Our talks

Browse all PlatformCon 2023 talks in one place.

Platform as Code: Simplifying developer platform design with reference architectures

Developer platforms can reduce the cognitive and operational load on software developers and thereby improve productivity and developer experience. We implemented reference architectures for developer platforms on AWS, GCP, Azure and OpenShift that allow organisations to set up an MVP of their developer platform in one day.

Mike Gatto

Sr. DevOps Engineer, McKinsey

Stephan Schneider

Digital Expert Associate Partner, McKinsey

sponsored

Impact

June 8

How to communicate the business value of platform engineering

Platform engineering initiatives can suffer due to lack of business buy-in or inadequate executive sponsorship.‍

Manjunath Bhat

VP Analyst, DevOps and Software Engineering, Gartner

sponsored

Impact

June 9

Beyond engineering: The future of platforms

Traditionally teams and groups are incentivized for outputs, so the more cycles you can run and the faster you can close requests the better. We end up optimizing internal processes at the cost of company outcomes. I posit that, ultimately, this happens because teams don’t see each other as customers. You might be thinking “But they’re not our customers, they’re our colleagues!”. Also true. This talk will explore how every team and every division in an organization can adopt a platform mindset, in which they treat what they offer to other teams as an internal product.

Manuel Pais

Co-author, Team Topologies

sponsored

Blueprints

June 9

bol.com’s journey with self-service developer platforms

This is a technical session where I’ll describe the original platform we built internally and how we replaced it with a new platform. We did this following the principles of platform engineering and by taking a product-led approach.

Anastasija Efremovska

Platform Engineer, bol.com

Quiran Storey

Software Engineer, bol.com

sponsored

Blueprints

June 8

Build abstractions, not illusions

The tech we have today is amazing, but it can also be complex. This talk reflects on two decades of building complex distributed systems, highlighting where abstractions helped and where illusions led to major disappointments.

Gregor Hohpe

Author Cloud Strategy

sponsored

Culture

June 9

It’s time to get on the platform engineering Ferris Wheel!

The DevOps Infinity Loop doesn’t serve platform engineering well enough: IaC isn’t a first-class citizen and it doesn’t aid reasoning about DevEx sufficiently. The Ferris Wheel offers ways to understand development in single-player and multi-player modes, balances attention across application and infrastructure code, emphasizes the pace layers of the SDLC, and nuances Security and Observability.

David Schweizer

Group Product Manager

sponsored

Stories

June 8

Adobe's journey into building an Internal Developer Platform

In this session, we will share our journey towards building an Adobe IDP for over 5000 developers, current challenges, insights on how we measure productivity, and learnings from one of our recently launched CI/CD products which is an integral part of the IDP.

Rohan Kapoor

Product Manager, Adobe

sponsored

Impact

June 9

Why treat your new Internal Developer Platform as a startup

Know your target market. Validate your idea. Build a minimum viable platform (MVP). Iterate and improve. Sound familiar? Even the most technically perfect solution is useless if nobody is using it. Launching a new Internal Developer Platform shares many of the same characteristics as running a startup. This means that a lot of the same product management tactics also work here! So get ready to wear many hats.

Jon Skarpeteig

Tribe Lead Global Platform, Signicat

sponsored

Stories

June 8

How ING built a platform to reach their customers faster and more meaningfully

In this presentation we will go through some of the challenges that we, as platform providers, faced during the scale of our technology platform. We’ll discuss what difficulties our consumers encountered while building products on top of our platform, and what solutions we implemented to improve the overall experience and “empower our consumers to reach their customers ever-faster and ever-more meaningfully".

Why is it so hard to create a great Platform-as-a-Product?

So you've heard that you should be applying product thinking and treating the platform as-a-product when embarking on a new platform initiative. This, however, seems much harder to do in practice than in theory! This talk explores some of the reasons behind this, looking at what the stumbling blocks are which tend to trip people up the most, as well as what can be done to counteract this.

A lawyer and an engineer walk into a bar and talk open source

Northwestern Mutual has been in technology since 1960. As we moved our workloads into AWS/Kubernetes, there were many unique challenges we encountered with the Open Source Maturity Model. This talk describes some of those challenges and the lessons learnt from that experience—some of which can help other companies in a similar boat to navigate these unpredictable waters safely.

Ravi Devineni

Sr. Director of Engineering, Northwestern Mutual

Shantanu Singh

Assistant General Counsel, The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company

sponsored

Impact

June 9

How to measure ROI and make your platform effect visible

The benefits of platform engineering might be obvious to engineers but are often hard to translate into the language of business leaders. In this talk we examine ways to measure the impact of platform engineering, steps towards defining an ROI, and methods for continuously increasing confidence through visibility. Finally, we outline how to build an ROI platform on top of engineering activities.

Ralf Huuck

Founder & CEO, Logilica

sponsored

Blueprints

June 8

Build golden paths for day 50, not for day 1!

When most people think about creating golden paths, they think about the simple scaffolding use case of a new service or resource. However, this leaves out the remaining 99% of golden paths you can and should design for your developers. Here’s how to design sustainable golden paths that help both developers and platform engineers.

Building the Perfect platform™ in the midst of Everything Else™

Join our talk for a behind-the-scenes look at how our small DevOps team is approaching the huge challenge of building our ideal platform, in the midst of a high-paced department of over 60 engineers. We’ll cover how we carved time out for it, our design process, and our strategy for a smooth, progressive transition.

Mathieu Frenette

Director of DevOps, nesto

sponsored

Impact

June 9

Quantifying platform engineering impact at Wise

In this talk we’ll be sharing our approach to measuring and quantifying the impact of our platform tribe. Based on our four Northstar KPIs (productivity, stability, efficiency and risk), I will share how we translate improvements in our KPIs to financial impact that the business understands.

Lambros Charissis

Sr. Technical Product Manager, Wise

sponsored

Stories

June 9

Building a platform for thousands of bots in the cloud

We share our journey of building an Internal Developer Platform on AWS, which started over eight years at Ocado Technology. From e-commerce to warehouse robotics, we have a wide variety of workloads that developers run. In this talk you’ll learn the key components of a successful platform, the vital metrics every platform engineer should know, and how we’ve used managed cloud services to do the heavy lifting.‍

Alex Howard Whitaker

Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer, Ocado Technology

sponsored

Stories

June 8

Building an Internal Developer Platform in a hybrid cloud scenario

Learn how we implemented platform engineering in the Tech department of a large scale-up in the e-commerce luxury fashion market. Discover where we were coming from, the errors we made, the corrections we implemented, and the key challenges. We’ll discuss how platform engineering is implemented and the roles of DevOps Engineers and Senior Reliability Engineers.

Leonardo Romanato

Global Head of DevOps Platform, Yoox Net-A-Porter

sponsored

Stories

June 9

IDPs after school: A 2017 proto-platform story

In 2017 both Sr. Sysadmins at a small startup retired and the burden of DevOps fell to a single high-school engineer. With a rapidly growing product and few infrastructure engineering resources, there was a clear need for a non-traditional DevOps setup, and so an early IDP was born.

Johnny Dallas

Co-Founder & CEO, Zeet.co

sponsored

Tech

June 9

How to eliminate config drift between environments

This session will discuss the benefits of Score, an open-source project that provides a developer-centric and platform-agnostic workload specification to standardize configuration management, improves developer productivity, and reduce the risk of inconsistencies across different environments.

Susa Tünker

Product Manager, Humanitec

sponsored

Blueprints

June 9

Streamlining developer platform design with reference architectures: Google Cloud use case

Developer platforms have the potential to enhance productivity and improve the experience of software developers by reducing their cognitive and operational burden. We have successfully implemented reference architectures for developer platforms on leading cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure, and OpenShift. In this talk, I will focus on the GCP reference architecture.

Marco Marulli

Principal Delivery Lead II, McKinsey & Company

sponsored

Culture

June 9

Unleash the power of technical empathy

Technical empathy provides a shift in mindset and culture that cultivates greater clarity of responsibility, increases the empowerment of both implementers and integrators, and ultimately helps build and maintain trust between software delivery teams.

Jeff Doolittle

Sr. Software Architect, Trimble

sponsored

Stories

June 9

Improving developer productivity with Platform as a Product

Discover how Mercedes-Benz is using VMware TAS based on Cloud Foundry and platform engineering to improve developer productivity in a product-oriented approach. Join us at PlatformCon 2023 to learn from industry experts and optimize your platform for maximum efficiency.

Roland Fetscher

Platform Architect, Mercedes-Benz AG

Thomas Müller

Product Owner, Mercedes Benz Group AG

sponsored

Blueprints

June 9

A blueprint for enabling multi-tenancy for production Kubernetes clusters

Learn about best practices to successfully enable a shared multi-tenant cluster model in your enterprise to save on costs, while still being able to meet your developer self-service and organizational requirements in terms of governance and security.

Naveen Chakrapani

Director of Product Management, Rafay Systems

sponsored

Stories

June 8

When the fit for everyone isn’t the right fit for you

This talk will encourage engineers to pause and approach their solutions with caution, realizing that the fit for everyone may not be right for them. We’ll discuss the reasons why a new technology adoption could fail, a few basic checklists to keep handy when evaluating tech stack options, critical aspects to consider, and architectural patterns that have emerged that could help you get started.

Maanasa Madiraju

Principal Application Engineer, Discover Financial Services

sponsored

Tech

June 8

Simplified infrastructure with Istio (yes, really!)

Istio is known by many names: Service Mesh, API Gateway, Nightmare-Inducing-Software. It has been criticized for being very complex and difficult to use. In Signicat, Istio represents the boundary between platform teams and service teams and replaces a number of other tools and processes. The result for us was more features with fewer moving parts!

Jon Skarpeteig

Tribe Lead Global Platform, Signicat

sponsored

Culture

June 9

The future of Ops is platform engineering

A lot of flamebait has been dropped about how platform engineering means that "DEVOPS IS DEAD!#@!" Stuff and nonsense. Platform engineering is what you get once you fully commit to the idea that software engineers should own their code in production. It's about the *convergence* of developers and Ops in the glorious future, where every engineer writes code and owns what they write.

"Treat your Platform as a product" is a paradigm that also includes testing it as a usual software product. In this talk, I'll go over modern software testing approaches and how they apply to platforms. I'll also provide insights on how Humanitec is testing its platform orchestrator.‍

Nils Balkow-Tychsen

Principal Engineer, Humanitec

sponsored

Culture

June 9

7 lessons from 7 years of running platforms

We can learn a lot from how organizations like Mercedes-Benz, JP Morgan Chase, the US Air Force, and others have built and run their platforms over recent years. This talk covers seven best practices learned at these organizations such as: Platform marketing and advocacy, tactics to scale from one team to hundreds, support methods, finding developer bottlenecks, and more.

Michael Coté

Sr. Member of Technical Staff, VMware

sponsored

Culture

June 8

How Realtor.com created a platform culture that lasts

Realtor.com went from a culture where you couldn’t say the word “platform” to now, a culture that encourages it. While the journey wasn’t a straightforward path, we are now well on our way to creating a real estate platform that differentiates and allows us to react fast to market and end-user needs.

Suzy Julius

SVP of Product and Engineering, Platforms, Realtor.com

sponsored

Tech

June 9

Unlock the power of versioned data in DynamoDB

In this talk, we will delve into the techniques and best practices for versioning data in Amazon DynamoDB, particularly with more complex directed graph data structures. Join us and gain an in-depth understanding of how to harness the full potential of your versionable data in a scalable and efficient manner.

Andrew Youngwerth

Senior Software Engineer, Courier

sponsored

Tech

June 9

Building scalable and reliable data pipelines using Debezium and Kafka

Data pipelines are used to perform data integration, which is the process of bringing together data from multiple sources to provide a complete and accurate dataset for business intelligence (BI), data analysis, and other applications. In this talk, we will cover this process.

Karan Thakur

Site Reliability Engineer, Moss

sponsored

Culture

June 8

From infrastructure to app deployment: Where does a platform start and end?

Platform engineering as a practice is growing in popularity but as with any new idea, confusion abounds. What exactly is a platform and where do the boundaries of responsibility lie? Should a platform be considered as a way for developers to provision the infrastructure they need or should it offer more? Must it be highly opinionated or instead allow teams to make any and all technology choices?

Is your platform ready for AI?

Discover how AI-ready platforms revolutionize software development by streamlining workflows and fostering collaboration between human developers and AI assistants. Join us as we unveil the benefits, challenges, and future of AI-assisted development, empowering you to harness its potential for greater efficiency and productivity in your projects.

Hugh McKee

Developer Advocate, Lightbend

sponsored

Impact

June 8

From cloud cost management to FinOps

By creating self-serve platform capability, we managed to successfully empower engineering teams to maximise their resource costs and usage. The overall forecasted saving figure for the year is around 50% compared to the previous year just by creating the right balance between information availability and actionability.

Suraj Narwade

Sr. Platform Engineer, RVU

Automating away bugs with Error Prone in practice

Error Prone is a powerful tool for detecting and preventing bugs and anti-patterns in Java codebases. It is capable of automatically suggesting and applying fixes at scale. This talk is a practical guide on how to introduce Error Prone in your codebase, enabling large-scale automated refactoring.

Rick Ossendrijver

Software Engineer - Java Platform team, Picnic Technologies

sponsored

Culture

June 8

DevEx is NOT DevOps: Investing in developer enablement to reduce barriers to continuous delivery

This talk will clarify the difference between developer experience (DevEx) and DevOps practices, and clearly outline what a DevEx investment should look like in a modern enterprise. We will discuss three specific areas of DevEx investment relating to developer onboarding, day-to-day, and modernization.

Vilas Veeraraghavan

Sr. Director of Engineering, DevEx, BILL

sponsored

Culture

June 8

FinOps: More than just cloud resources and tooling

Dev-Aware FinOps is a novel approach to both engineering cost optimization and reporting. In this talk we’ll introduce this emerging category that all engineering leaders should know and think about. We’ll show how modern tooling leverages data to understand investment in key projects and optimize developer team efficiency, without the unnecessary friction and toil.

Lessons learned when taming Kubernetes for on-demand environments

At OLX Autos, we are running a homegrown Internal Developer Platform that leverages Kubernetes to spin up on-demand environments, each housing more than 180 microservices. Managing 10 to 200 environments or 20k+ pods has been an interesting journey for us, filled with unique challenges and opportunities. I'd like to share our learnings while running on-demand environments at scale on Kubernetes.

Ravishen Jain

Sr. Platform Engineer, OLX Autos

sponsored

Culture

June 9

Empathy for the other

Language is important but outcomes are more important than labels, especially labels which try to draw crisp lines and have the potential to diminish collaboration. Othering is toxic. Let's look at some ways to appreciate and amplify the work of others.

Nathen Harvey

Developer Advocate, DORA & Google Cloud

sponsored

Stories

June 9

Where we went wrong in building a self-service platform on Kubernetes

In building a self-service platform on Kubernetes, we aimed to give application developers autonomy over their own services. But did we go too far in giving developers control? Join us as we explore how to find the right balance between standardization and flexibility when building a self-service platform.

Reynis Vazquez-Guzman

Sr. Software Engineer, Affirm

sponsored

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Conference tracks

Stories

Learn from practitioners who built platforms for real-life enterprise use cases. These talks showcase the platform journey – from initial steps to building it and rolling it out across the engineering organization.

Tech

Dive deep into the technical backbone of developer platforms. This track explores how platform teams solve specific problems with specific tools – from Kubernetes to IaC, service catalogs and GitOps.

Blueprints

Explore tried and true platform blueprints and reference architectures. These talks uncover key design considerations and explore how to effectively combine tools for your developer platform.

Culture

Developer platforms don’t live in a vacuum. They are built by engineers for other engineers. This track discusses the cultural aspects of platform engineering, from product management to how it relates to DevOps and SRE.

Impact

Discover the impact and business value platform engineering initiatives deliver. Hear C-level perspectives on how their platform impacted key metrics and practitioners on how they secured executive buy-in.

Our talks

Conference tracks

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