Katharina Sick
Software Engineer at Dynatrace
Linz, Austria
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I'm all about making things user-friendly, especially when it comes to Cloud Native and Kubernetes.
I've done a fair share of mobile app and backend work, but lately, I'm really into Cloud Native computing and enjoy it a lot.
Outside of work, you'll find me hanging out in tech and sports communities, cruising on inline skates, exploring new places, or challenging myself with quizzes and games.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Turning Platform Engineering Right Side Up: Building Better Paths for Juniors
Breaking into platform engineering and DevOps often feels like navigating two extremes. When I started, I bounced between perfect, predictable, and easy to follow sunshine tutorials, and the messy realities of production, where overwhelming systems and uncertainty left me stuck and, at times, spiraling into procrastination. That gap shaped my early years and still shows up when I mentor today.
It’s a bit like stepping into the Upside Down: confusing, chaotic, and full of unexpected challenges. The real issue isn’t just complexity. Tools are often taught in isolation, and juniors are left figuring out how they connect in practice. With countless combinations, there’s no one-size-fits-all guide.
This talk explores what I have found useful when mentoring newcomers to the platform engineering space. We’ll look at ways to make connections visible, create safe spaces to apply knowledge, and build community support, so talents can grow without being overwhelmed and teams can onboard more effectively.
Whether you’re a junior yourself or someone looking to support the next generation, this talk offers actionable ways to turn frustration into meaningful progress.
Your Backstage, Your Problems, Your Metrics
Backstage is often proposed as the solution to all platform problems. Just deploy it and watch the magic happen. Too good to be true? Exactly. Let's take a step back: which problems are you actually trying to solve? Service discovery? Onboarding? Tool sprawl? Documentation chaos? Your problems are unique. Just as the metrics for your developer portal should be.
A Developer Portal without a purpose is only just another piece of software, causing toil and maintenance effort. In this talk, we'll show you how to apply a product mindset to your platform (and Backstage): starting with identifying the specific problems you want to solve before implementing Backstage, define metrics for those problems, and measure whether Backstage actually delivers value and how it can be improved. Think DORA metrics, but for your internal developer portal.
We’ll equip you with a framework to validate your platform decisions with data, whether you're considering Backstage or already running it in production.
To Containers and Beyond - Kubernetes as a Universal Control Plane
Kubernetes has evolved beyond container orchestration - it is a powerful tool for managing diverse resources, from deployments to infrastructure and cloud resources. It is designed for extensibility and offers a robust foundation for more than just deployments.
This talk will dive into the exciting world of extending Kubernetes. We'll explore how Crossplane, an open source CNCF project, takes Kubernetes to a new level and enhances it to a versatile control plane. Further, it'll cover how GitOps can boost this powerful combination by providing automation, security, improved collaboration and more.
Securing Kubernetes Clusters: The Principle of Least Privilege with ArgoCD and Crossplane
According to OWASP, insecure workload configuration is the top security problem in Kubernetes. As modern Kubernetes clusters evolve from mere container orchestrators to versatile control planes managing various types of resources, protecting these clusters becomes even more critical.
In this talk, you'll learn practical strategies to address security problems in your Kubernetes cluster by applying the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). Moreover, we'll extend this principle to ArgoCD and Crossplane, two powerful tools used in many Kubernetes clusters.
Join me to discover how the Principle of Least Privilege, applied to Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and Crossplane, empowers you to safeguard your Kubernetes ecosystem.
Crossplane Observability and Traceability for Effective Multi-Cloud Management
Companies adopting cloud-native technologies increasingly use declarative definitions of cloud infrastructure. This shift offers excellent scalability, flexibility and agility opportunities, but also comes with challenges: What if resource creation takes longer than expected? What if resources fail to materialize at all? How to identify problems and potential performance optimizations? The answer lies in a familiar strategy: as in software development, we can address these challenges through instrumentation and leveraging observability data to uncover patterns, pinpoint root causes, and drive informed optimizations.
Join to learn how to answer those questions using existing metrics, logs and distributed traces emitted by tools like Crossplane, a popular open source CNCF project. The presenters will walk you through their best practices for making declarative cloud infrastructure traceable and leverage this data to improve issue resolution and your cloud infrastructure's reliability.
Closing the Loop: Applying Least Privilege and Ensuring We Did It Well
According to OWASP, insecure workload configuration is the top security problem in Kubernetes. With the shift to Platform engineering, minimizing the attack surface of our Kubernetes clusters becomes even more critical.
This talk will cover the Principle of Least Privilege and how it can be applied to balance robust security and a good experience for users and administrators. Moreover, we'll see how to use Falco to observe if we did well and detect suspicious events that may happen in our clusters anyway.
Join us to discover how the Principle of Least Privilege, Falco and observability empower you to safeguard your Kubernetes ecosystem without making yourself and your users suffer.
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