Kubernetes and Platform Engineering Ramblings
If you’ve ever had to evolve a Kubernetes CRD’s schema — rename a field, split one field into two, change a type — you’ve probably run into the same wall I did: the only supported way to do it safely is a conversion webhook, and the only supported way to build one is to write …
Continue reading "Stop Hand-Writing Kubernetes Conversion Webhooks"
AWS Finally Listens: After 5+ Years, ECR Gets Two Game-Changing Features The Long Wait Is Over In late 2025 and early 2026, Amazon Web Services released two of the most requested features in ECR’s history: Automatic repository creation on image push (December 19th, 2025) Cross-repository layer sharing via blob mounting (January 20th, 2026) For those …
With Kubernetes 1.35, KYAML moved to beta and was enabled by default as a new output format for kubectl. The intent is clear: reduce ambiguity, improve safety, and avoid long-standing YAML footguns like implicit typing. On paper, that sounds reasonable. In practice, I think KYAML is a mistake. This post isn’t meant to be inflammatory, …
Continue reading "KYAML in Kubernetes: a solution in search of a problem?"
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"