Lightning Talk: 10 Years of Building Platforms in the Public Sector - Hans Kristian Flaatten

In this talk, Hans Christian discusses the evolution of platform engineering within the Norwegian public sector, highlighting the collaborative journey of 84 organizations utilizing Kubernetes. He recounts how initial connections formed at KubeCon led to a wider community focused on shared challenges and successes in platform development. The speaker details a survey designed to assess the maturity levels of these organizations concerning their internal developer platforms and Kubernetes adoption, noting that 92% of respondents have adopted internal platforms and 83% are using Kubernetes. He emphasizes the importance of agility, quality, cost reduction, and security in their efforts, citing new legislation as a contributing factor for enhanced security focus. Despite overall progress, Hans identifies measurement as a critical area needing improvement, as many teams struggle to define and measure their platform success effectively. He concludes by inviting attendees to engage with the full report available on their community website.

So great to see everyone here. So great to be back at KubeCon in Amsterdam. So, yeah, 10 years of building platforms in the public sector. My name is Hans Christian. I work for the Norwegian public sector, the Norwegian labor and welfare administration, just abbreviated as NAV. two engineers walks into a KubeCon and out on the other side is 84 organizations in the public sector connected. So, this

all started in back in KubeCon in Berlin where the tax authority and the administration, they went to KubeCon. They by chance met each other in the coffee queue figured out that both were into containers and Kubernetes. So, they went home and then they invited all their colleagues from their respective agencies and also other agencies that were by the way looking to solve similar challenges. And this photo

that was from yesterday where we gathered. This was from the Norwegian attendees, some of them. I have a single group with a hundred more. And we gathered and it's it's been a this overwhelming overwhelming crowd where we have now gathered 84 organizations that all share the same love for building platforms, most of them using Kubernetes. And over the past 10 years a lot of has happened and

we decided that we need to measure this. We need to get some real data here. So, we of course looked around and saw that the App Tag App Delivery had made this very lovely platform engineering maturity model that we could base on. So, we created a survey that we sent to our um orga- all of these organizations and and the rest of the public sector that we

could get hold on to survey what are their maturity levels. So we decided we designed the survey. We had about 30-ish questions. There were some meta questions about the organizations. Then there were platform engineering maturity these questions here basically. And then there were a little bit about Kubernetes adoption as well as public cloud adoption. So what did we find and and we ran this survey here both

in 2024 and we also ran it in 2026 and a lot of the same organization were in in the same study so we could actually compare them actually create a longitudinal study here which isn't been done before as far as I'm known about. So what this says is that platforms won. There's no questions. Of the respondents, 92% of the organization had an internal developer platform and 83%

of them are using Kubernetes to run that platform. And we see here that there are various forms of managed Kubernetes services. We also see that the tooling has more or less converged when it comes to build and deploy, observability, security, automation and all of these things are converging as well. Without anyone dictating, there's no centralized body here that dictating. It's just because of the sharing, this knowledge

sharing where the organization comes together and they can share and learn from each other. So why has this change the why has changed. So one of the questions we asked is why do they create platforms and we see that agility is still number one. It's actually decreased a little for in the second wave but we also see that quality is important, cost reduction is is important, but

also security had this most significant gap. And lo and behold in 2025, Norway got a new digital security act, which might, when we say that in our paper as well, this might have contributed here. Um we see that operations has matured across the board, but measurements did not. That was the only one that didn't really have any significant improvement. That was how well are we measuring our

platforms and the defining success of what these platforms look like. So, that is what we need to continue working on and I see and I hear that from when talking with people at KubeCon as well and asked them how do they define if their platforms are successful. What does success mean and how do they measure that? And most platform teams do not measure that. You have anecdotal

data and you have some statistics about usage, but do you actually Are you able to measure the success of your platform? So, we have published the full report on our community websites for you to read so you can read all of this data here that I only had 5 minutes to present. And just a quick plug before I'm thrown off the cage and stage there is that

we are organizing a Kubernetes based conference in Norway and we are looking for speakers to join that. Thank you so much.