Platform journeys: Paving goldens paths and choosing the right abstractions

AGENDA

16:30: Doors open

17:00: Welcome by Cloud Native Aarhus

17:10: Welcome by our hosts Danske Commodities

17:15: Here Be Dragons: The Gravel Road to the Golden Path by Ole Hejlskov, Senior Product Manager @ Danske Commodities

18:00: Break with food

18:30: Decentralized vs Centralized Platform Abstractions: A Journey from Helm to Crossplane by Patrick Kerwood, Senior Platform Engineer @ JYSK

19:15: Networking

20:00: Doors close

Talk#1: Here Be Dragons: The Gravel Road to the Golden Path

Internal Developer Platforms, Infrastructure as Code, and Kubernetes have dominated Developer Experience conversations for years, but there is no universal blueprint. Every organisation has to adapt these ideas to its own constraints, technology landscape, and operating model.

Our internal developer platform did not start with a shiny platform engineering vision. It started with friction, inconsistency, and an on-prem setup that was becoming harder and harder to scale. In this talk, we will explore how these pain points pushed us toward Kubernetes, automation, orchestration, and ultimately a Golden Path that aims to make everyday development simpler and more consistent. This is a story about transformation, not theory: why we had to change, what worked, what did not, the challenges we met along the way, and what we learned while moving from traditional on-prem infrastructure toward a modern platform model for software engineers, data engineers, and quantitative analysts. Our Golden Path isn't complete yet, but the direction is clear: Reduce friction, reduce cognitive load, automate as much as possible, and make it easier for developers to focus on delivering value.

Ole Hejlskov is a Senior Product Manager at Danske Commodities, where he sets the strategic direction for the Developer Experience team. He has spent more than a decade working with Developer Experience and Developer Relations, with a strong focus on making developers more productive and happier.

Talk #2: Decentralized vs Centralized Platform Abstractions: A Journey from Helm to Crossplane

At JYSK, we’re in the middle of building a brand-new Internal Developer Platform and quickly ran into a big question: where do we actually want to put our abstractions?

For years, Helm has been the go-to tool for packaging and abstracting complex Kubernetes resources. It’s flexible and familiar, but decentralizing templating logic across teams comes with its trade-offs.

With Crossplane v2, a more centralized model has become a realistic alternative, giving platform teams more control while introducing a different set of trade-offs. Crossplane also brings the advantage of managing cloud resources in Kubernetes, enabling you to get rid of that pesky Terraform process.

In this talk, we’ll go through the differences between creating abstractions with Helm and Crossplane, and explore the pros and cons of going decentralized vs. centralized. If you’re building (or rethinking) your platform, this should give you some useful perspectives.

Patrick Kerwood, Senior Platform Engineer @ JYSK