Keynote: Beyond Operations: Scaling Platform Engineering in the CNCF Community - Abby Bangser

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Keynote: Beyond Operations: Scaling Platform Engineering in the CNCF Community - Abby Bangser, Principal Engineer, Syntasso

Cloud native has always been about more than technology. Each wave of innovation, from early projects reshaping deployment to today’s higher-level platforms, has combined technical progress with shifts in how organisations deliver value. Yet too often these movements narrow into tool-centric quick fixes.
Platform engineering sits at these crossroads. On one side it risks becoming another hype cycle, but on the other it offers a way out of today’s fragmented, unsustainable reality.

This keynote explores how decades of platform experience paired with the Linux Foundation and CNCF are guiding this evolution through community groups, white papers, and foundational technologies. It will challenge us to see platform engineering not as another operational trend, but as a higher-level abstraction, one that highlights organisational patterns, tackles interoperability, and informs architectural choices to ensure platforms deliver lasting value.