Derik Evangelista
Principal Software Engineer at Syntasso
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Derik is a Principal Engineer currently working at Syntasso to enable platform teams to build the secure, scalable and usable platforms. In the past few years, Derik spent copious amounts of time fine tuning pipelines, services APIs, and managing engineering teams. Outside of work, you can probably find Derik running somewhere around London.
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From Cloud Foundry to Cloud-Native: Empower Application Deployment with Kratix and Paketo
As organisations accelerate their digital transformation, developers need robust tools that offer flexibility, scalability, and seamless application deployment. Cloud Foundry provides a simple way to deploy applications in the cloud and with the growing demand for more customisation, modern platforms like Kratix, an open-source framework, can extend and bring new possibilities.
In this talk, we will demonstrate how Kratix can be used to enhance the experience of deploying applications to the cloud. We’ll explore how Kratix, combined with Paketo, enables developers to build and deploy applications from source or as pre-built container images with ease. You'll learn how Paketo supports a variety of build strategies and tools, offering the flexibility to use custom inputs while maintaining a streamlined workflow.
We’ll walk through practical use cases and demos, showing how Kratix and Paketo can empower developers to achieve frictionless deployment pipelines, optimise developer experience, and simplify DevOps workflows in an open-source, cloud-native environment.
From Panic to Peace: Making K8s Controller Observability Suck Less
Your infra runs on K8s, and your controllers and custom resources hum happily. Until they don't. One change later and… UH OH. The logs are a never-ending scroll of problems, dashboards flash like disco lights, and you are knee-deep in debugging hell. You check your custom resources, and they offer no guidance. You eventually fix it, add better error messages, and feel proud. And then it breaks again, with a brand new, even less helpful error.
Why is this so hard?
In this talk, Derik, a prolific controller-writer, and Cat, a regular listener to DevOps meltdowns, will walk you through tested strategies for making your K8s resources less mysterious and more manageable. You will learn how to:
- Add meaningful, traceable errors
- Make events and status your best friends
- Build dashboards that humans want to use
- Set up business-relevant alerts, not just CPU spikes
- Automate away the slog using AI
Make your controller logs and custom resource statuses a source of clarity, not chaos!
Unlocking Innovation: How NatWest Bank Uses Cloud Native Tools To Deliver Platform as a Product
The CNCF Platforms WG places platform product management at “Level 3 - Scalable” in their platform maturity model reinforcing that treating internal platforms as products is a key tenet of modern platform engineering. Natwest Group has been growing this capability within their Hosting Solutions team and this talk will cover the why, what and how of that experience.
By bringing together a cross-functional team and working with experts in the Platform Engineering domain, the team has focused on choosing the right open source tools for the job and enabling co-creation of capabilities. This talk will describe how they have focused on a GitOps approach and incorporated a range of tools including Kubernetes, Backstage, Flux and other open source technologies to define a set of patterns and enable platform users to have a seamless developer experience. The speakers will describe the progress made so far, the lessons learned along the way and the next steps for driving innovation further.
Zero to paved path in 15 minutes: build your platform API fast
Strong internal platforms have a big impact on how fast application teams get new features to production. But for platform teams starting from scratch, how quick is it to set up that platform? From experience, it comes down to tools. In this demo, Derik will create a platform API on a multi-cluster K8s environment. He’ll then use the API to deploy an application and three services in 15 minutes.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming
PlatformCon 2023 Sessionize Event
Derik Evangelista
Principal Software Engineer at Syntasso
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