Paradox Of Choice: How To Pick an Application Definition That Works For You!

As Intuit’s platform engineering team, we support our 5000+ developers to build great Fin-Tech products. We strive to enhance our Developer Experience by accelerating their velocity and self-serve maturity, while abstracting away the complexities of the underlying Kubernetes platform. But, with so many CNCF Application Definition solutions and projects available, we were faced with the “Paradox of Choice”! Choosing the right toolset for our application abstraction was challenging, as the toolset had to satisfy our wide array of use cases as well as fit our existing toolchain. Come hear us talk about how we evaluated some of the powerful open source projects in this space, including but not limited to client-side solutions (Kustomize and Helm) and server-side solutions (KubeVela and Crossplane). We will talk about our proof of concept across these projects that helped us make data driven decisions, our deciding factors and our competitive analysis of these projects. We will finish off with a demo of the winning toolset, showcasing a simple yet powerful application definition for our developers.