balancing standardisation and innovation.

This book is essential for platform engineers to understand how architectural choices underpin successful platform strategies. This helps to facilitate better decision-making and enables the implementation of robust, scalable infrastructures. It’s particularly useful for those looking to align their technical strategies with broader business objectives, which comes from another of Gregor’s excellent books, “The Software Architect Elevator.”

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

By Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

“Team Topologies” offers a practical, model-based approach to organising teams within software development. The book’s strategies focus on creating team interactions that promote faster software delivery and build more cohesive systems within an enterprise. The language of “stream-aligned teams”, “enabling teams”, “complication subsystem teams”, and “platform teams” that originated from this book is now mainstream across start-ups and enterprises alike.

For platform engineers, understanding these dynamics is vital for designing teams that can effectively manage and evolve the technical platforms supporting their businesses. It’s an excellent resource for anyone looking to refine team structure to enhance software delivery speed and quality.

Infrastructure as Code: Dynamic Systems for the Cloud Age

By Kief Morris

This book is essential for understanding the principles and practices of managing and provisioning infrastructure through code. Kief Morris explores how to use cloud technology to treat physical servers, virtual machines, and other infrastructural elements as software entities, allowing for automated setups, configurations, and maintenance. He provides practical advice on using popular tools and frameworks to implement infrastructure as code (IaC) at all levels of the stack.

This book is essential reading for platform engineers who want to master the automation of infrastructure, which is crucial for creating efficient, scalable, and stable software delivery pipelines and environments. It is an indispensable resource for anyone creating, scaling, or managing cloud-based infrastructures.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

By Betsy Beyer, Jennifer Petoff, Chris Jones, and Niall Richard Murphy

This book introduced Google’s pioneering approach to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), which merged software engineering with IT operations tasks to create highly reliable and automated systems. The collection of essays and articles by multiple Google engineers provides real-world insights into building and maintaining systems that can handle millions of users and immense computational workloads. Topics covered include automation, monitoring, design for scalability, configuration management, and disaster response.

Platform engineers will find this book invaluable for understanding how to apply software engineering principles to operational challenges and learning how to enhance system reliability and operational efficiency.

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations

By Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim

This book provides a research-backed examination of how DevOps practices impact high-performing technology organisations. It explores the capabilities that influence software delivery performance and organisational culture, which are crucial for effective platform engineering. The work by Dr Forsgren and the team has since evolved into the annual publication of “The Accelerate State of DevOps Report” from the DORA team.

The insights from Accelerate will help platform engineers understand how to implement practices that drive faster and more reliable delivery of software and services.

Bonus: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

By Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

This novel is a great introduction to the DevOps culture, from which platform engineering takes many cues. The book contains an interesting narrative that focuses on the digital transformation of a fictional company by addressing IT inefficiencies through DevOps practices. If you’ve worked within the software industry for more than five years (particularly in an enterprise context), I can almost guarantee you’ll be nodding along to this book — you may even recognise a “Brent” (or two) in your organisation.

What are your favourite platform engineering books?

As mentioned above, the Syntasso team is often asked for platform engineering book recommendations at conferences, via social media, and in Slack DMs. If you have any suggestions or disagree with our recommendations, please let us know in person or via the Interwebs!

The original version of this post appeared on the Syntasso blog “Top Five Platform Engineering Books for 2024”.

AI, Platform Engineering, and Product Thinking…

It’s time to once again reflect on my travels to the recent KubeCon EU event, which was held in Paris, France. As usual, I learned a lot from the keynotes and sessions — with a strong focus on platform engineering — and met many super interesting people from the community. With over 12,000 people attending, not to mention 100s of sponsors, it was busier than ever.

Here are my key takeaways for KubeCon EU 2024:

1. I, for one, welcome our new (cloud-based) AI overlords
2. A call for responsible innovation i.e. “don’t forget about cost and sustainability”
3. Platform engineering takes center stage
4. Product thinking FTW!
5. More interest in developer experience and inner and outer dev loops
6. Security continues to be big business
7. End-user stories are moving up the stack
8. The tool and framework bundling continues
9. Wasm: A hot topic, but with some uncertainty
10. Dapr is fast becoming the cloud native ESB (in a good way)

I’ll explore each of these takeaways in detail, and I’ve also included a bonus “GTM takeaways for KubeCon EU” section at the end of the article. As the French say, allons-y!

I, for one, welcome our new (cloud-based) AI overlords

Many of us were surprised by the lack of AI/LMM content at KubeCon NA Chicago in December last year. Well, KubeCon EU Paris made up for this… And then some! Practically all of the opening day keynotes were AI-focused (to some chagrin!) There were also dedicated AI labs running throughout the week and many breakout sessions focused on AI/LLMs from all angles. And I lost count of the number of sponsor booths where I saw the words “AI”, “LLM”, or “Generative” mashed up with cloud native buzzwords.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Can confirm 😂 https://t.co/jhG06ev69X / Twitter"

Can confirm 😂 https://t.co/jhG06ev69X

Jokes aside, the main message I took away was that the CNCF ecosystem is very much open for business regarding AI. The end-user talks I saw throughout the event mainly focused on using cloud native tech for inference (rather than model training); particularly inference at or near the edge. This echoed a previous pithy statement by Clayton Coleman: “If inference is the new Web app, then Kubernetes is the new Web server’.” There were also plenty of related “picks and shovels” for the K8s-based AI builders being demonstrated both on the keynote stage and sponsor hall.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Big focus on AI (use cases, reference architectures, and models) in the #KubeCon keynote! 🤖 It was teased in Chicago, but the call to action/experimentation is loud now... although tempered with being cost conscious and embracing open source 💸 pic.twitter.com/R9BgcGrI4C / Twitter"

Big focus on AI (use cases, reference architectures, and models) in the #KubeCon keynote! 🤖 It was teased in Chicago, but the call to action/experimentation is loud now... although tempered with being cost conscious and embracing open source 💸 pic.twitter.com/R9BgcGrI4C

It was super interesting to see NVIDIA take to the stage as the second keynote of the opening day with “Accelerating AI Workloads with GPUs in Kubernetes”. They took care to weave in the Kubernetes story, but I couldn’t help but think this was primarily a hardware/infrastructure play, which may have been a bit lost on this audience. It was also a solid reminder that NVIDIA currently runs the show when it comes to GPUs and AI chips.

On a related topic, I was listening to the All-in podcast over the weekend, and the besties wondered aloud where innovation and value capture would occur within the four layers of the AI stack: infrastructure, (foundational) models, dev tooling, and applications. If NVIDIA has captured the infrastructure layer, our next keynote highlighted another company working on capturing the model and dev tooling layers: Microsoft.

Kicking off a topic we’ll cover later, Microsoft was the first to announce an AI-themed “bundle” at the event, with the “Kubernetes AI Toolchain Operator (Kaito)”. Kaito aims to automate the AI/ML inference model deployment in a Kubernetes cluster, and targets models such as falcon and llama2.

Continuing on this theme, Ollama also featured heavily throughout the show and appeared to be the de facto way to run large language models locally. As we were in Paris, the Mistral AI folks got their props, too. Even if you couldn’t make it to KubeCon, there were several AI-themed meetups running nearby:

Edouard Bonlieu on Twitter: "What a night yesterday for the AI developer community! 🔥 Huge thanks to @ollama @gokoyeb for organizing and all the amazing speakers @DynamicWebPaige @pdev110 @solomonstre @ealeyner @oakela @hexapode @yann_eu @lmarsden @_willtainment @tlacroix6 pic.twitter.com/dL1PSD3XPV / Twitter"

What a night yesterday for the AI developer community! 🔥 Huge thanks to @ollama @gokoyeb for organizing and all the amazing speakers @DynamicWebPaige @pdev110 @solomonstre @ealeyner @oakela @hexapode @yann_eu @lmarsden @_willtainment @tlacroix6 pic.twitter.com/dL1PSD3XPV

There’s no denying the pace of innovation is happening at breakneck speed in the domain of AI. Many end users I chatted with in the sponsor hall were struggling to keep up. Even though their leadership encouraged them to embrace AI, they were only running small-scale experiments and desperately trying to keep pace with related developments.

To further illustrate this point, while the conference was running, my X/Twitter feed was alight with more developments from both companies mentioned so far. If you want to learn more about last week’s NVIDIA Blackwell chips and Microsoft’s recent acqui-hiring in the AI space, check out Ed Sim’s newsletter.

Walking away from the keynotes and three days of booth chats, I couldn’t help but think that the AI future is finally here at KubeCon—and yet, as the cliche goes, it’s just not evenly distributed; especially amongst end users. It’s clearly the time for the cloud native crowd to start building the next generation of AI-powered apps. And I, for one, welcome our new (cloud-based) AI overlords.

A call for responsible innovation i.e. “don’t forget about cost and sustainability”

Alongside the copious mentions of AI, the opening keynote called for “responsible innovation.” This phrase was used several times throughout the show. Given the context, I took this to mean “keep innovating, but do so using open source and with cost and energy savings in mind”.

As the CNCF runs the show, there are obvious calls to embrace OSS and, ideally, tech in the CNCF landscape. There was a tinge of discomfort in the audience, as Redis announced it was moving to a dual license on the same day at the opening keynote, which reminded everyone of a raft of these recent changes.

It was good to see the CNCF acknowledge some of the challenges around sustainability. The day three keynote expanded on this topic in more detail, with Gualter Barbas Baptista from Deutsche Bahn grounding the call for sustainability in a real-world (enterprise) use case, “Building IT Green: A Journey of Platforms, Data, and Developer Empowerment at Deutsche Bahn”:

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Nice call outs to the benefits of green and sustainable computing from the @DB_Bahn folks at #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/poBkFwS1Sg / Twitter"

Nice call outs to the benefits of green and sustainable computing from the @DB_Bahn folks at #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/poBkFwS1Sg

This is an important topic, and it was good to see it getting plenty of keynote time.

Platform engineering takes center stage

At KubeCon EU in 2022, a few of us spoke about an emerging trend of “platform engineering”. In 2024, platform engineering has gone mainstream.

The sponsor showcase was flooded with mentions of platforms, platform engineering, and developer experience. There was also an excellent keynote session from Solomon Hykes, co-creator of Dagger and Docker, “A 10-year Detour: The Future of Application Delivery in a Containerized World” (as an aside, I chatted with Solomon on the InfoQ podcast recently and learned a lot about Dagger!)

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "An enjoyable look back on the origins of @Docker, containers, and cloud platforms, via @solomonstre at #KubeCon 🙌And love the call out to "dude, where's my platform?" 😂 Many of us are still working on this with @dagger_io, @kratixio, #Backstage, and @CloudNativeFdn tech pic.twitter.com/sNRxf2QJri / Twitter"

An enjoyable look back on the origins of @Docker, containers, and cloud platforms, via @solomonstre at #KubeCon 🙌And love the call out to "dude, where's my platform?" 😂 Many of us are still working on this with @dagger_io, @kratixio, #Backstage, and @CloudNativeFdn tech pic.twitter.com/sNRxf2QJri

Infrastructure layer tooling and frameworks, such as Kubernetes, service meshes, gateways, CI/CD, etc., have evolved well and are largely considered “boring tech” (at least to this audience). The big challenge now is assembling the puzzle pieces to deliver value to the internal customers: the developers. As Betty Junod astutely observed in a reply to the above Tweet, “We taken all the PaaS’es of that era apart…played with all the individual legos…got some new ones…and are now trying to reassemble them”.

I recently discussed my mental model for the layers of platform-building on the Syntasso blog. Of the three layers — application choreography, platform orchestration, and infrastructure composition — I see a potential danger of over-rotating on the application (portal) layer.

In much the same way as people are debating where the value creation and capture will occur in the AI layers, I see the same thing playing out in the platform space layers.

The infrastructure layer looks profitable but is primarily a late majority play. As Adam Jacob recently pointed out, OpenShift makes more than $1B in annual revenue. But at the same time, we are seeing market challenges for HashiCorp and Terraform (and related, OpenTOFU was very visible at the event).

I’m seeing many companies promote tooling and frameworks at the application choreography layer, typically through internal developer portals, such as Backstage, Port, Cortex, etc, and workload specification languages like Score and Radius.

My friends Abby Bangser and Whitney Lee presented an excellent talk on the topic of platform UX: “Sometimes, Lipstick Is Exactly What a Pig Needs!”

There’s clearly value to be created at the application choreography layer. However, this KubeCon appeared to be the best of times and the worst of times for Backstage. The Backstage community presented several good sessions, and there is clearly a lot of momentum (this was the project most contributed to by CNCF end users). But I was also hearing a lot of grumbles from adopters about the lack of “out of the box” functionality and the effort required to get the portal operational and maintain it.

This application layer is where the proverbial “[developer] rubber meets the [platform] road”, and arguably the developer experience is crafted here. But drawing on my software architecture experience, I’m a proponent of creating the correct abstractions, and a portal feels a necessary but not sufficient abstraction for realising the goals of a platform. I believe the platform orchestration layer is where much innovation will happen next year. I’m obviously a bit biased here, as I’m currently working with the Syntasso team (building the open source Kratix platform orchestrator), but Humanitec, Upbound (Crossplane), Massdriver, Mia-Platform, Qovery, and many others are investing in this space, too.

As a reminder of the platform-building space's relative immaturity, some of the best-attended content focused on the fundamentals of delivering cloud native apps. For example, Adrian Mouat presented “Building Container Images the Modern Way” to a packed keynote room. The Docker booth was heavily focused on Docker Build Cloud (and it was great to see the Docker folks back at the event after a year’s hiatus). And many of the 101-level sessions were full and standing.

Finally, I didn’t see AI making a big impact on platform engineering (yet!). As we’re mostly orchestrating app, platform, and infra components and managing the lifecycles, the “AI ROI” appears to be higher elsewhere.

Product thinking FTW!

In a closely related topic to the previous takeaway, I saw much more “product thinking” being applied to platforms, frameworks, and developer tooling at this KubeCon.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Platform Engineering Day colocated event and the talk, “Boosting Developer Platform Teams with Product Thinking” by Samantha Coffman at Spotify. I heard several other platform builders say this was also their favourite talk. Obviously, we can’t all be Spotify, but Samantha presented a lot of very useful mental models and made strong references to a lot of Marty Cagan’s excellent work (such as the four big risks: value, viability, feasibility, and usability):

Daniel Bryant on LinkedIn: #platengday

The talk from Chris Plank at NatWest, “Unlocking Innovation: How NatWest Bank Uses Cloud Native Tools to Deliver Platform as a Product”, was also a standout presentation for me. Chris set the scene nicely for the challenges of rolling out a platform within a constrained (and well-regulated) environment and made a case for applying product thinking and cross-organisation collaboration to overcome these hurdles.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Using "platform as a product" thinking at NatWest bank! Heavily inspired by @a_bangser 😂#PlatEngDay #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/K5ECkti8L0 / Twitter"

Using "platform as a product" thinking at NatWest bank! Heavily inspired by @a_bangser 😂#PlatEngDay #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/K5ECkti8L0

Related, Mitch Connors from Aviatrix presented “Product Market Misfit: Adventures in User Empathy”. My friend and ex-colleague, Nicki Watt from Open Credo, also presented “To K8S and Beyond — Maturing Your Platform Engineering Initiative”, which provided a useful guide to the CNCF App Delivery TAG’s Platform Maturity Model with a healthy dose of product thinking.

If the future of KubeCon is platform-shaped, I hope it also continues to be product-focused, too!

More interest in developer experience and inner and outer dev loops

I’m obviously biased here, as I presented a talk at the colocated App Developer Con, “Testing Cloud Apps: Mocks vs. Service Virtualization vs. Remocal Tools” (no video yet!). However, I saw many more mentions of the importance of focusing on developer experience and the inner and outer developer loops throughout the event.

My friends from AtomicJar (now Docker) and Diagrid, Oleg Šelajev and Alice Gibbons, presented “Simplified Inner and Outer Cloud Native Developer Loops”. I also heard a lot of chatter around the topic of cloud development environments (CDEs) from the awesome folks at GitPod. I also heard interesting things from the new kid on the CDE block, Daytona.

Arsh Sharma on Twitter: "Fun discussions on all things Platform Engineering and Dev Tools with @paulienuh @loujaybee @danielbryantuk! pic.twitter.com/Pp5oPN2OIJ / Twitter"

Fun discussions on all things Platform Engineering and Dev Tools with @paulienuh @loujaybee @danielbryantuk! pic.twitter.com/Pp5oPN2OIJ

When speaking to senior leaders at the event, everyone appeared to know the value of developer experience, but they often had trouble “selling” this to leadership (particularly post-ZIRP). The general consensus was that focusing on DORA/SPACE metrics and cross-org collaboration can help. As I’ve shared previously on socials, you can’t go wrong by listening to a few episodes of the DX Engineering Enablement podcast with Abi Noda.

Security continues to be big business

Although the keynotes were relatively light on the topic of security, the sessions and sponsored showcase were definitely not. A quick search in the session catalogue for the term “security” showed tens of talks. Everything from secure supply chains to network intrusion and platform security was covered nicely.

Some sessions were overtly focused on security implementations and tooling, with Kyverno, Falco, and OPA stealing the show. Secure supply chains featured heavily mentioning container build tooling (alongside SBOMS and SLSA), Keptn, Harbor, etc. There was also a lot of focus on network security, with interesting mentions of Cilium (and eBPF in this context), Linkerd (with questions about Cloudflare’s Pingora), and Istio.

End-user stories are moving up the stack

Once again, it was good to see end-user keynotes and sessions on the program. I noticed that many of these sessions were “moving up the stack”. Instead of presenting how they had adopted Kubernetes (or some other CNCF tech), they framed the messaging around scaling, sustainability, cost savings, or enhanced developer productivity. The previously mentioned Deutsche Bahn keynote on sustainability was a good example of this.

I also enjoyed the Spotify talk, “How Spotify Re-Created Our Entire Backend Without Skipping a Beat” by Nick Rutigliano and Daniel de Repentigny, which applied product thinking to vending and maintaining production-ready K8s-based environments. Other good talks in this space included:

• State of Platform Maturity in the Norwegian Public Sector
• Keeping the Bricks Flowing: The LEGO Group’s Approach to Platform Engineering for Manufacturing
• Intuit’s Scaling Service Mesh: Self Service Beyond 300 Clusters
• BlackRock’s How to Save Millions Over Years Using KEDA?
• TikTok’s Edge Symphony: Scaling Beyond Boundaries with Multi-Cluster Controllers

The tooling bundling continues

As I’ve observed in previous KubeCon summaries, the bundling of tools and frameworks continued. With a few exceptions, gone are the days when vendors fought to be the “best in class point solution”.

The cloud native networking stack is a good example of this, with the booths from Isovalent (soon to be Cisco!), Solo, Tetrate, and Kong continuing to grow in size alongside the breadth of their offerings. There were several API gateway-focused vendors at the event, but even they were talking about the ease of integration with service meshes and CNI.

Building on the security bundling (by Snyk, Wiz, Aqua, etc) and observability bundling (by Datadog, Chronospere, Splunk, etc), we were seeing bundling in AI tooling from the cloud hyper scalers (see the previously mentioned KAITO) and AI-focused tooling vendors and projects like Ollama.

Wasm: A hot topic, but with some uncertainty

Wasm was once again front and center at the event. I didn’t mention this technology in my KubeCon NA 2023 summary, and several folks commented on this. This was definitely an oversight on my part. At the Paris event, there was also a lot of chatter about the AI and sustainability use cases with Wasm, and the SpinKube project received some good keynote time:

Lachlan Evenson on Twitter: "It's super impressive to see the speed, density, and cost savings achieved by running WASM apps on Kubernetes at ZEISS via @SpinKube Thanks for sharing @ancientitguy @ralph_squillace @michelledhanani #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/BKdnRECSUU / Twitter"

It's super impressive to see the speed, density, and cost savings achieved by running WASM apps on Kubernetes at ZEISS via @SpinKube Thanks for sharing @ancientitguy @ralph_squillace @michelledhanani #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/BKdnRECSUU

In the interest of balancing the hype, many folks I chatted to in my (platform engineering-focused) circle were still looking for the “killer use case” for Wasm. Anecdotally, the combination of container-based and serverless apps provided the required granularity and control of resource usage. They were also more interested in exploring the AI tooling when they returned to the office.

I’m generally positive about Wasm — and having worked a lot with proxies and API gateways in the past, I could always see the plugin use case with Wasm being a replacement for something like Lua — but I wonder if we’ll see less keynote time and more behind-the-scenes usage in the future.

Dapr is the cloud native ESB (in a good way)

It’s no secret that I’ve been bullish on the Dapr project for quite some time. This is a framework I wish I had access to when I was building early cloud native apps ten years ago. It was good to see many mentions of the tech throughout the event, even in sessions I didn’t expect, and the focus was often on the solid integration with other CNCF tooling.

Nele Lea on Twitter: "Interesting thoughts about combing Dapr and testcontainers for more developer productivity with @alicejgibbons and @shelajev at @KubeCon_ pic.twitter.com/DAoPy0Srq8 / Twitter"

Interesting thoughts about combing Dapr and testcontainers for more developer productivity with @alicejgibbons and @shelajev at @KubeCon_ pic.twitter.com/DAoPy0Srq8

As usual, I had great discussions with Bilgin, Mauricio, and Mark from Diagrid. We chatted about the developer patterns, the future of cloud native application middleware, and “Cloud-Computing in the Post-Serverless Era: Current Trends and beyond”.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Interesting context about running an app implementing the Singleton pattern in @kubernetesio from @bibryam at #KubeCon Beware of the guarantees/behaviour in K8s and potentially look to additional solutions like @daprdev for distributed locking pic.twitter.com/PYrZ2pUFZ2 / Twitter"

Interesting context about running an app implementing the Singleton pattern in @kubernetesio from @bibryam at #KubeCon Beware of the guarantees/behaviour in K8s and potentially look to additional solutions like @daprdev for distributed locking pic.twitter.com/PYrZ2pUFZ2

More than one person jokingly referred to Dapr in the context of old-school enterprise service buses, framing Dapr as “an ESB for the cloud generation” or “ESB as it should have been”. Having worked with several ESBs in my past life as an enterprise Java developer, I had to both chuckle and nod my head at this! Hopefully, the new generation of developers won’t remember the jokes we used to make about ESBs.

Bonus: GTM takeaways for KubeCon EU

In my day job, I advise several developer tooling companies on go-to-market, product marketing, and developer relations, and so I wanted to share a paragraph or two on this. Looking around the sponsor showcase highlighted several trends for what’s currently hot and sellable:

• AI-based anything
• Platform engineering
• Security
• Observability
• Cost savings (and, interestingly, the “FinOps” label was not consistently applied)

This was also the first time that I noticed several KubeCon regulars not running a booth, particularly those in the VC-backed series A/B funding space. Chatting to founders and GTM folks revealed a combination of cost saving, not targeting the EU market, and believing that the lead quality was low for their ICP (i.e. booth scans from previous KubeCons had not converted to $$$/€€€).

This is anecdotal, but I also noticed many more salespeople at this event. When I started attending conferences early in my career in the Java space (in the late 2000s), it was completely normal to be accosted by overly-keen sales folks in the sponsor showcase. This gradually changed as software tooling became more product-led, buying power switched to developers, and developer relations roles emerged (see Stephen O’Grady’s “​​The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World”).

KubeCon booths have historically seen developer relations, technical go-to-market, and founders front and centre. These folks were present here, but I also got metaphorically (and sometimes physically) jumped by salespeople as I walked from meeting to meeting in the sponsor showcase. One salesperson was borderline hostile when I replied that I was busy and not interested in the sales pitch — so much so that I had to check my response and hold my tongue (he completely caught me off guard with several unfounded accusations, but the code of conduct goes both ways!)

I know that times are tricky and sales quotas are challenging, but you must understand your audience's culture. I don’t think the hard sell works in the KubeCon sponsor hall.

I’m personally bullish on leaning into the Technical SDR role for booth duty, which I first learned about on Shomik Ghosh’s Software Snack Bites podcast. I also believe developer relations folks will lean more into product-focused roles that will lend nicely to booth work. I’ve written more about this here:

The Death of DevRel (Again?) and the Rise of Product Advocate and Community Roles

Wrapping up: Community, community, community!

As with every KubeCon, I was impressed by the community’s efforts to make this event more inclusive. I’ll tip my hat to the Deaf & Hard of Hearing Working Group, which secured sign language interpreters for the keynotes and many other sessions.

Nikhita Raghunath and Aparna Subramanian did an excellent job co-chairing the event. I’ll also shout out my cloud native buddy Kasper Borg Nissen, who co-chaired the event for the first time! Further building on the topic of inclusion, Kasper also ran the keynote panel discussion “Unity in Diversity: A Decade of Inclusive Growth in the Cloud Native Community”.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at KubeCon EU. It was great to catch up with so many of the community, and I had a lot of fun with a “Mastering API Architecture” book signing at the O’Reilly booth. It was also fun to spend some time with folks I’m currently working with, such as the Syntasso crew, who were co-organisers of PlatEngDay. I’m looking forward to the next evolution of this colocated event!

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Many thanks to all the organisers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees at #KubeCon! As usual, I had a blast 🎉 The people and conversations were amazing 🤩 I left having missed connecting with a few folks - I'll see you in Salt Lake City or online 🙌 pic.twitter.com/qUKu1liIJL / Twitter"

Many thanks to all the organisers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees at #KubeCon! As usual, I had a blast 🎉 The people and conversations were amazing 🤩 I left having missed connecting with a few folks - I'll see you in Salt Lake City or online 🙌 pic.twitter.com/qUKu1liIJL

I’m still unpacking all of my learning, and so I’m sure I’ve missed some important topics or mentions of key people. If so, please let me know!

If we didn’t get a chance to cross paths, please do contact me via socials or the usual channels. See you in Salt Lake City in November!

The (slow) rise of AI, the domination of platform engineering, and the refocus on developer experience at KubeCon NA 2023

This KubeCon NA was a very different experience for me, as I wasn’t representing a company or running a booth. However, I still had a blast, and it was amazing to catch up with so many people from the cloud native community. It was also great to be back in Chicago, and the city looked after us well — I had forgotten how much I enjoyed deep-dish pizza!

Here are my key takeaways from KubeCon NA 2023:

1. The cloud native community is embracing AI/LLMs… slowly
2. DevOps is so passe: Platform Engineering all the things!
3. There’s gold in them thar hills! Selling picks and shovels in the platform rush
4. Kubernetes should remain unfinished (and evolving)
5. Don’t forget about developer experience!
6. Increased focus on app development and integration
7. Cloud native communications: Bundling FTW?
8. Security is big business
9. More focus on sustainability: Observability, scaling & FinOps
10. Community, community, community

I want to say a big thank you to the CNCF for organizing the event and also a huge thanks to all the speakers, sponsors, volunteers, and attendees. You all rock!

Setting the scene: Here comes the late adopters

The general vibe I got from attending KubeCon Chicago was that we’ve very much moved into the late adopter phase of cloud native technologies.

Of course, there’s always the danger of getting stuck in a (cloud native) bubble with conferences like KubeCon; it would be easy to walk away from the event thinking the world runs on Kubernetes. This isn’t true, and “Gartner Says 50% of Critical Enterprise Applications Will Reside Outside of Centralized Public Cloud Locations Through 2027”. However, if you squint, the fact that almost 50% of workloads are running (or will run) in the cloud signals the arrival of the late adopters.

I sensed this shift in the event keynotes and the value propositions pitched in the vendor hall. More emphasis was placed on reliability and trustworthiness over innovation, product suites and ease of integration over “best in class” point solutions, and partnerships and collaboration over trailblazing individual organizations.

With this in mind, let’s dive into the key takeaways more deeply!

The cloud native community is embracing AI/LLMs… slowly

In stark contrast to the OpenAI DevDay held on the same day as the KubeCon NA co-located events, there wasn’t a lot of AI-themed content at KubeCon. If you haven’t watched the OpenAI DevDay keynote, I encourage you to do so to get a glimpse of what’s to come. Ed Sim also provided a great roundup in his weekly What’s Hot in Enterprise IT/VC newsletter, and my InfoQ colleague, Andrew Hoblitzell, shared his thoughts in “OpenAI Announces New Models and APIs at First Developer Day Conference.”

Granted, the first day’s KubeCon keynote led with the topic of AI, but this felt a little “bolted on” and more focused on providing infrastructure for AI/LLMs rather than using this in development or operational workflows. I won’t be too judgemental here, as an event like KubeCon takes months of planning, and the developments in AI are happening at a daily pace.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "A good question, Luke! My take on this was the CNCF community is creating toolkits, sharing use cases, baking learning into the platforms/best practices, etcThe message I heard in the keynote was "we offer the (cloud) vendor neutral way to build and run language models" / Twitter"

A good question, Luke! My take on this was the CNCF community is creating toolkits, sharing use cases, baking learning into the platforms/best practices, etcThe message I heard in the keynote was "we offer the (cloud) vendor neutral way to build and run language models"

A couple of vendor booths focused on “ChatGPT for the cloud”, but most of my chats with sponsors were firmly focused on the here-and-now of building platforms. Andrew Fong, CEO of Prodvana, nicely captured my thoughts on this with his “AI essentially does not exist at KubeCon” comment on LinkedIn:

Andrew Fong on LinkedIn: #kubernetes #k8s #ai #cicd #cloud #devops #sre #infrastructure | 10 comments

If you’re interested in learning about the potential for AI and LLMs in the platform space, I explored this topic with several cloud native and DevOps leaders, including Helen Beal, Abby Bangser, Matt Campbell, and Steef-Jan Wiggers, in a recent(ish) InfoQ Cloud and DevOps Trends Report podcast.

DevOps is so passe: Platform Engineering all the things!

I’m sure we’ve all seen the Minions/Gru platform engineering and DevOps meme by now (if not, I mentioned it in my KubeCon EU 2023 summary), and everyone was doubling down on this at KubeCon. If you search the program schedule, you will find at least 2x the number of talks that mention platform engineering compared to talks that mention DevOps. Practically no talk led with DevOps in the title, even though they all channelled the spirit of DevOps.

I think this is a natural evolution of the space, which comes with all the good and bad associated with this type of change.

The “good” is that we are forming a community around the topic and crystalizing best practices within the industry. I’ll give a big shout-out to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) TAG App Delivery team for publishing their “Platform Engineering Maturity Model” (and a special shout out to Abby Bangser from Syntasso for herding the cloud native cats)

Daniel Bryant on LinkedIn: Platform Engineering Maturity Model

There will also be a Platform Engineering Day co-located event at KubeCon EU 2024. We’ve come a long way since I collated a bunch of ideas about platform engineering emerging from the community and presented this at KubeCon 2022 as “From Kubernetes to PaaS to … Err, What’s Next?”

There’s gold in them thar hills! Selling picks and shovels in the platform rush

The “bad” part of everyone adopting platform engineering is that many vendors are in danger of “platform washing” their products. Granted, many of the existing CNCF landscape-inspired products were helping folks build platforms before this was officially a thing. But I’m not sure everything I saw marketed as platform engineering-friendly at KubeCon actually was. This means that end users must look more closely when buying products to ensure they meet their needs.

If a tool doesn’t integrate well with the existing cloud native stack, hasn’t been built to address clear use cases (i.e. solves a “job to be done” problem), and can’t be used in a self-service manner, it’s probably not been built with the concepts of platform engineering in mind.

Of course, in any (platform engineering) gold rush, there’s always money to be made selling picks and shovels, and technologies like Crossplane and KubeVirt kept popping up on my radar:

Michael Levan 👨🏻‍💻☕️ on Twitter: "The three things I'm most excited about from KubeCon:1. Crossplane2. KubeVirt3. Platform EngineeringThe way I see the future is Kubernetes underneath the hood for everything. Tools like KubeVirt and Crossplane make this possible.I'm betting on Platform Engineering. / Twitter"

The three things I'm most excited about from KubeCon:1. Crossplane2. KubeVirt3. Platform EngineeringThe way I see the future is Kubernetes underneath the hood for everything. Tools like KubeVirt and Crossplane make this possible.I'm betting on Platform Engineering.

Kubernetes should remain unfinished (and evolving)

I thoroughly enjoyed Tim Hockins’ final day keynote, “A Vision for Vision — Kubernetes in Its Second Decade”, in which he opined about the value of making tradeoffs in the near term to benefit the longer-term vision.

It would have been easy for the community to attempt to solve all of the cloud native challenges and integrate all of the platform tools into Kubernetes. However, Tim highlighted that this had been tried before with OpenStack… and with debatable results.

This concept was nicely summarized in a tweet from Tim Bannister that Tim shared on the big screen: “Kubernetes should stay unfinished.” To quote one of my favourite comic/movie franchises, Kubernetes may be “the hero Gotham needs, but not the one it deserves right now”.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "My #KubeCon keynote day 3 summary!- "Kubernetes should remain unfinished (and evolving)" @thockin- Don't forget about developer experience!- App Dev projects are gaining more adoption in the @CloudNativeFdn e.g @daprdev - Secure supply chain tooling is evolving e.g. SBOMs pic.twitter.com/3XmJSLJmns / Twitter"

My #KubeCon keynote day 3 summary!- "Kubernetes should remain unfinished (and evolving)" @thockin- Don't forget about developer experience!- App Dev projects are gaining more adoption in the @CloudNativeFdn e.g @daprdev - Secure supply chain tooling is evolving e.g. SBOMs pic.twitter.com/3XmJSLJmns

Don’t forget about developer experience!

It was great to see several mentions of developer experience and the importance highlighted in the KubeCon NA keynotes. KubeCon has historically been an infrastructure and operations-focused event, but we mustn’t forget about our primary (platform) customers: the developers.

My buddy Kasper Nisson was on a roll with his tweets related to developer experience, capturing the keynote panel:

𝚔𝚊𝚜𝚙𝚎𝚛 𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚗 on Twitter: "The @CloudNativeFdn End User Panel focus on Developer Experience and the importance of abstracting away toil and infrastructure to increase velocity. @onlydole #KubeCon #CloudNativeCon pic.twitter.com/Kivlo9rSzU / Twitter"

The @CloudNativeFdn End User Panel focus on Developer Experience and the importance of abstracting away toil and infrastructure to increase velocity. @onlydole #KubeCon #CloudNativeCon pic.twitter.com/Kivlo9rSzU

And also valuable thoughts from the Backstage Con co-located event:

𝚔𝚊𝚜𝚙𝚎𝚛 𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚗 on Twitter: "Great lessons learned from @_ChrisSTL from @thoughtworks at #BackstageCon #Kubecon #CloudNativeCon "You can actually make your Developer Experience worse" pic.twitter.com/OKdfNEnQfI / Twitter"

Great lessons learned from @_ChrisSTL from @thoughtworks at #BackstageCon #Kubecon #CloudNativeCon "You can actually make your Developer Experience worse" pic.twitter.com/OKdfNEnQfI

I also heard a lot of good things about the AppDeveloperCon co-located event. Dapr (covered later) was mentioned a lot in conversations about this event, alongside TestContainers for testing, Dagger for CI/CD, and the benefits of ephemeral clusters and PR-based preview environments (courtesy of the Okteto team). I also bumped into mentions of the devcontainer spec a few times, alongside the concept of cloud development environments, frequently with a tip of the hat to Loft Labs’ DevPods and GitPod’s CDEs.

As a shameless plug, I’m helping several clients in the cloud native dev tooling space with product marketing and go-to-market strategy at the moment, and focusing on developer experience and “jobs to be done” is a big part of this work.

You can’t successfully position your product if you don’t know who your users are and their most significant pain points. Developers are an intelligent bunch who like to solve their own problems, and often, your product is going head-to-head with the status quo solutions that use duct tape and bailer wire but get the job done “good enough”.

Increased focus on app development and integration

I’ve long been impressed by the work the Dapr community are doing, and they are arguably leading the way in highlighting the application developers’ needs within the cloud native community. For folks not familiar with the CNCF project, Dapr “provides integrated APIs for communication, state, and workflow.” For those of us with a few grey hairs, think of it as enterprise middleware for the cloud generation (done well).

Even with the rapid adoption of AI/LLMs in the cloud native space, we still need to focus on defining the correct abstractions; otherwise, we could generate a lot of incomprehensible code!

In my opinion, Dapr provides several very useful abstractions required for building distributed apps, such as pub-sub, state management, distributed locking, etc.

I attended several of the Dapr talks and was impressed. If I were building a greenfield cloud native application (or even evolving a brownfield app), I would look at this project first:

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Continuing on the #KubeCon keynotes themes, the @daprdev folks are leading the charge to make cloud developers happyThe new workflows and outbox pattern look super interesting! pic.twitter.com/qEWjg0Qf17 / Twitter"

Continuing on the #KubeCon keynotes themes, the @daprdev folks are leading the charge to make cloud developers happyThe new workflows and outbox pattern look super interesting! pic.twitter.com/qEWjg0Qf17

The open source community is strong, and the folks at Diagrid offer several great commercial solutions that reduce the friction and operational burden of managing your backing infrastructure. I had several great chats with Mark Fussell and Bilgin Ibryam, and I encourage you to follow them on X. My InfoQ buddy, Thomas Betts, also wrote a summary of the latest Diagrid commercial release: “Diagrid Launches Catalyst, a Serverless, Fully-Managed Dapr Offering.”

Cloud native communications: Bundling FTW?

As Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, once famously stated, there are “only two ways to make money in business: one is to bundle; the other is unbundle”. And we’re seeing a lot of bundling in the cloud native ecosystem!

One domain in which this observation really stood out is the cloud native communication stack.

I’ve discussed this several times, including a recent presentation: “The Busy Platform Engineers Guide to API Gateways”. The vast majority of platform builders will need three components in this stack: API gateway (for north-south traffic management), service mesh (for east-west traffic), and container-native interface or CNI (for all of your lower-level software-defined networking).

I’ll own my bias here — having worked for Ambassador Labs, maker of Edge Stack, and being a big supporter of the Linkerd folks — I like picking “best in class” solutions and integrating these.

However, the commercial winds are tending towards bundling. I saw various vendors in this space moving up and down the stack with their latest offerings, e.g. Isovalent (creators of Cilium CNI) are pushing up the stack by embracing service mesh and API gateway. Solo.io are pushing down the stack by incorporating CNI (Cilium) into its Istio service mesh and API gateway offerings. Tetrate, Kong, Tyk, Traefik, and others are making similar plays.

If you follow the cycle (and the money), the smart play appears to lean towards bundling.

And I believe this learning doesn’t just apply to the domain of cloud native comms. In general, enterprises are looking to consolidate vendors, reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of DIY solutions, and shift cloud spending commits onto end-to-end solutions offered within cloud marketplaces.

On a related note, the service mesh battle panel, moderated by Keith Mattix, was one of my favourite sessions at the conference. The participants weren’t holding back, leading to a fun and informative discussion versus the usual format of everyone agreeing!

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Summary of the leading service meshes at #KubeCon- @Linkerd: Simplicity. All you need for security, reliability, and observability- @ciliumproject: Invisibility. Pushing service mesh functionality into the kernel- @IstioMesh: Make simple stuff simple, complex stuff possible pic.twitter.com/kR9dqYANz1 / Twitter"

Summary of the leading service meshes at #KubeCon- @Linkerd: Simplicity. All you need for security, reliability, and observability- @ciliumproject: Invisibility. Pushing service mesh functionality into the kernel- @IstioMesh: Make simple stuff simple, complex stuff possible pic.twitter.com/kR9dqYANz1

Security is big business

I’ll keep the final three takeaways brief, but I wanted to mention that the vendor hall was full of security solutions, from secure supply chain solutions (SBOMs and SLSA) to network intrusion detection and permission management (OPA). There is a lot of interest (and money) in this space.

The sessions also provided good coverage of the topics, and KubeCon co-chair Frederick Kautz and the CNCF folks were keen to emphasise the importance of security (and related CNCF projects) in the keynotes:

Bridget Kromhout on Twitter: "Insightful keynote with delightful slides: @ffkiv on software supply chain security. #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/cbQZsxrwSb / Twitter"

Insightful keynote with delightful slides: @ffkiv on software supply chain security. #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/cbQZsxrwSb

More focus on sustainability: Observability, scaling & FinOps

Also of prominence in the keynotes was the topic of sustainability. There was an interesting panel session, “Environmental Sustainability in the Cloud Is Not a Mythical Creature”, and even the AWS-sponsored keynote focused on this theme:

Jon Brown on Twitter: "⁦@_nathantabor⁩ of ⁦@awscloud⁩ discussing energy consumption in the cloud. #kubecon #sustainability. 1. Identify cost drivers #finops #kubecost. 2. Prioritize optimizations for energy optimization 3. Shared, dynamic resources. Claim: cloud is 3x more efficient. pic.twitter.com/zptVKs4DGI / Twitter"

⁦@_nathantabor⁩ of ⁦@awscloud⁩ discussing energy consumption in the cloud. #kubecon #sustainability. 1. Identify cost drivers #finops #kubecost. 2. Prioritize optimizations for energy optimization 3. Shared, dynamic resources. Claim: cloud is 3x more efficient. pic.twitter.com/zptVKs4DGI

This is an important topic, and it was great to see the underlying drivers of understanding and monitoring your cloud (carbon) footprint being explored via observability, automated scaling, and FinOps.

For those new to FinOps, I learned a lot from Roi Ravhon in this recent InfoQ podcast I recorded with him, “Roi Ravhon on FinOps, Application Unit Economics, and Cloud Cost Optimization.”

Community, community, community

I can’t write a KubeCon summary without mentioning the power of the community. Seeing so many success stories and awards in the keynotes was awesome.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Key takeaways from day 2 of #KubeCon keynotes- Bad things happen in production. Good observability and incident management are key!- Building a successful community requires diversity and inclusion- It's good to celebrate successes within your team and the community pic.twitter.com/Epi2bWz1zl / Twitter"

Key takeaways from day 2 of #KubeCon keynotes- Bad things happen in production. Good observability and incident management are key!- Building a successful community requires diversity and inclusion- It's good to celebrate successes within your team and the community pic.twitter.com/Epi2bWz1zl

One of the primary reasons I attend these events is to catch up and hang out with folks in the community. The road to cloud native is not always easy, and I enjoy swapping stories with fellow travellers. I was a bit lazy with photos this year, but my devrel buddies Marino Wijay and Daniel Oh had me covered:

Marino Wijay 🇨🇦 on Twitter: "🧵5/8 pic.twitter.com/3nswRg8FoQ / Twitter"

🧵5/8 pic.twitter.com/3nswRg8FoQ

Daniel Oh on Twitter: "Got the last moment to catch up with my fellow UK friend @danielbryantuk at @KubeCon_ NA Are you looking for the Big picture tech? This is the man first you!!! pic.twitter.com/lpmlf6WY1J / Twitter"

Got the last moment to catch up with my fellow UK friend @danielbryantuk at @KubeCon_ NA Are you looking for the Big picture tech? This is the man first you!!! pic.twitter.com/lpmlf6WY1J

And I also got to spend some quality time with my old Ambassador Labs teammates:

Ambassador Labs on Twitter: "Toppin' off Day Three of#KubeCon with a team dinner of deep dish Chicago-style pizza. 🍕🍕🍕 @thedevelopnik @Didicodes @danielbryantuk pic.twitter.com/It7nUPdEkB / Twitter"

Toppin' off Day Three of#KubeCon with a team dinner of deep dish Chicago-style pizza. 🍕🍕🍕 @thedevelopnik @Didicodes @danielbryantuk pic.twitter.com/It7nUPdEkB

I didn’t get a chance to catch up with everyone I wanted to (KubeCon is busy!), so feel free to contact me via socials if you want to arrange a chat via Zoom. Otherwise, I hope we meet soon on the conference circuit!

Wrapping up

As I mentioned at the top of this article, I had a blast attending this KubeCon. The community and surrounding support systems are clearly maturing, and now we have the tricky task of balancing standardization and innovation.

I’m bullish that the cloud native future looks bright. I do, however, think we’ll see more shades of AI/LLMs in the future 🙂

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "That's a wrap for #KubeCon! Many thanks to all the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees -- I had a blast! 🙏The Chicago weather was perfect for the early morning runs, and I forgot how much I enjoyed deep dish pizzas 😋Stand by for my event summary 📝😁 pic.twitter.com/Z5o17SJSVX / Twitter"

That's a wrap for #KubeCon! Many thanks to all the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees -- I had a blast! 🙏The Chicago weather was perfect for the early morning runs, and I forgot how much I enjoyed deep dish pizzas 😋Stand by for my event summary 📝😁 pic.twitter.com/Z5o17SJSVX

If you work in developer relations or technical go-to-marketing, be sure to subscribe to my Avocado Bytes newsletter, and I’ll see you in Paris for KubeCon EU 2024 (don’t forget the CFP closes on the 26th November)!

Meeting the Besties and amazing guests to discuss macroeconomics, geopolitics, and technology

As a longtime listener of the All-In Podcast, I jumped at the chance to attend the latest All-In Summit in Los Angeles this week. The event didn’t disappoint, and the speakers and sessions were fantastic. If you listen to the podcast, you know what to expect from the self-proclaimed group of “Besties”: Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, and David Friedberg: a mix of discussions on investing, technologies, geopolitics, and, of course, science-based jokes about Uranus… cue the theme music!

Shuffling the deck: Backgrounds and audience mix

I’m fortunate to have attended many conferences as part of my work in software development and go-to-market roles. The All-In Summit was unique in that the diversity of attendee backgrounds was among the most varied I’ve encountered. Of course, many Bay Area folks focusing on AI were in attendance (whom I had great discussions with!), but I also met business operators of all types, founders, building architects, and retired folks.

The conversations were fascinating. Everyone was super engaged with the special All-In mix of business, geopolitics, and thought-provoking banter. And yes, there were definitely signs of hustle culture and strong political views, but everyone I encountered was respectful and happy to debate things from all perspectives.

Taking stock of the Flop: Macroeconomics, regulation, and strategy

I’m still processing all of my notes and learning — where else do you have two days to listen to Ray Dalio, Elon Musk, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Bill Gurley, to name just a few speakers — and so here are my top ten takeaways from the event so far:

1. Macroeconomic history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme (act accordingly).
2. Goldilocks regulation is good for everyone.
3. Strategy games provide many transferable skills.
4. Content market fit is just as challenging as PMF.
5. Focus on subtraction in business.
6. Be an analyst.
7. Healthy obsession can be a good thing for founders.
8. Grind, fail more, and be willing to pivot.
9. Co-pilots appear to be the near-term AI win.
10. Near-term science breakthroughs to watch: Fusion power and biologics.

Macroeconomic history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme (act accordingly)

The event started strong, with Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, as the first speaker. I’ve been a longtime fan of Ray’s work and very much enjoyed his first book, “Principles: Life and Work”, which lays down the rules and frameworks he used to navigate life. I read Ray’s latest book, “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail”, over the holidays last year and was equally impressed by his assessment of historical economic patterns. His talk at the All-In Summit mostly focused on the latter.

Ray started by presenting a five-minute video that captures the essence of “The Changing World Order” (a 40-minute version is available, too). This examined history’s most turbulent economic and political periods to reveal why the times ahead will likely be radically different from those we’ve experienced in our lifetimes — but similar to those that have happened many times before.

The audience, who potentially weren’t so familiar with Ray’s work, appeared equal parts bemused and curious as he argued that the international domination of the USA may be receding, following the trajectory of previous empires by the British and Dutch. During the remainder of his time on stage, the Besties asked him what we could do to stop a potential decline. Spoiler alert: there’s no silver bullet, but investing in education and acting with a sense of urgency is vital.

Goldilocks regulation is good for everyone

A topic that received a lot of attention at the event was regulation. My favourite session from the summit was from Bill Gurley, General Partner at Benchmark, who ripped into the dangers of over-regulating. Judging by the standing ovation he received, I wasn’t alone in my favouritism of this talk.

The session will be a must-watch when the recording is published, and I’m reluctant to summarise too much of it as I won’t do justice to the storytelling. The key takeaway, which Bill made everyone in the audience repeat aloud, was “regulation favours the incumbent”.

(Update 16th September! Bill’s talk is now available on YouTube!)

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that regulatory capture is an all-too-real phenomenon, and we’re seeing this emerge within the AI community. We also heard from Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, who argued about the dangers of over-regulation of cryptocurrencies.

Balancing these perspectives, Larry Summers, Professor at Harvard University and former United States Secretary of the Treasury, argued that some regulation is beneficial. When applied judiciously, regulation can prevent harm and a “free-for-all” mentality through managing externalities and setting quality standards.

My takeaway is that we should aim for the “Goldilocks” amount of regulation: not too much, not too little.

Strategy games provide many transferable skills

Jenny Just, co-founder of PEAK6 Investments, presented a strong argument for encouraging young women to learn more strategy games like poker. She argued that historically, girls have not been exposed in childhood to games that help develop skills in assessing and managing risk. This is evident in the current gender bias within financial disciplines and jobs. The core of Jenny’s argument is that we are unnecessarily limiting participation within these markets. This can be improved by encouraging more involvement with strategy games, as she is doing with Poker Power Play.

The session with Alexandra Botez, a professional chess player and holder of the International Chess Federation title of Woman FIDE Master, doubled down on this topic as she played speed chess simultaneously with all four Besties. Her father exposed her to the games of chess and poker at a young age. Not only is Alexandra an accomplished content creator and entrepreneur, but she is also looking to become a world-class poker player.

Anyone who listens to the podcast will know that the game of poker is a strong theme throughout the discussions. Indeed, the phrase “all-in” comes from the game, and the Besties regularly talk about the hands they play in the podcast. At the event’s conclusion, Chamath recounted his experience with learning poker and encouraged everyone to read “Thinking in Bets” even if they didn’t want to play poker. And for anyone wishing to hone their skills, the event’s parties offered several poker games.

Content market fit is just as challenging as PMF

On the second day, we heard from Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a Mr Beast. He was refreshingly humble, and his journey to a YouTube content creation superstar was fascinating. Jimmy shared many great content creation tips, with a standout being, “When you want to grow on a platform, you have to create native content for this platform”. This may sound obvious, but I’ve learned this the hard way through my content creation experience. What works on YouTube doesn’t work on Twitch, and what works on LinkedIn often doesn’t work so well on X/Twitter, etc.

Another key takeaway from this session was the value of compounding investments — not just financially (he constantly reinvests profits to create his next video) but also with making regular incremental investments in creating content and building your community. Alexandra Botez also doubled down on this topic, encouraging the content creators in the audience to “find their community”, and only after this should they attempt to monetize. “It‘s easier to turn attention into capital than capital into attention”, she stated.

Focus on subtraction in business

It was great to see Toby Lütke, CEO of Shopify, present on stage again. He shared his experience founding and evolving Shopify through the highs and lows of the markets over the past few years. A key takeaway included the need to “focus on subtraction” when scaling up a business.

Toby argued that a growing company often layers on more and more product features, internal processes, and bureaucracy — often with good intentions — but people are generally reluctant to subtract or take things away. This subtraction typically has to be initiated by the founders. This, Toby mused, is why long-established organizations (where the founders are no longer involved) often struggle to react to changing market conditions where simplification would be beneficial, much like the Innovator’s Dilemma affects established companies.

This jived nicely with a recent article I read in The Economist, “The best bosses know how to subtract work”. I also had several great conversations with founders on this topic during the lunch breaks.

Exploring the turn: AI, analysts, and the need to grind

As I’m wrapping up this article, there were several other takeaways I wanted to highlight from the summit.

Be an analyst

I’m a big fan of Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, and I think some of the best All-In podcast discussions occur when he’s involved. In addition to mingling with the crowds over lunch and at the parties, he joined the Besties on stage for the final wrap-up session of the event. He shared a series of principles that he found helpful with his investments and life in general. His main recommendation was to “be an analyst”. Study the world around you, create and test hypotheses, and share and discuss your findings with others.

Listening to Brad, I couldn’t help but think about the relationship between this topic and the fantastic book, “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction”.

Healthy obsession can be a good thing for founders

In the final wrap-up session of the day, David Sacks, pointing towards Elon Musk’s and Toby Lutke’s sessions, stated that “obsession can be a healthy indicator for founders”. I’ve seen this in my own start-up journey, too. Again, there is probably the need for a “Goldilocks” level of obsession, as too much can lead to toxic cultures and burnout. However, a lack of obsession in the problem space (rather than the solution space) in which a startup operates can be a negative sign.

Grind, fail more, and be willing to pivot

All of the Besties echoed that their journey hadn’t always been easy and that the ability to grind and persevere through adversity had been a defining trait for them. David Friedberg stated that this had crystallized for him when learning to play poker. Chamath Palihapitiya built on this by encouraging the audience to “fail more”, as only by experimenting and being willing to make mistakes can more successes occur.

Using a baseball analogy, Chamath and Jason Calacanis mused that startup life should be measured more like slugging percentage versus a batting average, in that “all hits are not valued equally.” If something isn’t working out, don’t be afraid to pivot.

A final thought related to this, shared by Jason, was the need to cultivate strong friendships throughout life. When times get tough, it’s often only true friends who are willing to help, give the necessary (hard) advice, or provide the tough love. This is the raison d’etre of the Besties.

Co-pilots appear to be the near-term AI win

Several on-stage participants mused about the value of artificial intelligence, particularly LLMs. I also had many excellent discussions about this topic with fellow attendees — it seemed the audience was peppered with Bay Area folks working on this tech.

The consensus appeared that although the dangers of over-hyping AI are real, co-pilots have a lot of near-term value. Toby discussed the value offered by the recent launch of Shopify’s Sidekick co-pilot, and at several points during the event, the Besties riffed on the importance of coding co-pilots like GitHub co-pilot.

Near-term science breakthroughs to watch: Fusion power and biologics

Although somewhat outside of my expertise, Friedberg aced the “science corner” sessions at the event. I learned a lot about fusion power and medicinal biologics. Dr Nicole Paulk’s talk about her work with virus-based medicines at Siren Biotechnology had some interesting overlaps with another recent article in The Economist, “America’s plan to cut drug prices comes with unpleasant side-effects”

Sailing up the river: Final thoughts on the All-In Summit 23

Any summary of the All-In Summit is likely incomplete, as there were so many great sessions and fantastic discussions. In reviewing my summary before publication, I realised I didn’t mention Stephen Wolfram’s excellent discourse on life and the universe, Alexis Gay’s fantastic standup comedy routine (in which she owned the Besties!), Elon Musk’s session where he dialled in mid-flight via Starlink, or many of the deep discussions about geopolitics and the balance between capitalism and democracy. The good news is that all sessions will soon be published on YouTube and via the podcast channel.

From my vantage point, this was a unique event. As with the All-In podcast listening experience in general, I didn’t agree with all of the arguments, and I sometimes found myself shaking my head in disbelief at some of the lines being dropped on stage. But I’ve come to realise this is why I enjoy listening to the Besties so much. I like to be challenged. And getting exposed to views and arguments that I don’t always agree with keeps me sharp and constantly questioning my beliefs. This, I think, is priceless.

Kudos to all involved with organising this great event.

Summary of SaaStr Europa 2023 at the Tobacco Docks

I had the pleasure of attending the SaaStr Europa event for the first time this year, and it was a blast. I’ve mostly worked in 0-to-1 startups over the last few years, and so I’ve become a regular reader of SaaStr, SaaStr University, and Jason Lemkin’s content. When I got the opportunity to attend the event and see some of the SaaStr contributors in person, it seemed like a no-brainer!

Here’s a summary of my top eight takeaways from SaaStr London:

• Brex’s GTM playbook: Ingenuity and repetition
• Category creation is (still) hard
• Markets in 2023: Hope for better, plan for the same
• “Field CTO” could be Developer Relations for Execs
• Product-led growth: Think distribution, adoption, and expansion
• Adopt the VC playbook: Look for exponential growth opportunities
• Rowing crew or running GTM: Aim for alignment
• SaaS metrics are broken: Kyle Poyar’s new proposal

Brex’s GTM playbook: Ingenuity and repetition

In Sam Blond’s “Top 10 Hacks Scaling Brex from 0 to 400M ARR with Brex’s former CRO”, he provided a lot of insight into how the Brex team applied ingenuity to drive early adoption. This included a lot of what we would call “guerrilla marketing” or “growth hacking” at events, such as sponsoring the hotel room keycards, handing out “Brex-fast” burritos, and scheduling magic shows at a sponsored booth.

Sam made the point that not only were these tactics cost-effective (in comparison with a double-platinum, all-singing, blow-the-budget official conference sponsorship), but they also repeatedly exposed event attendees to the brand at a series of key touchpoints.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "I'm definitely taking away the need for focus, ingenuity, and repetition from @samdblond's #SaaStr talk.Whether it's for a product launch, advertising, or sponsoring events.Loved the stories about making a hotel keycard a @brexHQ card, and handing out brex-fast burritos pic.twitter.com/6NtAxB8Kac / Twitter"

I'm definitely taking away the need for focus, ingenuity, and repetition from @samdblond's #SaaStr talk.Whether it's for a product launch, advertising, or sponsoring events.Loved the stories about making a hotel keycard a @brexHQ card, and handing out brex-fast burritos pic.twitter.com/6NtAxB8Kac

Sam continued by encouraging the audience to work hard to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP), and once you’ve hooked these folks as a customer, make sure you are providing as much value as possible — and charging accordingly!

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Some more thoughts from @samdblond on his @brexHQ at #SaaStr- Extract as much as possible from your customer base (great for NDR when fundraising, too)- RevOps can help identify ICPs and buyer roles to target, and also which cadences to use- Always be experimenting pic.twitter.com/JZqTGBg44B / Twitter"

Some more thoughts from @samdblond on his @brexHQ at #SaaStr- Extract as much as possible from your customer base (great for NDR when fundraising, too)- RevOps can help identify ICPs and buyer roles to target, and also which cadences to use- Always be experimenting pic.twitter.com/JZqTGBg44B

Category creation is (still) hard

In “10 Interesting Learnings to Driving a New Category to $1B+ ARR and Beyond with UiPath’s CEO & Founder” with Daniel Dines and Philippe Botteri, I learned a lot about the early days of UiPath and the robotic process automation (RPA) space. In a discussion I could very much relate to (with some of my challenges marketing Telepresence at Ambassador Labs), Daniel stated that we shouldn’t chase category creation when starting a business. Not only is it time-consuming and not an efficient use of our time, but it often focuses more on a (potential) solution rather than fully understanding the problem that the business is attempting to solve.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: ""Don't chase category creation when starting a business. Focus on the problem and solving this, and only attempt to create a category if the timing is fortuitous" @danieldines on building @UiPath and the RPA category at #SaaStr pic.twitter.com/XQypQAHlbd / Twitter"

"Don't chase category creation when starting a business. Focus on the problem and solving this, and only attempt to create a category if the timing is fortuitous" @danieldines on building @UiPath and the RPA category at #SaaStr pic.twitter.com/XQypQAHlbd

Markets in 2023: Hope for better, plan for the same

In the next session, “Kick off to SaaStr Europa 2023 with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin”, Jason provided a whistlestop tour of the current VC and start-up funding market. In a meme that was echoed several times at the event, in the current macroeconomic climate every company should assume they are default unfundable now — they are not “between rounds” or waiting for the next series investment. Jason mused that this isn’t necessarily because things have become harder, but they have “reverted to the mean” against the backdrop of overexuberant funding that took place in 2020 and 2021. The big focus now should be on efficiency.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: ""During the last two years everything in SaaS got harder -- or perhaps back to as hard as it should be. Building a funnel is hard. Sales is hard. Retention is hard.From growth at all costs, the push now is to being radically efficient." @jasonlk #SaaStr pic.twitter.com/kr93WS7l34 / Twitter"

"During the last two years everything in SaaS got harder -- or perhaps back to as hard as it should be. Building a funnel is hard. Sales is hard. Retention is hard.From growth at all costs, the push now is to being radically efficient." @jasonlk #SaaStr pic.twitter.com/kr93WS7l34

Jason cautioned that although there are macroeconomic headwinds, companies shouldn’t use this as an excuse for seeing no growth in their revenue. In a statement that saw a number of nodding heads in the room, there is potential that products have fallen out of product-market fit due to the current market conditions because these products don’t provide enough value or solve a painful enough problem.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: ""Growth has slowed 33% over the past 2 years due to the macro economic shifts.But, if your growth has slowed to 0%, you have problems. Your product isn't as valuable as it should be, or you've lost product market fit"@jasonlk with a h/t to @jaminball at #SaaStr pic.twitter.com/aziKJ2Y1OU / Twitter"

"Growth has slowed 33% over the past 2 years due to the macro economic shifts.But, if your growth has slowed to 0%, you have problems. Your product isn't as valuable as it should be, or you've lost product market fit"@jasonlk with a h/t to @jaminball at #SaaStr pic.twitter.com/aziKJ2Y1OU

In a concluding slide, Jason suggested the audience “hope for better, but plan for the same” over the next 18 months. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency…

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "I like the message of focusing on working hard during a "resetting" of the SaaS market, rather than riding out a downturn, from @jasonlk at #SaaStr"18 months into a reset: hope for better, plan for the same" pic.twitter.com/dt907Sk7k4 / Twitter"

I like the message of focusing on working hard during a "resetting" of the SaaS market, rather than riding out a downturn, from @jasonlk at #SaaStr"18 months into a reset: hope for better, plan for the same" pic.twitter.com/dt907Sk7k4

“Field CTO” could be Developer Relations for Execs

In a fascinating session exploring the HashiCorp Field CTO role, “Bridging the Gap Between Sales and Tech Teams: Playbook to Customer Success with HashiCorp’s CTO and VP NEMEA”, Sarah Polan and Louise Fellows shared a lot of insight that I could relate to as a Developer Relations leader. In previous roles, I have mainly been engaging and working directly with developers, and so it was very interesting to learn that a lot of our tactics overlap with the Field CTO and solution engineer approach.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Fascinating insight into the @HashiCorp Field CTO role -- and I can see why some folks say this is "DevRel for execs"Programmatic approach, focus on sharing experiences, and bring back product/impl learnings to the orgSarah Polan and Louise Fellows at #SaaStr pic.twitter.com/m3dJGBLkLq / Twitter"

Fascinating insight into the @HashiCorp Field CTO role -- and I can see why some folks say this is "DevRel for execs"Programmatic approach, focus on sharing experiences, and bring back product/impl learnings to the orgSarah Polan and Louise Fellows at #SaaStr pic.twitter.com/m3dJGBLkLq

Product-led growth: Think distribution, adoption, and expansion

In “Product is King and PLG is King Kong with Connect Ventures, Index Ventures, Our.Space, and PurpleDot” Georgia Stevenson, Stephanie Bowker, Madeline Parra, and Pietro Bezza spoke to a packed room about product-led growth (PLG). They explored the concepts behind PLG and unpacked how this organisation-wide go-to-market approach is really based on getting an effective blend across the “trifecta” of product-led distribution, adoption, and expansion.

Key takeaways included that if your product isn’t generating pipeline, you probably aren’t doing PLG (correctly), and it’s typically easier to move from a PLG motion to a sales-led growth (SLG) or product-led sales (PLS) motion than it is to go from SLG to PLG.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Interesting insight into the value of the "Product Led Growth (PLG) trifecta" from this panel at #SaaStr- product led distribution- product led adoption- product led expansionCombine all three and you have 🔥 pic.twitter.com/W6qvo1GDmw / Twitter"

Interesting insight into the value of the "Product Led Growth (PLG) trifecta" from this panel at #SaaStr- product led distribution- product led adoption- product led expansionCombine all three and you have 🔥 pic.twitter.com/W6qvo1GDmw

Adopt the VC playbook: Look for exponential growth opportunities

The first day ended with an enlightening overview of the Loom story with Joe Thomas presenting, “From 2 Weeks of Runway to a $1.5B Valuation: The Founder Playbook with Loom’s CEO.” Having been a (free tier) user of Loom myself, it was fascinating to hear about the early struggles. A key takeaway from this talk — and also something I heard Jason Lemkin double-down on several times during the event — is that VC-backed companies have to strive for $100M ARR for a successful exit, and do so relatively quickly (the so-called “triple-triple-double-double-double” of revenue growth). Therefore, you have to aim for exponential growth opportunities.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Fantastic overview of the @loom journey from @yoyo_thomas at #SaaStr (yesterday)- Look for exponential growth opportunities and virality- Distribution is key- Focus on mindset and momentum pic.twitter.com/KhKemDWVFd / Twitter"

Fantastic overview of the @loom journey from @yoyo_thomas at #SaaStr (yesterday)- Look for exponential growth opportunities and virality- Distribution is key- Focus on mindset and momentum pic.twitter.com/KhKemDWVFd

Rowing crew or running GTM: Aim for alignment

Echoing many of the takeaways from the Loom talk, Sterling Snow began the second day of the event with “The GTM Models We Used at Divvy To Go From 0 to a $2.5B Exit in 4 Years with Divvy’s Former CRO.” Sterling kept emphasising the importance of ensuring alignment across the entire company: “we don’t have a marketing team, we don’t have a sales team, we don’t have a customer success team — we have a revenue team!”

Using the analogy of a rowing crew, he suggested that when teams achieve “swing” (everyone’s blades hitting the water at the same time and with the same power) magic happens.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Great overview of the Divvy GTM story with @sterlingmsnow at #SaaStr, from $0 to $2.5B exit in 4 yearsIt's all about the team: alignment, speed, and feedback pic.twitter.com/KlJe0ctJPd / Twitter"

Great overview of the Divvy GTM story with @sterlingmsnow at #SaaStr, from $0 to $2.5B exit in 4 yearsIt's all about the team: alignment, speed, and feedback pic.twitter.com/KlJe0ctJPd

Particularly well received was Sterling’s mention of the T3/B3 process at Divvy, where each quarter everyone on the team identifies their top three superpowers and bottom three weaknesses and discusses these with their manager. This happens at an individual level, and also team members share what they believe are the T3/B3 qualities of their manager. These qualities are used as a cue for coaching and improvement, and they can also be monitored over a period of time — identifying if someone is struggling with a repeating challenge, for example. Sterling commented that it’s not always easy receiving this kind of candid feedback, but it did drive results throughout the organization. And in general, the high performers welcomed this kind of framework for improvement.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Interesting traits and antitraits from @sterlingmsnow that the Divvy team optimized for when recruiting and training teammates."With a fast moving startup, there is no room for 'passengers' "A big focus on ownership and team wins (rather than sales Vs marketing)#SaaStr pic.twitter.com/5h5Rq5D3lC / Twitter"

Interesting traits and antitraits from @sterlingmsnow that the Divvy team optimized for when recruiting and training teammates."With a fast moving startup, there is no room for 'passengers' "A big focus on ownership and team wins (rather than sales Vs marketing)#SaaStr pic.twitter.com/5h5Rq5D3lC

SaaS metrics are broken: Kyle Poyar’s new proposal

One of my favourite sessions of the event was Kyle Poyar’s talk, “Why SaaS Metrics are Broken: Time for the Next Era Metrics Playbook with OpenView.” Having been a reader of Kyle’s “Growth Unhinged” SubStack for quite some time, I knew what to expect. There was an interesting historical analysis of how the standard SaaS metrics emerged, and also a detailed rebuttal on why we need to evolve these metrics. Kyle pitched that we need to move away from the “(Salesforce) SaaS growth playbook v1.0” and embrace new tactics alongside new metrics.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Great opening for @poyark's #SaaStr talk about the need to change SaaS metrics - did existing metrics influence the SaaS valuation bubble?- many of us are selling using the (outdated) Salesforce model- software has changed (e.g. consumption based land and expand) pic.twitter.com/4sLHsmSp6U / Twitter"

Great opening for @poyark's #SaaStr talk about the need to change SaaS metrics - did existing metrics influence the SaaS valuation bubble?- many of us are selling using the (outdated) Salesforce model- software has changed (e.g. consumption based land and expand) pic.twitter.com/4sLHsmSp6U

As expected with Kyle's rigorous approach, he explained his reasoning and also proposed new benchmarks for his proposed metrics.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Interesting pitch from @poyark on new "metrics for each stage of the user journey" in the SaaS customer playbookAnd he's brought along new benchmark metrics, too! 📈#SaaStr pic.twitter.com/pPhwtqYHlw / Twitter"

Interesting pitch from @poyark on new "metrics for each stage of the user journey" in the SaaS customer playbookAnd he's brought along new benchmark metrics, too! 📈#SaaStr pic.twitter.com/pPhwtqYHlw

A point that particularly hit home to me was a reminder to deliver value to users “before they hit the paywall”, and potentially use a reverse trial motion. Ed Sim from Boldstart jumped into the conversation and agreed, and he also cautioned not to give away too much for free if we want users to convert to paying customers.

Ed Sim on Twitter: "💯 and the trick is making sure you don't give away too much for free to start as it will be insanely hard to get folks to convert to paying, so many lessons from #OSS as well / Twitter"

💯 and the trick is making sure you don't give away too much for free to start as it will be insanely hard to get folks to convert to paying, so many lessons from #OSS as well

Wrapping up: Knowledge, coffee, and ice cream

The amount of learning and networking on offer at the event was impressive, from sessions to workshops to “brain dates” and more. However, having organized a few events myself, I also know the importance of keeping everyone well-fuelled. SaaStr Europa did not disappoint here either. The main meals were superb, the happy hours were indeed happy, and the coffee and ice cream were plentiful (and there was also fruit and healthy snacks, too!) Kudos to the organizers and event staff.

As echoed in my tweet, I took away a lot of new knowledge and connections. Thanks to everyone involved. I hope to be back next year!

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Many thanks to all the @saastr & @saastreuropa organisers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees! I had a blast attending for the first time 🙌It was great to see several folks live after reading their content for years 👨‍🏫The venue was great and the catering was perfect 🚢🍦☕ pic.twitter.com/nhRk0URlX4 / Twitter"

Many thanks to all the @saastr & @saastreuropa organisers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees! I had a blast attending for the first time 🙌It was great to see several folks live after reading their content for years 👨‍🏫The venue was great and the catering was perfect 🚢🍦☕ pic.twitter.com/nhRk0URlX4

A roundup of the key themes from the KubeCon EU event held in Amsterdam

The Ambassador Labs team and I safely arrived home after a fantastic KubeCon EU 2023. We all enjoyed the Valencia edition of the event last year, but KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU Amsterdam felt like the community was returning to full strength after two years of virtual and hybrid events. We had so many great conversations and attended so many fantastic sessions that it’s challenging to summarize our takeaways in ~2000 words, but here goes!

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Bedankt en tot ziens, Amsterdam! #KubeConEU 2023 has been a blast 🚀Big thanks to the @CloudNativeFdn from all the @ambassadorlabs team 🙌 pic.twitter.com/ek2l6okRaV / Twitter"

Bedankt en tot ziens, Amsterdam! #KubeConEU 2023 has been a blast 🚀Big thanks to the @CloudNativeFdn from all the @ambassadorlabs team 🙌 pic.twitter.com/ek2l6okRaV

Key themes of KubeCon 2023!

There was so much going on at this year’s KubeCon EU 2023 it’s tricky to pick the key themes. And, of course, everyone who attends KubeCon does so looking through a unique lens. I’ll acknowledge my bias upfront and say I am typically most interested in developer experience and cloud native communications.

In no particular order, here are my top KubeCon EU 2023 key takeaways:

1. Developer experience continues to get more attention
2. Platform engineering is increasingly focused on DevOps
3. Debugging K8s-native applications shouldn’t be a slog (but it often is)
4. Cloud native “stacks” are emerging: should you go all-in or select best-in-class point solutions?
5. Wasm continues to gain momentum
6. The biggest challenge with Machine Learning is CI/CD
7. Edge computing continues to move away from the core
8. Commercializing OSS isn’t always easy: Striking a balance is key
9. Doing more with less is on everyone’s mind
10. The community still rocks!

Developer experience continues to get more attention

Both TheNewStack and my team flagged that developer experience (DevEx) would be a key theme in our articles published before the event, and we weren’t disappointed. KubeCon has successfully evolved into a developer-friendly — and maybe even a developer-focused — event over the past three years. DevOps engineers, operators and platform engineers are still well represented, but developers entering the ecosystem have guided projects and platforms into thinking more about developer experience.

This was evident in the excellent talk by Shahar Shmaram & Ran Mansoor from AppsFlyer, “How We Migrated Over 1000 Services to Backstage Using GitOps and Survived to Talk About It!”

Kushtrim Morina on Twitter: "And the KubeScar goes to "How we migrated over 1000 services to Backstage using GitOps and survived to talk about it!". The best talk for this year by @SShmaram and Ran Mansoor regarding #terraform and #backstage #KubeConEU #itqlife pic.twitter.com/wCVGtCBqKC / Twitter"

And the KubeScar goes to "How we migrated over 1000 services to Backstage using GitOps and survived to talk about it!". The best talk for this year by @SShmaram and Ran Mansoor regarding #terraform and #backstage #KubeConEU #itqlife pic.twitter.com/wCVGtCBqKC

I’ll draw your attention to the developer-focused pain points in the slides above: “unknown resource dependencies and ownership” and “lack of technical documentation.” It’s almost like we need some sort of internal developer platform (IDP)! Which was, of course, another hot topic…

Platform engineering is increasingly focused on DevOps

I’ve used this meme in a few of my recent talks, but it felt especially relevant at KubeCon EU 2023 (and hat tip to Derek Morgan for the image):

I spent a lot of time at the Ambassador Labs booth, and if a conversation quickly became technical, I would often ask: “So, are you dev or ops?” To which ~50% of the time, the response was “Yes!” 😁

It turned out that many folks identified as being in a DevOps role. Not platform engineering. Not infrastructure. Not operations. But DevOps… And when I asked a few more questions, I often found that they were building platforms, but they saw themselves as the bridge between developers and operations — and this was the job/role title they had been given. It was also interesting that many of these folks clearly cared about the platform experience they delivered to developers, and they were keen to learn more.

I had several interesting debates about the difference between an internal developer “portal” and an internal developer “platform” — and for me, the distinction is primarily focused on UI versus UX, i.e. are you simply implementing a service catalog (“putting some Backstage lipstick on the proverbial shell script pig”) or actually building a platform to enable developers to get stuff done — and there was a big focus on reducing toil and wasted effort for both the builders and users (developers) of these platforms.

Debugging K8s-native applications shouldn’t be a slog (but it often is)

My awesome Ambassador Labs colleague, Edidiong Asikpo, presented “Telepresence Case Studies: From First Experience to Fast Feedback at Scale” to a packed room. The message that debugging applications deployed to Kubernetes should not be painful clearly resonated, as Edidiong was swamped by questions after the presentation ended!

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Listening to @Didicodes at #KubeConEU talk about Telepresence case studies! pic.twitter.com/6sR4nuWkHd / Twitter"

Listening to @Didicodes at #KubeConEU talk about Telepresence case studies! pic.twitter.com/6sR4nuWkHd

Edidiong not only provided an overview of the “remocal” (remote-to-local) approach provided by Telepresence, but also presented three real-world use cases of how teams had used this CNCF tool to reduce their development iteration/feedback times when coding locally and testing against services running in a remote Kubernetes cluster.

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "From local to remote to "remocal" development, via @Didicodes at #KubeConEU pic.twitter.com/pBfogo2i9m / Twitter"

From local to remote to "remocal" development, via @Didicodes at #KubeConEU pic.twitter.com/pBfogo2i9m

We also had some great chats at the booth about how Telepresence compares to tools like DevSpace and Skaffold, and we heard some great stories about how these tools were being combined within workflows. And I’ll give a big shout-out to Whitney Lee and Viktor Farcic for demonstrating Telepresence and DevSpace in their session, “Choose Your Own Adventure: The Treacherous Trek to Development” Rich Burroughs created a great thread, even if he was clearly cheering for the wrong team! 😆

Rich Burroughs on Twitter: "I'm excited to see @wiggitywhitney and @vfarcic speak next about their You Choose project :) #KubeCon / Twitter"

I'm excited to see @wiggitywhitney and @vfarcic speak next about their You Choose project :) #KubeCon

And I wanted to give another shout-out to Alex, Colleen and the entire team at The New Stack for letting my colleague Kay James talk about Telepresence on the TNS stage. She had a blast demoing Telepresence and enjoyed Alex’s banter:

The New Stack on Twitter: "Day 3 at @CloudNativeFdn #kubeconEU! Kay James of @ambassadorlabs shows @alexwilliams how Telepresence improves developer experience and productivity (by 50%) with a need for speed! #kubecon #demodays #telepresence #amsterdam #developers pic.twitter.com/9qKgqRW4FG / Twitter"

Day 3 at @CloudNativeFdn #kubeconEU! Kay James of @ambassadorlabs shows @alexwilliams how Telepresence improves developer experience and productivity (by 50%) with a need for speed! #kubecon #demodays #telepresence #amsterdam #developers pic.twitter.com/9qKgqRW4FG

Daniel Lipovetsky also presented a great session, “Breakpoints in Your Pod: Interactively Debugging Kubernetes Applications”, which walked through some debugging challenges and how to use the relatively new ephemeral containers to set breakpoints and walk through code.

Matthis H. on Twitter: "Yesterday's last talk was mind-blowing - remote debugging a distant pod without a debugger in the app image! Although the process was a bit tedious, the power was incredible. I learned a ton, and I now realize I need to use ephemeral containers more often. #KubeConEU #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/DmrNgNmEbp / Twitter"

Yesterday's last talk was mind-blowing - remote debugging a distant pod without a debugger in the app image! Although the process was a bit tedious, the power was incredible. I learned a ton, and I now realize I need to use ephemeral containers more often. #KubeConEU #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/DmrNgNmEbp

The key message is that developers now have many options for debugging applications running in Kubernetes. I’m biased with my work on the Telepresence project, but it’s always good to explore alternatives.

Cloud native “stacks” are emerging: should you go all-in or select best-in-class point solutions?

I had many great conversations at the Ambassador Labs booth about cloud native communications/networking stacks. A recurrent theme was people asking if they should go all-in with adopting a stack from one vendor for API gateway + service mesh + CNI, or instead choose best-in-class point solutions.

Having worked on Emissary-ingress and Ambassador Edge Stack, I lean towards selecting point solutions that integrate well. I had a lot of conversations about how these API gateway technologies work with Linkerd and Istio, and many attendees at our booth were looking to create a stack that provided them with the best overall developer experience.

Fall 22: "From Kubernetes to PaaS to... err, what's next"

For those interested in this space, I’ll talk more about this in the upcoming PlatformCon in June:

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Just successfully recorded my #PlatformCon talk! 📽️I say "successfully", but in reality, I had to do four takes 😂 I had two deliveries arrive at my front door (what are the chances! 📦), and I stumbled on my words twice (which happens all the time! 🤫) #DevRelLife pic.twitter.com/0l27whKGnD / Twitter"

Just successfully recorded my #PlatformCon talk! 📽️I say "successfully", but in reality, I had to do four takes 😂 I had two deliveries arrive at my front door (what are the chances! 📦), and I stumbled on my words twice (which happens all the time! 🤫) #DevRelLife pic.twitter.com/0l27whKGnD

It’s worth mentioning that a lot of cloud native communication technologies are built on Envoy Proxy, which got its own origin story documentary that was premiered at KubeCon EU. This was a lot of fun to watch. The documentary makers wove together a compelling narrative, just as they have done with their previous Kubernetes and Prometheus documentaries:

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "Fantastic premiere of the @EnvoyProxy documentary at #KubeConEU! 🔥 Many thanks to @Speakeasy_Films and @ambassadorlabs was happy to sponsor pic.twitter.com/J1rIHoeGWu / Twitter"

Fantastic premiere of the @EnvoyProxy documentary at #KubeConEU! 🔥 Many thanks to @Speakeasy_Films and @ambassadorlabs was happy to sponsor pic.twitter.com/J1rIHoeGWu

And, of course, I can’t write about cloud native comms without mentioning eBPF and Cilium. Liz Rice and the Isovalent crew were leading the charge here:

Liz Rice 🐝🚴‍♀️ KubeCon on Twitter: "Most people won't write eBPF code themselves, they'll use tools built on it - I mean, it's kernel programming and most of us don't do that. I expect there will be a proliferation of serverless-specific tools built on eBPF that cloud vendors will offer as part of the service. / Twitter"

Most people won't write eBPF code themselves, they'll use tools built on it - I mean, it's kernel programming and most of us don't do that. I expect there will be a proliferation of serverless-specific tools built on eBPF that cloud vendors will offer as part of the service.

Wasm continues to gain momentum

Web Assembly (Wasm) was front and center at the event, and in addition to eBPF, this was one of the most talked about low-level technologies. I had several terrific conversations about Wasm’s use to create extensions plugins in API gateways and service meshes, and several folks were interested in using this as a runtime target for edge applications.

This, of course, led to conversations about how to create a toolchain for building Wasm applications. In response, the Docker and Fermyon folks were rocking the mic about this throughout the dedicated Wasm Day colocated event and KubeCon itself:

Scott Johnston on Twitter: "#developers, Curious about what's new with #Wasm? @fermyontech's @technosophos and @Docker's @justincormack shared the latest with @furrier on @theCUBE yesterday at #KubeCon - check it out.https://t.co/9yi5GgGPrs / Twitter"

developers, Curious about what's new with #Wasm? @fermyontech's @technosophos and @Docker's @justincormack shared the latest with @furrier on @theCUBE yesterday at #KubeCon - check it out.https://t.co/9yi5GgGPrs

Interestingly, I kept bumping into Dapr throughout the event (and my enterprise Java buddies hadn’t been this excited about a piece of technology for a long time!). Mauricio Salatino and Adrian Cole joined this technology and Wasm in “Safe, Dynamic Middleware with Dapr and WebAssembly.”

Mark Fussell on Twitter: "Dapr and wasm better together with @salaboy and @adrianfcole @KubeCon_ pic.twitter.com/oGQMJU4jik / Twitter"

Dapr and wasm better together with @salaboy and @adrianfcole @KubeCon_ pic.twitter.com/oGQMJU4jik

The biggest challenge with Machine Learning is CI/CD

Despite the current hotness of ChatGPT, I only spotted one booth that was heavily leaning into this theme, and in general, the chatter was mostly focused on building machine-learning platforms and toolchains. Although ML and AI are everywhere, only a minority appeared to be thinking deeply about their technical requirements and establishing good continuous delivery practices. My conference buddy, Dean, nicely captured this theme from the ArgoCon colocated event:

Dean L. on Twitter: "Volts needs when thinking about running processes that involved ML to support the business and the machine learning platform they've chosen#argocon #KubeCon #KubeConEU pic.twitter.com/VLY89GabSn / Twitter"

Volts needs when thinking about running processes that involved ML to support the business and the machine learning platform they've chosen#argocon #KubeCon #KubeConEU pic.twitter.com/VLY89GabSn

Edge computing continues to move away from the core

I’ve always considered “the edge” to be my API gateway or network perimeter, but I’m clearly not hipster enough! Seriously, there was a lot of buzz surrounding edge technologies as they expand outwards from the core of the data center, from IoT to serverless functions running in globally distributed CDNs.

Edge computing and associated technologies like Wasm received several shout-outs in the keynotes:

Bill Mulligan 🐝🐝🐝 on Twitter: "TAG Runtime is looking at edge, batch, and WASM pic.twitter.com/1AHev2nYly / Twitter"

TAG Runtime is looking at edge, batch, and WASM pic.twitter.com/1AHev2nYly

Commercializing OSS isn’t always easy: Striking a balance is key

One of the most talked about sessions at KubeCon EU was by the cloud native living legend Kelsey Hightower, “From Community to Customers.” Kelsey dived deep into the benefits and challenges of attempting to commercialize open source software:

Kubecon_ on Twitter: "No slides. No laptop. Just @kelseyhightower hosting a conversation about building businesses around open source projects. "Most businesses experience uneccesary friction when converting community into customers."#KubeCon #CloudNativeCon #KCCNC pic.twitter.com/LdYuo6iqJe / Twitter"

No slides. No laptop. Just @kelseyhightower hosting a conversation about building businesses around open source projects. "Most businesses experience uneccesary friction when converting community into customers."#KubeCon #CloudNativeCon #KCCNC pic.twitter.com/LdYuo6iqJe

It’s not always an easy path to walk, but we’ve learned at Ambassador Labs that everything gets a bit easier if you put the community and customers first in all of your decisions. This starts with providing clear licensing and good documentation for open source projects and goes all the way to providing obvious value and world-class customer support for commercial offerings.

Rich Burroughs also nicely captured Kelsey’s thoughts on the balancing act that is required between open source and commercial projects, highlighting how this has benefitted the Envoy Proxy project in the past:

Rich Burroughs on Twitter: "Kelsey talking about the danger of withholding features from open source projects because they conflict with features in the paid versions. He told a story about how Nginx did it, and that led to the popularization of Envoy. #KubeCon / Twitter"

Kelsey talking about the danger of withholding features from open source projects because they conflict with features in the paid versions. He told a story about how Nginx did it, and that led to the popularization of Envoy. #KubeCon

Doing more with less is on everyone’s mind

This is a cliche given the current macroeconomic situation, but “doing more with less” manifested itself in conversations at our booth and at the Emissary-ingress and Telepresence OSS Pavilions. Several attendees were looking to do more with open source offerings and asked how they could balance the build vs buy decision over the short-to-medium term.

After chatting with my peers at the event, it appeared that many vendors were offering more generous free tiers and helping users to get as much value as they could before they needed to level up through the tiers. This is something we’ve been focused on at Ambassador Labs, too. This is a balance (as discussed by Kelsey in the point above), but most of us know that we are all playing a long game here, and we believe that helping out folks now will pay dividends in the future.

The community still rocks!

I say this every year, but that’s because it’s true every year: the cloud native community rocks! I had so many great conversations with friends, old and new, and everyone was welcoming. I’ve been working in the tech industry for 20 years, and this kind of thing doesn’t just happen — it takes real work by the community, the vendors, and the CNCF.

A particularly fun event that’s emerged within the ecosystem (largely thanks to Lian Li!) is Kuberoke. The Ambassador Labs team was happy to join Mia-Platform, Loft Labs, Control Plane, and Chainguard to sponsor this edition of the #1 KubeCon singing event:

Daniel | 🥑 | on Twitter: ".@kuberoke getting started 🥳 let the fun begin 🎤🎉 pic.twitter.com/zM15Z89kTF / Twitter"

@kuberoke getting started 🥳 let the fun begin 🎤🎉 pic.twitter.com/zM15Z89kTF

Outside of the parties, I also had many thought-provoking discussions and met many folks I had only connected with on Zoom. This is why I love going to KubeCon!

Daniel Bryant on Twitter: "I was so bad at taking selfies at this #KubeConEU (I blame running the booth 😂), but it was great to meet so many amazing community folks in person! Shout out @kunalstwt, @natalevinto, @wiggitywhitney, @sjmaple, @virtualized6ix, @Thisisobate, @PaulaLKennedy, @a_bangser & more! pic.twitter.com/eeDyIag8li / Twitter"

I was so bad at taking selfies at this #KubeConEU (I blame running the booth 😂), but it was great to meet so many amazing community folks in person! Shout out @kunalstwt, @natalevinto, @wiggitywhitney, @sjmaple, @virtualized6ix, @Thisisobate, @PaulaLKennedy, @a_bangser & more! pic.twitter.com/eeDyIag8li

In conclusion, KubeCon EU 2023 was fantastic!

Thanks for reading this post and for all the great conversations at the Ambassador Labs booth! The people and the community make KubeCon so unique, and the entire team has a blast reconnecting with folks and meeting new people (or friends we had only met on Zoom until now!)

Join us again at KubeCon NA 2023 in Chicago! And don’t forget to bring your Ambassador Labs beanie — it will be cold.

• Watch the Inside Envoy: The Proxy of the Future documentary trailer here
• Learn More about Telepresence
• Join us on Slack

KubeCon EU + CloudNativeCon 2023 Summary: DevEx, Debugging, and Doubling-down on Community was originally published in Ambassador Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Join us to learn more about devex, debugging, and API gateways

The Ambassador Labs team has packed our suitcases and booked our flight tickets for KubeCon EU 2023 — Amsterdam here we come! We’re looking forward to seeing you in our sessions, the hallway track, and also at booth #S7. Please stop by and say hello!

We’re presenting several sessions, sponsoring Kuberoke, and have also been heavily involved in creating the Envoy Project Documentary premiering on Thursday night at KubeCon EU.

Please come and find us to learn more about Envoy Gateway, Emissary-ingress, Telepresence, or TAG Contributors!

Themes: DevEx, Stacks, and Wasm

It’s always challenging to predict themes that will emerge at KubeCon EU, but here are our best (educated) guesses for 2023:

• Developer experience all the things: KubeCon has successfully evolved into a developer-friendly and maybe even a developer-focused event over the past three years. Operators and platform engineers are still well represented, but developers entering the ecosystem have guided projects and platforms into thinking more about developer experience. This year I think we’ll see this impact in GUIs, CLIs, and workflows.
• The emergence of technology “stacks”: We increasingly see technologies being grouped into stacks, and there is a CNCF tool for every category. I’m keeping an eye out for these stacks in 2023:
  – Internal developer portal (IDP) stack: Developer portal + service catalog + observability
  – Cloud networking stack: API gateway + service mesh + CNI
  – Observability stack: Metrics + logging + tracing
  – Security stack: Secure supply chain tool + DAST/SAST + Zero trust
  – Dev stack: IDE + container build tool + debugging tools
• Machine learning on Kubernetes goes next level: This has been a popular trend over the last several KubeCons, but this is the year we’ll see more production use case discussions. Of course, the hype with LLMs and ChatGPT will only increase the interest in this space.
• Wasm has a breakthrough moment: We’ve been closely watching what the Docker folks have been up to in this space, and the likes of the Fermyon and Cosmonic teams are also driving a lot of innovation within the Wasm ecosystem. There’s already a Cloud Native Wasm Day colocated event, and KubeCon is peppered with interesting talks.
• Community, community, community: If there’s one constant theme at KubeCon, it’s the power of the community. Everyone involved within the CNCF and wider cloud community makes this event and the surrounding ecosystem what it is.

Ambassador Labs Sessions at KubeCon EU 2023

The Ambassador Labs team is presenting several sessions at this year’s KubeCon EU.

Emissary-Ingress: Self-Service APIs and the Kubernetes Gateway API
(11:55–12:30, Wednesday, 19th April)

Lance Austin (Principal Engineer, Ambassador Labs) & Flynn (Technical Evangelist, Buoyant) will explain why ingress controllers are necessary, how self-service developer workflows work for developers and for operations, and how Emissary-ingress based on Envoy proxy makes all of this easier. They’ll also look at current best practices with a deeper dive into Emissary-ingress’s evolution and future, notably the plans for supporting the Kubernetes Gateway API.

Envoy Gateway Update
(14:30–15:05, Wednesday, 19th April)

Alice Wasko (Software Engineer, Ambassador Labs) & Arko Dasgupta (Software Engineer, Tetrate) share a project update on Envoy Gateway, the OSS Envoy ingress controller and what the future plans are for the project!

Envoy Gateway is a collaborative effort between engineers from Emissary-ingress, Tetrate, Tencent, Contour, and VMware, who decided to work together to create a new first-party ingress controller for Envoy.

Its goal is to combine the experience and knowledge from existing solutions into a new gateway that is ready to use on its own but can also serve as a foundation for everyone to share and build on for their own additions and extensions.

ContribFest: Emissary-Ingress — Bugs, Deprecations, and Features, Oh My!
(16:30–18:00, Wednesday, 19th April)

Interested in getting experience with multiple CNCF projects? Come help us smash some bugs, remove deprecated features, and help work on new features. You can learn about developing helm charts, designing Kubernetes CustomResources, and working with Envoy configuration.

Telepresence Case Studies: From First Experience to Fast Feedback at Scale
(14:30–15:05, Thursday, 20th April)

Edidiong Asikpo (Senior Developer Advocate, Ambassador Labs) presents a case study of three companies that adopted the open source CNCF tool Telepresence and improved their developer experience, accelerated their inner dev loop, and reduced staging environment costs.

She’ll follow this with a demo on speeding up the development build-push-test cycle and streamlining the developer experience.

TAG Contributor Strategy: What We Get Out of It (and You Could Too!)

(16:30–17:05, Thursday, 20th April)

Dave Sudia, Senior Developer Advocate, Ambassador Labs, joins panelists Catherine Paganini, Buoyant; Dawn Foster, VMware; Nate Waddington, CNCF; and Josh Berkus, Red Hat to discuss best practices for projects to recruit contributors, do self-governance, scale sustainably and mentor others effectively. TAG CS members share how giving back has shaped their careers, advanced their skills, and grown their own communities.

The CNCF Pavillion: Bring your questions for maintainers of Emissary-Ingress and Telepresence and see demos of the latest versions live!
(Wed-Fri, April 19–21)

Join maintainers and members of the Emissary-ingress and Telepresence communities at the OSS pavilions. Learn about the projects, see a demo, and learn how to contribute!

Ambassador Labs Booth, S7 in the Sponsor Hall: Watch demos, pick up some swag, and have a chat!
(Wed-Fri, April 19–21)

Join Daniel Bryant (Head of DevRel), Kay James (Solutions Engineer), Steve Rodda (CEO), and more surprise guests at the booth! We love to chat about all things Kubernetes, Edge Stack, and Telepresence. We also have swag and demos!

Trailers: Envoy Project Documentary

We’re super excited about the Envoy Project Documentary's premiere at 18:15 on Thursday in the Forum Center. Ambassador Labs has been involved with Envoy Proxy since its open source release back in 2016, and all of our projects and products use Envoy in some way: Emissary-ingress, Edge Stack, and Telepresence.

If you want to learn more, check out the recent movie trailer.

Can’t make it? See you online!

If you can’t make the event this year, there’s always the virtual KubeCon EU option. You can still watch a number of talks online and chat with folks via Slack. You can also join Ambassador Labs on Slack.

If you want a sneak peek of what’s to come, check out our wrap-up blogs from last year’s events:

• KubeCon EU 2022 Summary: Cloud Novices, Golden Paths, and Software Supply Chains
• KubeCon NA 2022 Summary: Maintainers, Open Standards, and the Rumoured Demise of DevOps

We hope to see you there, and stay tuned for this year’s conference wrap-up!

KubeCon EU 2023: Themes, Talks, and (Movie) Trailers was originally published in Ambassador Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.