Building a Kubernetes platform often starts with layers like infrastructure, tooling, security and delivery. But real platforms do not grow vertically, they grow horizontally.

In this talk we introduce thinking in planes as a practical mental model for designing scalable Internal Developer Platforms.
You will learn how the plane model, covering control, service, observability, security and resource concerns, helps teams structure complexity, centralize what needs control and scale what needs independence without turning the platform into YAML spaghetti.

As a real world example, we showcase OpenChoreo, a fresh CNCF Sandbox project that is secure by default and designed around planes from day one. OpenChoreo is also based on Cell Based Architecture (CBA). Each project becomes a cell, a secure, isolated and observable unit that enforces domain boundaries through well defined ingress and egress paths, with policies enforced via Cilium and eBPF.

The session includes a live demo you can try yourself right after the talk. Instead of using Kubernetes in Docker (KinD), we use vCluster in Docker (VinD), a brand-new approach that enables fast and isolated platform experiments on your local machine.