AGENDA:

16:30: Doors open

17:00: Welcome by Cloud Native Aalborg

17:05: Welcome by our host - Spar Nord

17:10:“Why Backstage isn’t the answer to your problems" by Bjørn Hald Sørensen, Head of Tech @ Lunar

17:55: Break with food

18:30: “Supercharge your Kubernetes Platform with Carvel” by Thomas Vitale, Systematic

19:15: Networking

20:00: Thank you and goodnight

TALK 1: 

“Why Backstage isn’t the answer to your problems"  by Bjørn Hald Sørensen, Head of Tech @ Lunar

Everyone is talking about Platform Engineering, Internal Developer Portals, and the Backstage project created by Spotify. It seems to solve everyone’s problems and be a silver bullet to scaling a modern technology stack. But often a portal is not the solution you should spend time adopting.

This talk will walk through a multitude of real-world scenarios where Backstage is not the answer. The purpose is to cut through the buzz and focus on the problems organizations face when scaling up or attempting to optimize their ways of working.

We will conclude with a summary of the problems and briefly discuss what Backstage is good at solving and also take a look at how Lunar leverages Backstage to empower our engineers. It turns out that Backstage is a great tool for some very specific problems like understanding the software landscape or automating frequent tedious processes.

Bio:

Bjørn is the Head of Technology in the Empower organization of Lunar which focuses on developer experience, cloud operations, data platform, and security.

He is a co-creator of the Lunar development platform which enables developers to deliver software continually through a GitOps-based Kubernetes platform fast and safely to Lunar users. Furthermore, he contributes to multiple CNCF projects such as Backstage, and Linkerd.

TALK 2: 

“Supercharge your Kubernetes Platform with Carvel” by Thomas Vitale, Systematic

Working with Kubernetes and building a secure platform on top of it is challenging. First, you’ll need a way to group Kubernetes resources and apply changes predictably. Are you sure you approved all the changes reconciled by Kubernetes? I’ll demonstrate how that’s often not true.

Your apps will require a different configuration across environments. Wouldn’t it be great to have a way to use both templating and overlays that is also maintainable and YAML-native? What about air-gapped environments? You’ll need to distribute and relocate manifests and OCI artifacts safely.

And when building an internal platform, you’ll need to package all the different capabilities in an efficient and composable API, supporting GitOps and providing extensibility. This session will present a modular strategy with Carvel to solve those issues and help you improve your cloud native strategy on Kubernetes.

Bio:

Thomas Vitale is a software engineer and architect focused on building cloud native, resilient, and secure applications and platforms. He works at Systematic (Denmark) and is the author of “Cloud Native Spring in Action” (Manning). Thomas likes contributing to open source projects in the Java and cloud native space (Spring, Carvel, Cartographer, Buildpacks, TAG App Delivery), and sharing knowledge with the community. His speaking gigs include KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, KCD, Devoxx, and GOTO.