Paved Paths to Production – There and Back Again
04-16, 16:40–17:10 (Europe/Amsterdam), The Warehouse

There’s no place like production. Any idea, any code change will not deliver value until it reaches production. How can we go there fast and securely? A path to production includes all the activities to deliver a new idea to the software users.

The first challenge will be to provide application developers with a compelling experience that enhances the inner development loop, improves their productivity, and reduces their cognitive load. You’ll see how to design such an experience using Backstage, Buildpacks, and Knative.

The second challenge will be establishing secure and reusable CI/CD pipelines while ensuring a clear separation of concerns. You’ll see how to do that by building on top of the inner loop and adding Tekton, Trivy, and Argo CD. Application operators and security engineers will be responsible for those pipelines and the supply chain, taking care of all the activities for building, testing, securing, configuring, and ultimately deploying workloads.

The third challenge will be to offer paved paths to production as a coherent service via a platform based on different tools from the cloud native ecosystem. You’ll learn about the concept of golden paths enabled by Backstage and see how to implement them using Cartographer, a framework to build paths to production.


This talk focuses on sharing with the community tools and principles they can use to design and build paved paths to production. A well-designed path enables fast iterations for application developers and reduces their cognitive load while guaranteeing supply chain security.

A common challenge we face when adopting a Kubernetes-based platform is ensuring a clear separation of concerns. Using open-source projects, the presentation shows how to use different CNCF projects to establish reusable paths to production without exposing the underlying complexity or moving extra responsibilities to developers.

The strategy is based on a flexible framework to build paths so that application operators and platform engineers can customize or swap any tool used in the demo with another one from the cloud native landscape, getting even more out of the ecosystem.

The end goal is reduced time-to-market, faster feedback loops, and more effective collaboration between product and platform teams.

Software Architect specialized in building modern, cloud native, robust, and secure enterprise applications and author of Cloud Native Spring in Action, published by Manning.

Thomas Vitale designs and develops software solutions at Systematic, Denmark, where he’s been working on modernizing platforms and applications for the cloud native world, focusing on developer experience and security. Some of his main interests and focus areas are Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Knative, and cloud native technologies in general. Thomas supports continuous delivery practices and believes in a collaborative culture aimed at working together to deliver value to users, customers, and businesses.

He likes contributing to open source projects like Spring, Carvel, Buildpacks, and sharing knowledge with the community. Thomas has an MSc in Computer Engineering specializing in software from the Polytechnic University of Turin (Italy). He is a CNCF Certified Kubernetes Application Developer, Pivotal Certified Spring Professional, and RedHat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Application Development. His speaking engagements include those for SpringOne, Spring I/O, KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, Devoxx, GOTO, JBCNConf, DevTalks, and J4K.