Platform Engineering Vienna - May 2026 Meetup

Welcome to our May Meetup event for great talks, discussions and beers. We will meet at the Dynatrace office, thanks for hosting!

Agenda:

• Doors open 5:30 p.m.
• Talk 1: 6:00 to 6:30 p.m.
• Speaker: Philipp Maier
• Title: Beyond the Fork: A 2026 Perspective on Terraform and OpenTofu
• Abstract: Both Terraform and OpenTofu are industry-standard tools used to automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure through code.
  In this session, we will start at Commit b145fbc from 2023 and shortly review what happened back then and how OpenTofu started. We will then explore the technical divergence between Terraform and OpenTofu as of 2026 and how their managed ecosystems have evolved, looking at the practical trade-offs for our own projects.
• Break: 6:30 to 6:45 p.m.
• Talk 2: 6:45 to 7:30 p.m.
• Speaker: Sahil Sharma
• Title: Kafka on Kubernetes: Building a Full-Stack Streaming Environment with Strimzi.
• Abstract: Running Apache Kafka on Kubernetes was once considered a daunting task. However, the Strimzi operator has simplified this process, making it possible to manage complex streaming infrastructure through a declarative approach. In this session, we will demonstrate how to bridge the gap between local development and production patterns by deploying a full-stack Kafka environment inside a Kind cluster.
  We will walk through a live setup including:
  - Cluster Provisioning: Using Strimzi to deploy a functional Kafka cluster in seconds.
  - Management & Visibility: Integrating Kafbat UI to inspect topics and messages.
  - Observability: Implementing a Grafana and Prometheus + AlertManager stack to track broker health and consumer lag.
  - Application Flow: Deploying a producer and consumer to validate the end-to-end data pipeline using Confluent library.
  Whether you are building a local sandbox or planning a larger rollout, you will leave with a repeatable template for a fully observable Kafka ecosystem on Kubernetes.
• Networking: start 7:45 p.m.