Beyond Kubernetes: Pragmatic Platform Engineering for 2026 with Kelsey Hightower

Why It Matters

By treating platform engineering as a product function and building incremental, user‑driven solutions, organizations can cut operational waste, maintain security, and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving cloud‑native landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Platform engineers act as product owners for internal tooling.
• Automating UI tasks alone isn’t enough; enforce security defaults.
• Rip‑and‑replace strategies fail; evolve platforms incrementally with existing assets.
• Golden paths balance developer autonomy with enterprise governance standards.
• Listening to end users uncovers friction and informs roadmap.

Summary

The webinar, titled “Beyond Kubernetes: Pragmatic platform engineering for 2026,” brings together Broadcom’s VCF team, VMware veteran Jad, and cloud‑native evangelist Kelsey Hightower to dissect the real‑world challenges of platform engineering. Rather than a polished sales pitch, the discussion focuses on how organizations can survive the next five years by balancing build‑versus‑buy decisions and treating platform work as a product discipline.

Hightower frames platform engineering as the evolution of traditional sysadmin tasks into a product‑oriented role: writing scripts, automating UI clicks, and, crucially, embedding security‑compliant defaults. He warns that vendors can only deliver 80 % of a solution, leaving the “glue”—the contextual, opinionated layer—to internal teams. The panel stresses that legacy infrastructure isn’t a dead weight; it must be incorporated into incremental designs, avoiding costly rip‑and‑replace projects.

Memorable analogies pepper the talk: “You can’t knock down the bridge; you build a new one beside it,” and “Golden paths are paved roads that give developers autonomy while satisfying governance.” Hightower urges engineers to sit with end‑users, map current workflows, and commit to short‑term fixes (e.g., version 1.3) that directly address pain points, shifting the mindset from ticket‑taker to product owner.

For enterprises, the takeaway is clear: adopt a user‑centric, incremental platform strategy, codify golden paths, and align governance with developer workflows. This approach reduces toil, improves security posture, and positions companies to leverage modern application stacks without discarding valuable legacy assets, a critical advantage heading into 2026.

Original Description

Dive into an unfiltered session with Kelsey Hightower and VMware platform experts as they unpack real-world platform engineering for modern apps, golden paths, Kubernetes-powered platforms, and AI–ready infrastructure.

In this webinar, we cover:

- How successful teams design platforms as real products by defining golden paths, balancing guardrails with developer freedom, and reducing operational toil.

- How to run modern applications on Kubernetes-backed platforms using containers and VMs, integrating opinionated services, and adopting GitOps practices.

- How these platform practices extend to securely developing and operating AI workloads, including inferencing use cases.

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Speakers:

Kelsey Hightower - Author & Open Source Contributor/Former Distinguished Engineer @ Google Cloud

As a curious and motivated self-learner, Kelsey Hightower gained an interest in computing at a young age and started his IT career by opening a small consulting shop 20 years ago. He is especially known for his work with Kubernetes, open-source software, and cloud computing. From those beginnings his career progressed quickly, eventually passing through the halls of Google, Puppet Labs, New Relic, and CoreOS. Hightower is a system administrator by trade, a programmer by necessity, but a problem-solver at heart. He hopes to solve the many problems facing IT culture by equipping people with the mental and computational software they need to succeed in the competitive world of technology.

Jad El-Zein - Principal Technologist @ Broadcom

Technology leader with 16 years at VMware and over 27 years of

experience in the IT industry, ranging from driving tech vision, strategy and

implementation to leading the research and development of emerging

technologies. Speaker, thought leader, mentor, community advocate.

Taka Uenishi - Product Marketing Engineer @ Broadcom

Product Marketing Engineer in the VCF Division of Broadcom, leading

product marketing for infrastructure automation.