Event language
UI language
Platform engineering is the hottest trend in infrastructure, but most teams struggle with the same question: how do you actually build an Internal Developer Platform? An IDP isn't a single tool—it's an architecture with multiple components working together.<br>The challenge: you need a developer portal for self-service, a provisioning engine for infrastructure, and orchestration to tie them together. Most teams either buy expensive proprietary platforms or get stuck building brittle custom integrations that never reach production.<br>This talk presents a complete, production-ready IDP reference architecture built entirely with open-source CNCF projects. We'll break down the three core components: Backstage as the developer portal (the "what developers see"), k0rdent as the provisioning API (the "control plane"), and Cluster API as the infrastructure engine (the "what actually creates clusters").<br>You'll see the full cycle: how developers request clusters through Backstage templates, how those requests flow to k0rdent's API, how k0rdent translates them into CAPI resources, and how CAPI provisions across AWS, Azure, or on-prem. We'll cover the hard parts: API contracts between components, handling async provisioning in a UI, RBAC for multi-tenant self-service, and graceful failure handling.
