8 Years of Kubernetes Platform Evolution - Do's and Don'ts

Learn from eight years of real-world Kubernetes platform evolution through this 13-minute conference talk that chronicles the journey from experimental self-hosted clusters to managing 30+ production clusters across four regions. Discover the strategic and technical milestones that shaped an internal platform now serving over 5,000 developers and handling 400,000 requests per second. Explore the transition from manual control plane management and experimental developer abstractions to implementing managed control planes and seamless in-place upgrades. Gain insights into critical decisions around blue-green deployment strategies, cluster scaling approaches, multitenancy tradeoffs, and risk management through real-world examples including FiaaS adoption, Common Platform UI implementation, and nginx ingress controller challenges. Understand how platform maturity evolves in high-scale environments and learn practical do's and don'ts for building sustainable Kubernetes platforms in complex, fast-paced organizations, including how Hyrum's Law manifests in production systems.