KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025

What if developers could create fully isolated, production-like environments—directly from Backstage—with just a click?

This talk showcases Backstage as a powerful self-service platform to spin up vClusters representing Dev, Test, and Prod environments. Each virtual cluster is fully GitOps-managed with FluxCD, automatically pulling from specific Git branches to mirror real deployment stages.

The environments can be provisioned on-demand—whether on a developer’s local laptop (using WSL), a centralized server, or a remote EKS cluster—offering flexibility and production-like confidence at every stage.

We’ll deep-dive into building this “staging system” where code is tested safely before ever reaching customers, while giving developers the speed and autonomy they crave—all powered by Backstage.

By the end of the session, you’ll learn how to build a practical, cloud-native staging system to test, validate, and promote code safely—before your customers ever see it.

Platform engineering continues to evolve as a critical discipline for modern software development. However, infrastructure complexity is slowing down its momentum. The software infrastructure is a complex web of interrelated entities that spans much beyond a simple software catalog and cloud resources. Such infrastructure management is often driven by a team’s understanding of the implicit relationship between these entities. This is not scalable and often leads to operational challenges and loss of developer productivity. Knowledge graphs can build relationships between entities from diverse infrastructure sources and make explicit what was previously implicit knowledge. It elevates the developer productivity and its neglected counterpart - operational excellence. This talk will discuss the importance of knowledge graphs and the strategies and mental models that will help in building knowledge graphs around the software infrastructure.

Providing application teams with a self-service way of deploying applications and their dependencies often means that platform administrators have to hide the implementation details of the platform via simple to consume APIs. In the case of Kubernetes this usually means having to deploy Custom Resource Definition that are either 3rd party or custom built in-house. These CRD’s in addition to allowing Kubernetes users to manage non-Kubernetes objects via the Kubernetes Resources Model (Aka YAML file), they also allow abstracting away the details of how some resources get created and managed.

In this session, you'll learn how KRO allows platform teams to:
- Create high-level APIs that reduce YAML complexity while maintaining flexibility
- Support both native Kubernetes and cloud-specific resources for more efficient orchestration
- Integrate KRO into your Kubernetes workflows for better scalability and simplicity

As a developer, are you overwhelmed by the growing number of tools just to ship code? Struggling with visibility into cost, performance, and reliability? Torn between enabling developer autonomy and enforcing governance? The answer to all these challenges lies in building an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) like a real product. With clear ownership, iteration, and a focus on your internal users—you solve for both scale and usability. An IDP unifies onboarding, CI/CD, infrastructure provisioning, observability, cost visibility, and more.
You’ll learn how an IDP can streamline the entire developer journey while embedding security and operational best practices by design. We’ll discuss prioritising Developer Experience (DevEx), aligning platform capabilities with developer needs, and avoiding becoming a bottleneck.
Whether you’re a platform engineer or an engineering leader, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to make your platform a true enabler at scale.

Local dev setups worked fine when teams were small. But when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of developers, things start to break - slow onboarding, dependency hell, inconsistent environments, and wasted compute cycles.

Cloud Developer Environments (CDEs) promise instant, reproducible workspaces, but shifting from local machines to cloud-first workflows is easier said than done. Latency, security, adoption hurdles, and cost can turn a promising initiative into an operational headache.

This talk will go deep into:

* Why local dev is unsustainable—from wasted CPU cycles to lost engineering hours.
* How cloud environments reduce friction—ephemeral, pre-configured workspaces that just work.
* Optimizing for speed—pre-warmed environments, AI-assisted debugging, and workload-aware compute allocation.
* Measuring impact—tracking developer velocity, infra costs, and sustainability improvements.
* Lessons from real-world rollouts—what works, what breaks, and how to get buy-in.

Infrastructure teams have long been a staple of large enterprises, responsible for creating and managing cloud and on-premises resources. However, each team often operates with its own user interface, making it difficult for developers to access the infrastructure they need efficiently. How can we enhance the developer experience while enabling infrastructure teams to offer products more effectively?

This talk will showcase how Allianz Technology leverages the Kubernetes ecosystem and open-source software to build an infrastructure-as-code platform powered by over 1,000 Kubernetes control planes. This approach simplifies the developer experience through customized APIs while providing infrastructure engineers with a scalable framework for delivering infrastructure products and gaining insights for continuous improvement.

In today's fast-paced development landscape, maintaining reliable and up-to-date test environments is crucial yet challenging. Join us as we share our journey of evolving from traditional long-running test environments to testing directly in production, and eventually achieving scalable and ephemeral test environments for platform builders as well as application teams.

- Are you content with the current state of your test environments?
- Do you find yourself relying on outdated, long-running staging and test environments?
- How do you handle the risks of data staleness and unexpected environment corruption?

In this talk, we will go into the strategies and tools that helped us to transition to ephemeral test environments, highlighting the benefits and challenges encountered along the way. We aim to provide you with practical steps to improve the scalability and reliability of your own testing frameworks.