Abstracting Kubernetes: How Intuit is Migrating Services to a Simplified, Abstracted Paved Road
11-11, 11:30–12:00 (MST), Flex Space

Are you grappling with the complexities of managing K8s for your application developers? Join us for an insightful session where we share how Intuit has evolved and abstracted its platform and the journey toward migrating 1k+ services to the abstracted paved road.

At Intuit, developers spent more time on infrastructure configuration than coding, and adding to standardization drift. To address this, we developed an AI-native abstracted platform where developers define just the app intent, while platform teams handle infrastructure configuration. This reduces the burden of managing K8s complexity, restores standardization, and eliminates cognitive load for developers, thereby increasing dev velocity.

In this session we will cover the challenges of direct Kubernetes management; our journey to developing an abstraction layer, migrating services, real-world benefits, and lessons learned of an abstracted platform.


Intuit, a pioneer in cloud-native technologies, utilizes a Kubernetes-based software development platform to empower developers, minimize infrastructure management overhead, and rapidly adopt modern practices. However, they've identified key challenges hindering further productivity gains:

Version Updates: Adapting to newer Kubernetes API resources with each platform upgrade disrupts developer workflows.

Resource Allocation: Accurately determining compute requirements without wasting resources or compromising availability is complex and time-consuming for developers.

New Technology Integration: Adopting features like service mesh necessitates modifying Kubernetes manifests and application code, diverting focus from core development.

These challenges are not unique to Intuit; other Kubernetes end-users face similar obstacles. By sharing their approach to solving these problems, Intuit aims to contribute to the broader cloud-native community and facilitate increased productivity industry-wide.

Shail Shah is a Sr software engineer at Intuit. Passionate about Distributed Systems and Platform Engineering. Shail has worked as a core contributor to Intuit's journey towards kubernetes abstraction platform, helping reducing cognitive overload for developers.

Avni is a Product Manager at Intuit, working on Intuit’s Modern SaaS Kubernetes platform. She also worked on ArgoCD as a PM. Avni is passionate about Developer tooling and strives to make developers' life easier by delivering them delightful experiences. She is also an Open Source contributor and loves all things cloud native. She is a believer in giving back to the community and has been a speaker and advocate for many women in tech programs and open-source talks.