Building a developer app platform is like assembling furniture from a dozen different manufacturers. Every piece comes with its own instructions to follow and adjustments to make before it fits neatly into the larger structure.
You've got service mesh, observability stack, and a CI/CD pipeline that looked great in the catalog, with each component promising to work with the others. But aligning them to actually work together requires countless hours of yak shaving (a technical term for getting lost in endless, tangential tasks).
According to a recent study by IDC, almost 49% of developer time is spent on operational and background tasks. A strong platform enables developers to focus on solving business problems instead of fighting infrastructure puzzles. But putting it together yourself or evaluating the platforms and/or CNCF tooling available isn’t always straightforward.
Building an app using open source tools
The following 10 key evaluation points can help you build an app using CNCF open source tools:
Address teamwork: RBAC and clear boundaries make good neighbors
Include security early: Not as an afterthought when you're breached
Invest in observability that actually works: See problems before users do
Provide access to common data services: Reduce barriers to necessary information
Control costs: Without forcing infrastructure into the developer's domain
Address teamwork: RBAC and clear boundaries make good neighbors
Each team needs its own namespace. Think of it as a Kubernetes apartment building. The platform team owns the building infrastructure (cluster management, networking, security policies), the development teams own their apartments (applications, configurations, deployments), and everyone knows exactly where their responsibilities begin and end.
This separation isn't about mistrust; it's about cognitive load. Front-end developers shouldn't need to understand CNI plug-ins, and back-end engineers shouldn't focus on ingress controllers. RBAC enforces these boundaries programmatically so team A gets full control over namespace-A, read-only access to shared services, and zero visibility into Team B's secrets.
When done right, teams can move fast without stepping on one another’s toes or accidentally deleting the production database.
Adopt automation: Reduce manual and time-consuming work
Most DevOps transformations just move the manual work from developers to platform engineers. Real automation means developers can push code with no tickets, no waiting, and no questions like, “Can someone with kubectl access help me?”
GitOps with Argo CD transforms your Git repository into the single source of truth. No more “work on my machine,” or “Who deployed what to production?” If it's not in Git, it doesn't exist. Tekton handles the CI pipeline, turning source code into container images without anyone writing another Jenkinsfile. When these tools integrate, a Git push triggers Tekton to build, which pushes to your registry, which then notifies Argo CD to deploy. Zero human intervention — and developers can deploy at 2 AM without waking up the platform team.
Include security early: Not as an afterthought when you're breached
Your app platform needs security baked in from day zero, not after the first incident.
Falco becomes your runtime threat detection system, catching containers that are doing suspicious things, such as unexpected network connections and file system modifications. Harbor isn't just a container registry. Every image gets scanned for CVEs before deployment, with policies that block critical vulnerabilities from reaching production.
Kyverno enforces your security policies as code. No root containers, mandatory resource limits, or required labels. Together, they create defense in depth without security theater.
Invest in observability that actually works: See problems before users do
Configuring Prometheus from scratch has always been a headache. But here's the thing: When it’s done right, developers don’t need to be experts in understanding their application's health.
Prometheus and Grafana form your metrics foundation, and adding Thanos solves the long-term storage problem. Tempo handles distributed tracing, which is essential for your microservice call chain. Loki aggregates logs without the Elasticsearch overhead.
Kiali visualizes your service mesh, showing you traffic flow and error rates at a glance. The key is automatic instrumentation (i.e., developers get dashboards, alerts, and tracing without adding a single line of observability code).
Provide access to common data services: Reduce barriers to necessary information
Every application needs data services, but spinning up a production-ready PostgreSQL cluster shouldn't require database administration expertise. Your platform should make common services as easy as clicking Add Database.
Helm charts become your service catalog, with preconfigured templates for PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, and all the other data services. The platform handles the operational complexity: automated backups, connection pooling, failover, security hardening.
Developers just get a connection string and SLA guarantees. When they need a cache or message queue, it's just a parameter in their deployment manifest, not an infrastructure project.
Simplify networking: Cut through Kubernetes complexity
Kubernetes networking is where developer happiness goes for a toss. Service meshes promise to help, but often add more complexity. The key is to abstract the complexity without hiding the capability.
Istio provides the service mesh backbone: mutual TLS, traffic management, and circuit breaking. Knative adds serverless abstractions on top, making scale to zero a simple configuration option rather than an architectural decision. The platform handles ingress controllers, cert-manager for automatic TLS, and DNS configuration.
Developers define services and routes in simple terms, and the platform translates them to the appropriate Kubernetes and Istio resources.
Integrate with dev tools: Meet developers where they are
The best platform in the world is useless if it requires developers to abandon their existing tools. Your platform should integrate with what developers are already using, not force new workflows.
Gitea and GitHub provide self-hosted Git, but more importantly, they integrate with your CI/CD pipelines. Jaeger plugs into standard instrumentation libraries. OpenTelemetry, Zipkin, and OpenTracing provide distributed tracing without code changes.
The platform should provide CLI tools that feel native, and APIs that follow REST or GraphQL conventions. It's about reducing context switching, not adding another dashboard to monitor.
Manage artifacts: Secure the path from code to production
Code and container artifacts need a clear path from development to production with security gates and quality checks along the way without becoming a bottleneck.
Harbor serves as your universal artifact repository for containers and Helm charts. It's not just storage; images get scanned, signed, and replicated across regions. Integration with CI/CD means artifacts flow automatically from build to deployment with full traceability. You always know what's running where, who built it, and what vulnerabilities it contains.
Apply configuration as code: Because YAML is life
Everything in your platform should be declarative and version-controlled. This isn't just about GitOps; it's about portability and not being locked into your platform.
Helm templates your applications, Kustomize handles environment-specific overrides, and Argo CD ensures your cluster matches your Git repository. Every configuration change is a pull request, which is reviewed, tested, and auditable.
The platform provides abstractions and guardrails, but everything resolves to standard Kubernetes manifests. No proprietary formats, no vendor lock-in. If you need to migrate clouds or run in multiple regions, it's a matter of pointing Argo CD at a different cluster, not rewriting your entire deployment strategy.
Control costs: Without forcing infrastructure into the developer's domain
Developers should think about features, not node pools. But someone needs to watch the cloud bill before it becomes a mortgage payment.
Prometheus metrics feed cost allocation so you know exactly how much each team, service, and environment costs. Kyverno enforces resource quotas and limits, preventing a single team from spinning up GPU nodes. Knative scales to zero for development environments, reducing idle resource costs.
Automatic right-sizing recommendations, scheduled scaling for nonproduction environments, and clear showback reports keep costs under control without hindering productivity. The platform provides cost visibility without making developers act as cloud architects.
How we built all this into App Platform for LKE
We learned from experience, so we integrated all these insights into App Platform and created a pre-integrated solution that gets you from zero to a working platform in approximately 20 minutes on top of Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE).
The tools are all there
Every CNCF tool I mentioned (and a few others) comes pre-installed and pre-integrated in App Platform (Figure). This isn't just a Helm chart dump. These tools are configured to work seamlessly together from day one.
The tools that come pre-installed and pre-integrated in App Platform
Team spaces with built-in RBAC
App Platform implements multi-tenancy by default. Each team gets its own isolated namespace with automatic RBAC configuration (no manual kubectl commands required). The self-service portal lets platform admins onboard new teams in minutes, with automatic service access and resource quotas.
Golden Path templates
Instead of starting from scratch, teams choose from a catalog of Golden Path templates, which are pre-configured application patterns that encode best practices.
Self-service without chaos
The portal abstracts Kubernetes complexity without hiding its capabilities. Developers can fill out forms to deploy applications, add databases, and deploy applications on Kubernetes. But everything still resolves to standard Kubernetes resources, which maintains portability and avoids lock-in.
Security and observability from minute one
Harbor scans every image, Falco monitors runtime behavior, and Kyverno enforces policies (all automatically configured). Prometheus scrapes metrics, Grafana provides dashboards, and Loki aggregates logs without any manual setup. Preview environments spin up on commits with automatic cleanup and configurable retention periods.
Lifecycle management
By managing the complex update cycles of the 30+ integrated Kubernetes projects, App Platform frees your engineering resources from maintenance tasks.
The platform is the product
Building a good app platform on Kubernetes isn't about installing every CNCF-graduated project and calling it a day. It's about integrating thoughtfully, focusing on developer experience, and understanding that the platform itself is your product.
A good app platform encodes your best practices, provides guardrails without being restrictive, and most important, lets developers focus on solving business problems instead of infrastructure puzzles.
Whether you're building your own platform from scratch or using a solution like App Platform, these principles remain the same. Start with clear team boundaries and RBAC, automate everything, build in security from the start, and never stop focusing on developer experience.
Because at 3 AM, when production is on fire, you want developers thinking about the fix, not fighting with the platform.
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