Kubernetes and Platform Engineering Ramblings
The evolution of developer platforms has always been about providing the right abstractions at the right time. But what if your platform could not just serve humans through beautiful UIs, but also empower AI agents to interact with your business logic in a standardized, secure way? This is the promise of Backstage’s recent integration with …
For years, VI admins have relied on vROPS—now called VMware Cloud Foundation Operations (VCF Operations)—to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their environments. But working with these tools often means context switching, learning multiple interfaces, and spending valuable time digging through dashboards to find the right piece of data. What if you could talk to your infrastructure …
Continue reading "Bringing the Power of MCPs to the VI Admins"
2 of my favorite CNCF projects are Backstage and Crossplane. just under 6 months ago we released the first versions of our Backstage plugins which integrate Crossplane and Backstage to the community. It has been great to see the growing interest and adoption of the plugins over the past few months. With over 3.5k downloads …
Continue reading "Crossing Planes – Enhanced Backstage + Crossplane Integration"
One of the things i go through periodically is the new projects added to the CNCF. This is a great way to see some really cool and awesome OpenSource software! As i was going through the recently added projects I found one that really clicked, an I was super excited to try it out!The project …
What has changed The initial feedback regarding the Backstage plugins we built which can be found here has been really great especially for the Crossplane related plugins! While the initial proof of concept work showed potential, it was heavily in need for better performance, enhanced functionality, and better integrations between the different parts of the …
Continue reading "Enhancing The Backstage Plugins For Crossplane"
In the platform engineering space, two of the most impactful and interesting tools are Backstage and Crossplane. In this post, we will discuss and demonstrate how the two tools can be integrated to provide a great baseline for the ultimate developer platform. What is Backstage Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals. It …
One of the biggest challenges in the industry as a whole and in the DevOps world today in particular is vulnerability management. As we in the industry are trying to implement better security practices and to evolve the secure software supply chain whether by choice or by necessity due to governmental or industry regulations and …
Continue reading "Shift Down Security with KubeScape’s VEX Generation"
One of the things I have a huge issue with in the industry today, is the insistence on pushing a shift left approach. According to the CNCF glossary, Shift Left is the practice of implementing tests, security, or other development practices early in the software development lifecycle rather than towards the end. While this sounds …
Continue reading "Stop Shifting Left, Shift Down to your platform"
ClusterAPI is becoming the standard approach for deploying Kubernetes clusters no matter which infrastructure provider you want to run on, whether that be a public cloud provider like AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, Akamai etc., a virtualization platform like vSphere, Proxmox, Openstack, etc., or bare metal servers using a management layer like Metal3, Tinkerbell, Canonical MaaS …
Continue reading "Advanced autoscaling of Cluster API based clusters"
Recently a colleague of mine wrote 2 great blog posts (blog-1, blog-2) regarding configuration of TAP to issue certificates signed by ADCS. The solution he documented utilizes Hashicorp Vault as an intermediate CA between cert-manager and ADCS. This approach is a very scalable and simple approach which is very well suited for production setups. The …
Continue reading "Integrating Active Directory CA (ADCS) with TAP"