u/Waste_Bat_4525

For anyone working in platform engineering, Kubernetes, internal developer platforms, or observability, there’s a CNCF OpenTelemetry Live virtual meetup happening on August 20.

The session looks at a practical platform engineering question: how do you make observability a built-in capability of the developer platform instead of something every application team has to assemble separately?

It will explore how OpenTelemetry can be integrated across Kubernetes environments for capabilities such as distributed tracing and platform level events, and how an IDP can provide those capabilities consistently across teams.

OpenChoreo is used as the open-source implementation for the walkthrough, giving a practical look at how an internal developer platform can bring together Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and platform-level observability.

August 20 | 9:00 AM PDT | Virtual

Join the meetup:
https://ocgroups.dev/cncf/group/opentelemetry-live/event/6v22mew

See you there!

If you’re building an internal developer platform with Backstage, this InfoWorld article is a useful practical guide to think through the architecture beyond the portal itself.

It covers how Backstage can fit together with platform APIs, control planes, Kubernetes, observability, deployment workflows, and higher-level abstractions as the platform grows.

A good read for anyone currently building with Backstage or evaluating how to evolve a developer portal into a more complete developer platform.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/4189074/building-a-state-of-the-art-development-platform-with-backstage.html

Sydney Kubernetes folks,

If you're interested in Kubernetes, AI agents, or platform engineering, CNCF Cloud Native Sydney is hosting a meetup on August 19:

Running AI Agents and Building Platforms on Kubernetes

Two open source projects will be covered:

kagent — a Kubernetes-native framework for building, deploying, and managing AI agents.

GitHub: https://github.com/kagent-dev/kagent

OpenChoreo — an open source developer platform for Kubernetes, bringing together platform abstractions, Backstage, CI/CD, GitOps, and observability.

GitHub: https://github.com/openchoreo/openchoreo

Cuscal Limited, Barangaroo, Sydney
Wednesday, August 19
5:30 PM – 8:30 PM AEST

Free entry, food and drinks, networking, and live Q&A with the maintainers.

If you're working with Kubernetes, DevOps, SRE, AI infrastructure, or platform engineering in Sydney, come join us.

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/cncf-sydney/events/316052564/

See you there!

Backstage gives teams an open-source developer portal, but the portal is only one layer of an internal developer platform.

Behind it, teams still need to connect and maintain:

• CI/CD and application deployments
• Environment provisioning and promotion
• Kubernetes workload management
• Observability and developer context
• Access control and policy enforcement
• Continuous reconciliation and operational reliability

This raises an interesting question.

Should every organization assemble and maintain these capabilities from separate projects, or should the FOSS ecosystem provide more complete, connected platforms that remain open, modular, and replaceable?

On August 27, Kelsey Hightower and the OpenChoreo maintainers are hosting a session on what it really takes to build a complete internal developer platform around Backstage.

The discussion will look at the engineering work behind the portal, how Kubernetes and cloud-native tools fit together, and the trade-offs between building every integration yourself and adopting an open-source platform that provides them as a connected system.

I am part of the OpenChoreo team, so sharing this with full disclosure. OpenChoreo is an open-source platform built for Kubernetes.

Session details:

https://platformengineering.org/events/what-it-really-takes-to-build-an-internal-developer-platform-with-backstage-2026-08-27