Build a cloud native engineering platform in a day

Building and running software in the cloud can overwhelm developers with many tools and settings. Platform engineering fixes this by giving teams one open-source, cloud native platform that hides the hard parts and offers ready-made golden paths. This approach lowers cognitive load and helps developers ship faster.

Self-service platforms are on the rise and a lot of companies are building them from scratch hoping their developers will come and use it. We believe you can use existing open-source tools to compose a platform and spend your time designing the services you want to offer to your developers.

In this full-day workshop you will build such a platform, starting on a small local Kubernetes cluster and finishing on Azure, setting up the groundwork so you can take the lessons back to your workplace to focus on implementing the services that your company needs.

What we will cover:

Build a cloud native internal engineering platform with CNCF projects & Kubernetes clusters created locally for zero-cost experiments, then repeated on Azure Kubernetes Service for real world scale.

Adopt GitOps with Argo CD so the cluster always follows what is in Git, giving safe and fast releases.

Learn about tools such as Azure Service Operator, Crossplane, Terranetes & KRO and how they can help you design automated self-service scenarios.

Create golden path templates in Backstage that let a developer generate a new service repo, pipeline, and manifests in one click.

Show a clear return on investment and gather facts you can use to convince leaders to fund a platform team.

Deploy a service from commit to traffic and watch every step in the portal and GitOps dashboard, proving the value in minutes.

Learning objectives:

- Learn how platform engineering can cut developer cognitive load by providing a single self-service engineering platform.

- Automate build and release with GitOps, Argo CD, and Backstage templates.

- Learn to navigate the CNCF landscape regarding platform engineering with tools like Argo, Crossplane, Backstage, Azure Service Operator, Terranetes & KRO

- Build a short business case that secures support for a platform team in your company.

Prerequisites

- A laptop that can run Docker
- A GitHub account
- Basic command-line knowledge
- An Azure Account you can use
- Any existing Kubernetes knowledge would speed things up but is not required