KubeCon North America 2024 recap: AI and Platform Engineering all the things
It should surprise nobody that KubeCon North America this year (2024) was basically - Platform Engineering and AI all the things!
At the start of the week the Arctir team attended both the Backstage and Platform Engineering Co-located events followed by the big show: KubeCon itself.
Backstage is moving fast and a lot of exciting changes are coming into (and recently landed in) upstream. The discussions on Tuesday fell into two camps: the contributors and user adoption. On the contributor side a key topic was the new plugin systems: the generally available backend implementation, and the still-alpha-but-getting-really-close frontend system. These are key for our platform and the project itself. Lot's of excitement about the flexibility of the new systems, but a lot of work is still needed in both the frontend system and all the downstream plugins that will consume these APIs.
We've already baked many recent changes into Flightdeck and are actively contributing to upstream. The upstream roadmap covering these topics in depth can be found here: https://backstage.io/docs/overview/roadmap/
On the adoption side we heard from a number of teams that the amount of effort and time-to-value for Backstage adoption was higher than they'd like. Two of the seemingly universal challenges here overlap with topics at Platform Engineering Day: a focus on developer enablement/education, particularly with regard to internal tool variety.
Put simply, how do you get developers bought in, and how do you build a platform around a seemingly endless variety of internal tools that developers use?
An underpinning issue here is developer overload. Folks are still being asked to learn and understand too large of a surface area. It turns out that shift-left doesn't solve everything. Our favorite talk covering some of this came from David Grizzanti at the New York Times:
Another talk pushing the edge on what is possible these days came from Hugo Smitter at FICO:
We are huge fans of both Crossplane and Dapr, so seeing this approach made us smile.
As the larger crowd showed up, and the vendor area started getting swarmed, the hallway track built on the themes of the Co-located event with a twist.
Over the past couple of years a large number of companies have been doing more with less in light of layoffs and restructuring. As a result, many had been looking for quick wins and not necessarily large projects, but that sentiment seemed to be turning the corner with a number of large scale projects being floated by conference goers.
A number of those discussions, understandably, included AI deployments and integrations. Top of mind for everyone building an AI platform is NVIDIA, and they had a really good talk about how they maintain their GeForce NOW GPU environment (Ryan Hallisey and Piotr Prokop):
In a similar vein to building environments for AI workloads, this talk by Zoram Thanga and Peter Ableda at Cloudera gives some good considerations around how to think about requirements and approach evolution:
Both AI workloads and Platform Engineering with fairly niche even just 3-4 years ago. It was interesting and encouraging to hear how folks are thinking about how these two, previously-nascent, movements are now coming together.
A number of talks (including those above) cover what we'd define as advanced use cases, but it was clear to us, through our hallway track conversations, that the majority of teams are still very early in this journey.
And, of course, questions surrounding DevOps and Platform Engineering abounded. Is Platform Engineering an evolution of DevOps? A complementary team? Where does SRE fit in?
We have some thoughts on this, and, while there were are ton of fantastic talks on building platforms and improving specific scenarios, most of it was geared towards teams that are fairly far along in their journey. With this in mind, we are working on entry-level education content covering many of these topics, which we anticipate delivering in early 2025.
Save the best for last? We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the Backstage Maintainer talk from Ben Lambert and Patrik Oldsberg at Spotify:
We're really excited about the changes coming to Backstage, and can't wait to integrate (even more of) these changes for our users.
