AGENDA

16:30: Doors open

17:00: Welcome by Cloud Native Aalborg

17:10: Welcome by our host Spar Nord

17:15: "Adventures of Building a Platform as a Service for the Government" by Hans Kristian Flaatten, Platform Engineer @ NAV

18:00: Break with food

18:30: "Platform Engineering is Product Engineering (Just for Infrastructure)" by Bjørn Hald Sørensen, Product Engineer @ Understory

19:15: Networking

20:00: Doors close

Talk #1

"Adventures of Building a Platform as a Service for the Government" by Hans Kristian Flaatten, Platform Engineer @ NAV

Who said that Government Tech has to be boring? In Norway the largest administration has been using Kubernetes for over 7 years! StatefulSets had just been introduced (alpha) and RBAC was still in beta. During this time we moved from quarterly releases to thousands of continuous releases each week across our fleet of cloud native applications!

Could we replicate the success we had at NAV for other agencies? Could we provide them with a fully managed platform as a service to let them focus on building new and innovative services for their users and not reinventing the wheel by building yet another platform?

In this session Hans Kristian will share their experience building and operating one of the largest platforms of its kind in Norway providing a fully fledged application development platform for more than a 100 product teams. And how they set an ambitious goal of being able to provide their platform as a service to other agencies.

Bio:

Hans Kristian Flaatten is a CNCF Abassasor, Google Developer Expert (GDE) for Cloud, Grafana Champion and a Platform Engineer at the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV) working on Nais - a platform built to increase development speed by providing the best experience to build, run and operate applications.

Talk #2

Platform Engineering isn’t just about automation—it’s about building an experience developers actually want to use.
Drawing from the history of DevOps and the rise of platform teams, this talk will break down the principles of treating platforms as products, the challenges of designing infrastructure with a product mindset, and how these ideas translate to both internal and external developer platforms.

With real-world examples and hard-earned lessons from building both internal and external developer platforms, we’ll explore the strategic and technical decisions that shape modern Cloud Native platforms.
Just like great product teams, successful platform teams must balance value (is it solving real problems?), viability (is it sustainable for the business?), usability (is it intuitive for developers?), and feasibility (can it be built and operated effectively?).
By applying these principles, platform engineering moves beyond just enabling developers—it creates a thriving ecosystem that drives real impact.

Bio:

Bjørn Hald Sørensen is a product engineer at Understory, where he builds the external developer platform that enables users to extend the Understory booking system. He has years of experience in building internal developer platforms from Lunar—from startup to enterprise—and enjoys coding, engineering leadership, and product development.