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K8s, but make it green: Platform Engineering takes Milano

Leonardo Romanato, Global Head of DevOps and Platform Services at YOOX NET-A-PORTER

On March 28th we had our first in-person Platform Engineering Meetup in Italy. 🇮🇹 ~30 platform engineering enthusiasts gathered together in Mia-Platform’s Milano offices to dive into kube-green, GitOps setups, and how to build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP).

Here are my highlights:

🥐 Mia-Platform’s Davide Bianchi presented his work on kube-green, an open-source K8s controller. It aims to reduce the carbon footprint of cloud-native applications.

The talk raised the community’s awareness of how our choice of infrastructure management can help (or hurt) our environment, reduce CO2 emissions, and minimize the eco-footprint of K8s infrastructure.

My favorite part of the talk was the deep-dive on how choosing green energy over traditional energy, or simply shutting down some pods for the weekends, can cut costs and save energy. 🍃

🥐 Red Hat’s Raffaele Spazzoli and Natale Vinto shared their best practices for building an IDP. They organized their design tips around four key pillars:

• Onboarding. This includes all the tasks a developer must do to get their team and application on the platform. First impressions matter, so make it count!
• Code time. A quick workstation setup and a fast and reliable inner loop improve both developer experience (DevEx) and productivity.
• Build time. A comprehensive and reliable CI/CD process is one of the most important components of team productivity and application reliability.
• Run time. Teams need self-serviceable and observable infrastructure in order to be fully autonomous.

The Red Hat team also shared this handy GitOps bag of tricks:

The first in-person Italian Meetup was a great success! It demonstrates just how much platform engineering is taking off all around the world. 🚀

Want to get involved in the Platform Engineering community or host an in-person Meetup in your city? Shoot an email to giulia@platformengineering.org to get started. 📧

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 What’s the difference between DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering? I dove in with Software Daily’s Sean Falconer 👇

🥐 Tabloid is a “turing-complete programming language for writing programs in the style of clickbait news headlines.” Useless but amusing. 🤣

🥐 Conducting user research for your platform? You’ll want to take good notes. Check out these quick tips to boost your notetaking game.

🥐 OpenAI scaled their K8s clusters to 7,500 nodes and shared what they learnedfrom the process with the community.

Last but not least, have you joined the Platform Engineering Slack channel? If not, you're missing out. Here are the highlights:

• Why are Kubernetes upgrades so challenging?
• How do I host backstage.io for a small team?
• What are the main KPIs you track for IDPs and tools?
• How do you give developers access to deployed services in K8s?

POLL: Do you think AI tools like k8sgpt will become the future of software engineering?

Yes

No

Unsure

And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project. So if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

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