Join Platform Engineering Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026
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GPU teams face a bad trade-off: a control plane per team, or weak isolation in a shared cluster. This reproducible lab combines Kamaji (control planes as pods) and HAMi (fractional GPUs) on a single GPU-less machine using HAMi's mock device plugin.
As organizations accelerate AI and cloud native adoption, platform teams are being asked to solve a growing set of problems. How can developers access new capabilities such as AI safely and efficiently? How can platforms reduce bottlenecks rather than create them? And how should internal platforms evolve as developer and organizational needs change?
These questions are at the heart of Platform Engineering Day — a full-day event bringing the community together to exchange practical experiences, lessons learned, and ideas about the future of platform engineering. It runs as part of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City on Monday, November 9, 2026.
Platform Engineering Day began at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam in 2023. Platform engineering was already generating significant discussion, but there was no dedicated space that went beyond individual tools and project updates. Practitioners wanted to talk about the principles and practices behind building and operating platforms — and share what they were learning along the way.
The first event ran alongside KubeCon Europe in Paris in 2024. The goal has stayed simple: a space where platform engineers and practitioners learn from one another. That means talking not only about successful implementations, but also about approaches that did not work as expected, trade-offs teams encountered, and lessons they would apply differently next time.
Platform engineering rarely has a one-size-fits-all answer. Teams have different users, organizational structures, technologies, constraints, and definitions of what a successful internal platform looks like.
Platform Engineering Day prioritizes end-user stories and case studies — hearing directly from practitioners building and evolving platforms in real environments. The aim is to move beyond what teams are building and explore why they made particular decisions, what they learned, and how their approaches changed over time. This year's conversations span the issues currently shaping platform engineering: AI enablement, developer experience, and how platforms evolve as organizations scale.
If you're at KubeCon North America — or deciding whether to go — Platform Engineering Day is the practitioner-to-practitioner track for platform work: honest case studies, failures included. A day built around end-user stories rather than vendor slides.