Achieve platform engineering scale: Synthetic Environments with vCluster | Francis Holt

Ephemeral environments resolve the age-old tension between developers who want to ship change and platform engineers who want stable paths to production. In this session hosted by Sam Barlien, Head of Ecosystem at Platform Engineering Community, Francis Holt, Staff Engineer at ClearRoute, shows how his team built self-service ephemeral environments with vCluster on AWS EKS, from the GitOps deployment flow to a live demo safely testing an autonomous AI agent. 0:00 Welcome and intros 1:53 Meet Francis and today's agenda 3:34 The developer vs. platform engineer problem 5:29 What ephemeral environments are 7:23 Why developers love them 10:25 Why platform engineers love them 12:13 Three challenges: complexity, deployment and fidelity 13:03 Inside ClearRoute's Constellation platform 15:09 How good a replica do you need? 16:30 What vCluster is 18:18 How vClusters run inside a host cluster 20:08 How vCluster syncs with its host 23:16 Demo: inside a vCluster 27:06 Deploying vClusters with kro and Argo CD 29:11 Demo: the resource graph definition 30:16 Host rules and network policies still apply 30:49 How it all comes together 33:18 Demo: testing an AI agent that fixes clusters 37:04 What's next: agents, identity and fidelity 40:11 Q&A: other tools for self-service environments 41:23 Q&A: a good starting point for a platform roadmap? 42:43 Q&A: day two at scale 44:05 Q&A: cost considerations 45:14 Q&A: full replicas with middleware for testers 46:41 Q&A: vCluster on RKE2 and spot instances 47:37 Q&A: do you need spare capacity ready? 48:36 Wrap-up Ready to give your developers a safe place to break things? 🚀 Get your copy of the book, Thinking in Platforms, and learn how to design self-service capabilities that protect your path to production: https://weaveintelligence.io/thinking-in-platforms-book Join the conversation in our Community Slack channel and swap ephemeral environment tips with thousands of platform engineers: https://platformengineering.org/slack-rd Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest talks, events and insights! https://www.linkedin.com/company/platform-engineering-org And keep the momentum going! Continue your platform engineering journey with Platform Engineering University: https://university.platformengineering.org #PlatformEngineering #Kubernetes #vCluster