In the evolving cloud native landscape of software development, the paradigm of "shifting left" has championed embedding security, and its complexity, into the development lifecycle (SDLC). Platform Engineering challenges that convention by advocating for a "shift down" strategy—integrating a strong security posture as a core component of the platform, particularly with Kubernetes, rather than overwhelming the development teams.

Platform engineering teams can embed governance and scalable security controls within the infrastructure, freeing developers to focus on code and business value, instead of being an afterthought or a blocker for the developers productivity.

With this talk, attendees will walk away with real life examples based on successful implementations for regulated entities like financial companies, including actionable best practices about cloud native security controls and threat models.

Developer Experience (DevX) is a key concept in Platform Engineering and in the cloud native ecosystem. Its primary goal is to empower developers, allowing them to focus on their code and generate business value rather than dealing with Kubernetes and infrastructure complexities.

Thanks to the Open Container Initiative (OCI) standard, the rise of cloud native runtimes has revolutionized how teams build and deploy applications. Developers leverage the same containerized approach from their local development workflows to remote environments. But this still exposes some inherent complexities. What is the right level of abstraction? How to reduce the cognitive load? How to shift down to the platform rather than shift left to the developers?

Let’s see in action how we answer these questions with Score, an open-source workload specification that enables developers to deploy their workloads across a spectrum of runtime platforms like Docker Compose, Kubernetes and more.