Even though Kubernetes enhances development efficiency by offering a structure to run distributed networks resiliently, the complexity can be challenging.

Platform engineering helps by taming the complexity and heavy lifting, as it addresses DevOps at scale and aligns business objectives with development practices, according to Haseeb Budhani (pictured, right), co-founder and chief executive officer of Rafay Systems Inc.

“We talked about this concept of platform engineering, which has now become a thing,” Budhani explained. “Kubernetes, it’s become boring … but boring really means it’s becoming a standard. It has become a standard. Everybody understands that they have to build a platform engineering program to solve for Kubernetes.”

Budhani and Vamshi Samudrala (left), principal architect of cloud and engineering platforms at American Airlines Inc., spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Rob Strechay at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the importance of platform engineering in the current Kubernetes ecosystem and how American Airlines tames Kubernetes complexity. (* Disclosure below.)

Security should be embedded in Kubernetes layers

Since computing security goes beyond just being a technology, it entails social engineering aspects, zero trust and built-ins, hence it should be integrated into the Kubernetes environment, according to Samudrala. As a result, security should be spread across from where Kubernetes starts to where it runs for all layers to be secured.

“Security happens at different layers,” Samudrala said. “When we come in with the enterprise tools, apart from the Kubernetes ecosystem has to build around, with respect to the front-end web app, when they’re using the web apps, web application firewall, the apps have to be developed and the core Kubernetes zero trust. When we talk about zero trust, we need to tap into the image securities, the build pipeline securities, and also the runtime scans.”

Given that developers just want to code because that is what they like best, tackling pain points, such as the scaling of Kubernetes clusters, is of the essence. As a result, platform engineering comes in handy when dealing with various issues, such as observability, scalability and security, Samudrala pointed out.

“When that cluster scale in the front-end needs to be robust for the developers, they do not care about how my platform is, what my server is, where we are running on,” he stated. “The developer platform has kicked off … where developers don’t care about Kubernetes. That’s where the platform engineering comes in, where they do the heavy lifting.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA:

(* Disclosure: Rafay Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Rafay Systems nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE