Erica Hughberg
Community Advocate at Tetrate
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
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Erica Hughberg is a technical leader, experienced public speaker, and community advocate passionate about helping engineering teams build scalable, secure, and human-centric platforms for the AI era.
As a maintainer of Envoy AI Gateway, she plays a key role in enabling organizations to securely and efficiently integrate AI-powered services into their systems and solutions.
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You Keep Using That Word 'DevEx' - I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means
Platform teams invest heavily in "developer experience" yet struggle with adoption. Why? We focus on infrastructure while developers spend most of their time writing software, not deploying it.
This talk examines how platform engineering's infrastructure bias creates blind spots. Developers need local cloud API access, language-native libraries, and test data management - not just deployment pipelines. Some organizations are expanding platform scope: providing SDKs, enabling local workflows, automating test environments, even leveraging AI for cross-repository search.
You'll learn to identify gaps between what platforms provide and what developers actually need, see examples of platforms that moved "up the stack," and understand why broader scope drives adoption. It's time to expand our definition of platform engineering beyond CI/CD, Terraform and Kubernetes.
The Missing Manual for Open Source Community Sustainability
You released an open source project that is gaining users. Now, how do you build a sustainable community?
An open source project runs on people, a community. This talk is the missing manual. Learn to build and sustain cloud native open source communities and how to do so by supporting the people behind the code.
We’ll explore the three pillars of every open source project:
* Builders – writing the code and shaping the roadmap
* Users – deploying and running the software
* Silent Users – benefiting quietly, but rarely engaging
We’ll also look at the Builder-User hybrid, the vital link that fuels feedback and momentum.
You’ll walk away with:
* A practical guide to preventing burnout and project decay
* Strategies to identify and retain contributors who keep the soul alive
* A renewed sense of purpose for growing a thriving community
We have the manual you need if your project has code and user documentation, but no community playbook.
The Hidden Discipline: Marketing Secrets for Engineering Platforms
The success of an internal engineering platform requires more than technical excellence and good product management. You also have to be a marketer. Yes, I know, it is yet another discipline to master, but a little bit of knowledge can take you a long way.
You, the platform leaders, are operating in a challenging market. Your buyers—your fellow engineers—have limited currency and too many things to spend it on. Their currency is their time.
In this lightning talk, I'll share three crucial marketing lessons I learned the hard way to drive internal adoption: building a movement, leveraging the loyalty loop, and being aware of value-based pricing.
Through these lessons, you'll learn how to market your platform internally, driving adoption and maintaining usage to unlock its full potential for your organization. Join me to explore these strategies and become not just a platform leader but a platform marketer.
Tailor Made: Dynamic Fine-Frained Authorization for API Traffic
Modern API access control requires authorization models that can adapt to real-time conditions and complex relationships. Learn how to move beyond static authorization methods that are complex to revoke, like API keys and tokens, and improve your security posture with dynamic access decisions.
We'll demonstrate how to implement fine-grained authorization at the gateway level by integrating OpenFGA with Envoy Gateway in Kubernetes, enabling context-aware access decisions at the edge of your system.
With live demonstrations, we'll showcase how OpenFGA's Relationship-based Access Control (ReBAC) model can solve complex authorization challenges. For example, has your boss approved you to access confidential information about Project X?
We'll present three entertaining yet practical examples that showcase common multi-tenant SaaS challenges, B2B API access, and data-dependent authorization rules.
Tailor Made: Dynamic Authorization with Extensions in Envoy Gateway
Modern API access control requires authorization models that can adapt to real-time conditions and complex relationships. Learn how to move beyond static authorization methods that are complex to revoke, like API keys and tokens, and improve your security posture with dynamic access decisions.
Learn how to use Envoy's extensibility to integrate with external dynamic authorization systems, enabling context-aware access decisions at the edge of your system.
See how we make dynamic access decisions tailored to your needs for a request proxied by Envoy. For example, has the user been approved to access confidential information about Project X?
This talk will showcase how to leverage Envoy Gateway, which is part of the Envoy project. It is a complete open-source solution that is part of the CNCF ecosystem.
From Build to Boom: Using GTM to Drive Internal Platform Adoption.
Building the right internal platform is only half the battle; driving adoption is the other.
This talk explores the critical, yet often overlooked, Go to Market(GTM) strategies that are required for successful platform launches. Based on their experience building and launching internal platforms, Erica and David will share practical, actionable techniques for communicating the value of your platform, engaging stakeholders and onboarding users. We'll examine how playbooks for product launches help you drive adoption of your platform.
We’ll discuss strategies for:
Platform Rollout
User Enablement
Feedback Gathering
Diving into gradual rollouts, positioning to drive platform adoption with targeted communication, training programs, and established feedback mechanisms.
By mapping these product launch techniques to platform launches, attendees will learn how to position, promote, and drive adoption of their platform as a compelling business offering.
Evolve, Adapt, and Adopt: Envoy in the AI Era
The AI era is transforming how applications communicate, introducing new traffic patterns, protocols, and scale requirements. At the heart of this transformation lies a core question: can our infrastructure keep up?
This panel brings together Envoy maintainers, builders, and adopters who are shaping the next generation of GenAI platforms and infrastructure. We'll explore how Envoy is evolving to meet the needs of AI workloads, how the community is adapting to new demands, and how adopters are leveraging Envoy.
We’ll cover:
- How the Envoy community is enabling new AI traffic use cases
- Real-world stories from adopters building GenAI platforms
- Lessons learned in adapting Envoy for inference, egress routing, and scale
- What's next: opportunities and challenges at the intersection of Envoy and AI
As user interactions change, infrastructure must evolve. This panel will shed light on how Envoy remains a foundational layer in the modern, AI-powered era.
Envoy in the Era of Agentic Workloads
Agentic workloads have presented new challenges for the underlying network and require both the data and control planes to evolve.
This talk presents Envoy and Envoy AI Gateway as building blocks for service-centric networking for Inference, MCP, and A2A requests. Providing you with a reliable and extensible foundation for your agentic systems.
In this presentation, you will get an overview of configuration APIs, a deep dive into implementation details, and the roadmap ahead, directly from the maintainers.
A decade of Envoy: From Lyft's Debugging Nightmare to the AI Infrastructure Era
In 2015, Lyft had over 30 microservices and a major problem: when something failed, developers couldn't identify if it was the app, AWS, or the network. This uncertainty made them hesitant to make service calls.
So Matt Klein built Envoy. A proxy designed around one idea: the network should be transparent to applications.
Envoy graduated from the CNCF in just two years. Today, it has hundreds of active contributors per quarter, powering production workloads from startups to the Fortune 500 as edge proxies, service mesh sidecars, and load balancers.
But Envoy's story isn't just about where it's been. Envoy Gateway brought Kubernetes-native simplicity to Envoy's power. Now Envoy AI Gateway extends that foundation to handle AI traffic: intelligent inference routing, multi-provider failover, token-based rate limiting, and MCP support.
This talk traces Envoy through three eras. The origin story. The ecosystem. And the AI-native future the community is building together.
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