Platform Engineering 101: Building Internal Developer Platforms

Track: Cloud Native

Abstract

Tell us what you want, what you really, really want… Developer productivity and reduced cognitive load, of course!

In our world of cloud-native Java development and shift-left mentality, developers are now drowning! They have an endless flood of tasks and responsibilities on their shoulders, whilst battling an ever-increasing sea of potential technologies and tools to use. Change is needed! So, build a dam with us through platform engineering and IDPs.

In this workshop, we’ll explore the concepts of platform engineering and Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and how they can help to relieve the cognitive load on developers, help to standardize technologies and tools used throughout an organization, streamline CI/CD pipelines and in essence enable greater developer productivity. We’ll investigate how this can all be achieved in the cloud, with example applications running in OpenShift, with Red Hat Developer Hub as the basis of our IDP. Throughout this workshop, you’ll learn how to utilize Red Hat Developer Hub, an implementation of the Backstage CNCF project, to create an IDP and then how this can be shared with development teams to enable rapid, easy deployment of their applications. We’ll demo this with a range of technologies, runtimes and tools to really showcase just how flexible and personalised these IDPs can be to your own organization and application needs.

Grace Jansen

Grace is a Java Champion and Developer Advocate at IBM, working with open source Java and cloud technologies. Grace enjoys bringing a varied perspective to her projects and using her knowledge of biological systems to simplify complex software patterns and architectures. As a developer advocate, Grace builds POC’s, demos and sample applications, and writes guides and tutorials. She is a regular presentor at international technology conferences and has recently authored a book on reactive systems. Grace also has a keen passion for encouraging more women into STEM and especially Technology careers.

Kevin Dubois

Kevin is a Java Champion, software engineer, author and international speaker with a passion for Open Source, Java, and Cloud Native Development & Deployment practices. He currently works as developer advocate at Red Hat where he gets to enjoy working with Open Source projects and improving the developer experience. He previously worked as a (lead) software engineer at a variety of organizations across the world ranging from small startups to large enterprises and even government agencies. Kevin is actively involved in Open Source communities, contributing to projects such as Quarkus, Knative, Apache Camel, and Podman (Desktop). He is also a member of the Belgian CNCF and the Belgian Java User Group. Kevin speaks English, Dutch, French and Italian fluently and is currently based in Belgium, having lived in Italy and the USA as well. In his free time you can find Kevin somewhere in the wild hiking, gravel biking, snowboarding or packrafting.