Platform Wars - The Battle Between Golden Paths and Spaghetti Pipelines

Explore the complex realities of internal developer platforms in this 40-minute conference talk that examines the gap between platform engineering promises and practical implementation challenges. Discover how well-intentioned golden paths can transform into tangled webs of YAML configurations, Bash scripts, and tool sprawl that hinder rather than help development teams. Learn about the critical platform democracy challenges that represent the true crisis in modern platform engineering, where developer experience often suffers despite good intentions. Examine open-source tooling and cloud-native strategies designed to mitigate platform crisis situations while maintaining disciplined paved paths for software delivery. Analyze real-world stories and anti-patterns that illustrate both the beneficial and problematic aspects of OSS-powered platform engineering implementations. Understand how to identify potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies within your technology stack that may be silently undermining development velocity and team productivity.