2026-02-13 –, VYAS - G - Room#VY003
Internal developer platforms promised golden paths, streamlined reliable routes for delivering software. Yet too often, they lead platform engineers into a tangled web of YAML, Bash scripts, and tool sprawl. The true crisis today isn't implementing the idea of platform engineering but navigating through platform democracy challenges. The true Darth Vader moments in platform engineering appear when good intentions turn dark: developer experience suffers, and open-source tools quietly become villains to velocity.
The idea behind this session is to dive deeper into the open source tooling and cloud-native strategies that mitigate the platform crisis. We’ll examine how to maintain the Jedi discipline of paved paths or fall into spaghetti-pipeline chaos while chasing the perfect delivery workflow.
Through real-world stories and anti-patterns, we’ll explore the light and dark sides of OSS-powered platform engineering and help you uncover who the true Darth Vader of your stack might be.
Prithvi Raj is a Community Manager & Developer Advocate at Mirantis working with the Open Source Program Office team. He is a CNCF Ambassador with 5+ years of experience who helped scale a CNCF incubating project in LitmusChaos and runs the Platform & Resilience Engineering Meetup group. He is an active member at SIG Project Reviews and is currently leading the community efforts for the k0s project, k0rdent, OpenSDN, and the other OSS initiatives Mirantis is contributing to.
He is a co-organizer to KCD Bengaluru, and previously did Chaos Carnival, LitmusChaosCon and KCD Chennai.
He was previously at Harness, ChaosNative, and MayaData.
Bharath Nallapeta is a cloud-native engineer and open-source contributor with deep expertise in Kubernetes, Go, and AI/ML infrastructure. He specializes in designing scalable, automated platforms that bridge AI and Kubernetes, enabling efficient, production-grade workloads across multi-cloud environments.
Currently, he leads the OSPO team at Mirantis working on all things Kubernetes.