Sponsored Keynote: Make Workloads, Not Infrastructure - Will Stewart, Northflank

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Sponsored Keynote: Make Workloads, Not Infrastructure - Will Stewart, Northflank

Developers often find themselves bogged down by configuring infrastructure and deploying clusters rather than focusing on their primary goal—delivering valuable workloads. This talk explores shifting the focus to configuring and deploying workloads rather than infrastructure.

By redirecting focus to workloads, developers can abstract away the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, allowing them to concentrate on writing code and building features. It also improves consistency and reliability, as workloads are deployed using standardized processes and best practices encoded within the platform.

This shift not only enhances productivity but also accelerates time-to-market by streamlining the development process. In a self-service way, developers can specify their requirements and let the platform handle the intricacies of resource provisioning, scaling, and maintenance. The talk will contrast a workload platform with Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and explore how it enables “golden paths” to production for applications, databases, and jobs.

Additionally, focusing on workloads aligns better with business objectives, as it emphasizes delivering functional value rather than managing technical details. This talk will explore practical strategies for implementing this shift with Kubernetes, provide examples for facilitating workload-centric operations, and demonstrate how this abstraction enables consistency and portability across clouds.

Ultimately, adopting a workload-centric approach helps developers deliver better applications more efficiently and minimizes infrastructure toil within engineering teams.