Joshua Leuenberger - From Tickets to CRDs: Our Journey to a Kubernetes Native Datacenter​

"What if Kubernetes wasn’t just your container platform, but the control plane for your entire datacenter? In this talk, I’ll share how we transformed a traditional, multi-datacenter public-sector environment from ticket-driven processes to a fully API-driven, Kubernetes-native platform. By modeling services as Custom Resources and building controllers around them, we unified VMs, secret engines, GitOps, and legacy systems under one declarative interface. I’ll walk through our architecture, the trade-offs we faced, lessons learned in API design and platform adoption, and the cultural challenges behind the technical shift. Finally, I’ll demonstrate how our internal developer platform consumes these APIs to deliver real self-service. This is a practical story about turning Kubernetes into a true control plane — beyond containers."