Odyssey Platform # 01

Editor's Note
Welcome to the first edition of Odyssey Platform Weekly! This week, we’re diving into fresh insights, key events, and powerful stories shaping the future of platform engineering.

🗞️ In this newsletter

🗓️ Events

• Identifying Vulnerabilities in Public Kubernetes Helm Charts

🔦 Tool Spotlight

• Backstage: designed to build centralized developer portals

🔍️ Deep Dive

• Crossplane vs Terraform – The Battle for Control Planes

🎯 Stay Inspired - Case Studies

• Emerging innovator: Insurance company

👀 In Case you missed it

• Platform engineering in 2025 is rapidly evolving, with AI integration and automation at its core. According to DuploCloud, increased automation and AI-driven development are key trends shaping the field .

📆 Upcoming Events

Delve into the security risks associated with public Helm charts—essential tools for deploying applications in Kubernetes environments. The session will cover real-world incidents like the Codecov supply chain attack and explore potential threats such as "ChartSploit." Attendees will gain practical strategies for auditing Helm deployments, verifying chart integrity, enforcing access controls, and integrating DevSecOps practices to enhance security.

🔦 Tool Spotlight

Backstage is an open-source framework developed by Spotify

🔍️ Deep Dive: Crossplane vs Terraform/OpenTofu – The Battle for Control Planes

⚔️ Why This Matters

In modern platform engineering, choosing the right control plane is critical. While Terraform offers a battle-tested way to provision infrastructure, Crossplane brings infrastructure-as-code directly into Kubernetes. Here's how they compare:

Terraform runs outside Kubernetes, using its own state files and execution model.

☸️ Crossplane: Kubernetes-Native, GitOps-Ready

Crossplane treats infrastructure as Kubernetes resources (CRDs), enabling reconciliation, self-healing and self-service provisioning.

🆚 Typical Flow Terraform VS Crossplane

🎯 Stay Inspired - Case Studies

• Emerging innovator: Insurance company

  A major insurance company revolutionized its developer experience by adopting platform engineering principles. By building a golden path with reusable templates, GitHub Actions, and Azure DevOps, they accelerated product delivery while reducing cognitive load on dev teams. Result: faster onboarding, consistent pipelines, and improved compliance across teams.

👀 In Case You Missed It…

• Cycloid
  Secured €5 million in Series A funding to accelerate its sustainable platform engineering solutions, aiming to meet the growing global demand for eco-friendly DevOps practices.

• Tempest
  Founded by ex-Apple engineers, Tempest emerged from stealth with $3.2 million in seed funding. The startup focuses on simplifying the deployment of developer platforms, reducing the time and cost typically associated with building internal developer platforms.

• Port
  Raised $60 million in a Series C round to enhance its developer portal platform, which offers service catalogs and scaffolding tools to streamline platform engineering workflows.

Till next time,

Odyssey Platform