No more guesswork: a Kubernetes controller for platform engineering

Delivering artifacts across environments remains a complex challenge in today’s cloud-native landscape - especially when managing multiple artifact types such as applications, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and large language models (LLMs), all under tight compliance and dependency constraints. In this talk, Denys Vasyliev shares how his team migrated their release process to Kubernetes-native patterns using custom controllers, GitOps workflows, and tools like the Application custom resource definition (CRD), OCI, Flux, and OpenTofu. The result is a unified promotion pipeline that supports diverse workloads across environments with traceability and control. To enhance usability and observability, the controllers were extended with APIs, a CLI, OpenTelemetry, and messaging integrations such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. These capabilities enabled seamless integration with platform tooling, including Port, offering a consistent and developer-friendly interface for managing promotions across the platform lifecycle. Learn more: https://platformcon.com/sessions/no-more-guesswork-a-kubernetes-controller-for-platform-engineering