In the bustling halls of today’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2023 event, a potent dialogue on cloud-native innovation took center stage.

The transformative trends shaping the future of application deployment and infrastructure management were major topics of discussion. During the event, Brad Maltz (pictured), senior director of DevOps portfolio and DevRel at Dell Technologies Inc., offered pivotal insights into the evolving landscape of DevOps and artificial intelligence.

“Platform engineering is one of the buzzwords that seems to be taking hold, and we’re definitely playing in that discussion,” he said. “AI, you’ve seen it all over. Dell is ripe and prime to enable the community and the world around AI.”

The dual focus of DevOps and developer relations in fostering platform engineering and identifying the appropriate application of AI is crucial, Maltz added. These areas are being highlighted as key topics at the conference, aiming to empower the IT community and others involved.

Maltz 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 innovation in cloud-native applications and the significance of DevOps and DevRel, as well as platform engineering and AI, particularly the introduction of data engineering to support AI and data pipelines. (* Disclosure below.)

The rise of platform engineering

Platform engineering has emerged as a buzzword, signifying a paradigm shift in the way organizations conceive their IT strategies.

“Platform engineering is about taking IT and trying to figure out how do they build this platform, how do they make a cloud-like experience with all the guardrails in place for their end users to consume,” Maltz said.

The goal is to transform IT operations into product organizations, thereby ensuring that platforms are managed as products with end-to-end solutions. There is a distinction between traditional DevOps and the nascent field of platform engineering, according to Maltz.

“DevOps to us is an operating model. It’s not a person. It’s a cultural shift to allow operations to become more agile,” he explained.

Platform engineering, however, encapsulates a more comprehensive approach, “fully engineered bottoms up, tops down and delivered as an actual product.”

Addressing the skills gap in an AI-driven IT landscape

A significant portion of the discussion with Maltz addressed the widening skills gap in IT, exacerbated by the advent of AI. The bottom line: The skills gap is getting worse.

“We’re not all of a sudden magically finding hundreds of thousands of skilled workers out there to go help this world,” he said.

Dell, however, is taking an active role in mitigating this gap through solutions like the APEX Cloud Platforms, which simplifies Kubernetes consumption and enables microservice-oriented architectures.

Within the evolving enterprise computing landscape, it’s critical to adapt IT processes to incorporate AI, Maltz said, adding that “finding the translation of business-level intelligence into AI models” is when platform engineering will truly excel.

The IT community should continue automating and codifying their processes, according to Maltz, who stressed that AIOps and the convertibility of policy into infrastructure as code are crucial for long-term success.

“We need the people in the IT ops, platform engineer, DevOps world to continue writing the automation, continue taking what you do on a daily, hourly, per-minute, per-second basis and figure out how to codify that,” he said. “Until you codify that, no AIOps, AI thing is going to be able to help you.”

Maltz’s vision for Dell’s role in this ecosystem is clear: to support and accelerate the development of these technologies while ensuring that developers and IT professionals are equipped with the necessary tools and skills.

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

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE