Unifying Developers and Platform Engineers Through OpenChoreo’s Core Abstractions
Kubernetes gives us powerful primitives, but a collection of primitives does not automatically become a developer platform. Platform teams are often left stitching together CI systems, GitOps, portals, observability stacks, and policy engines, only to expose the resulting complexity to developers.
This talk shares the architectural thinking behind OpenChoreo, a CNCF Sandbox project that sits on top of Kubernetes and other CNCF projects, introducing higher-level abstractions for both developers and platform engineers. I'll walk through how OpenChoreo separates concerns into distinct planes such as experience, control, data, CI, and observability, and how this approach reduces developer cognitive load while preserving strong governance for platform engineers.
OpenChoreo brings together development workflows, a Backstage-powered portal, CI/CD, GitOps, and observability without turning Kubernetes into a developer-facing API. Through this, you'll see how to design meaningful abstractions, when to hide and when to expose Kubernetes primitives, and how to balance developer experience with platform control.
If you're building an internal developer platform, this talk is for you.
Speakers
Sameera Jayasoma is a Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at WSO2, where he leads the technical direction of OpenChoreo, a CNCF project, and serves as one of its core maintainers. Sameera is the lead architect of the Ballerina platform, a programming language optimized for cloud-native integration. He is a dedicated mentor and frequent conference speaker, passionate about advancing developer productivity through technical innovation.