Cloud Native Stockholm Platform Engineering Meetup

Kubernetes has become the foundation for running modern applications. But what if we take the same declarative model one step further and use Kubernetes to build the cloud itself — so users simply request a VM, a cluster, a database or a GPU environment, and the platform handles provisioning, policy, lifecycle and operations?

This talk walks that architecture: KCP as a scalable API and multi-tenancy layer, Crossplane for composition, and operators for service-specific automation. But provisioning is the easy part — the real work is tenant isolation, identity, policy, secrets, observability, quotas and cost, tied into a consistent self-service experience.

Drawing on Stakater Cloud, which runs on this architecture in production, the talk is honest about where Kubernetes-native abstractions work well, where they start to leak, and what it takes to turn a collection of cloud-native tools into a coherent platform.

The goal isn't to recreate AWS. It's to explore how Kubernetes can be the foundation for your own cloud — an internal platform, a sovereign cloud, or a customer-facing service.