How to reduce cloud costs by deleting complexity: saving £100M+ with Steve Wade
Platform engineering teams have a well-documented habit of over-building the ingress layer. More controllers. More abstractions. More things to break at 2am. The question isn't whether this happens, it's why, and what to do instead.
In this session, we sit down with Steve Wade, aka "The Pragmatic CNCF Guy". He is the founder of Platform Fix and the former CNCF Flux maintainer, to dig into the patterns behind over-engineered ingress. Drawing on Steve's experience across 50+ platform migrations, they'll cover the failure modes that show up again and again, the signals that tell you an ingress layer is becoming a liability, and the cases where simpler wins.
Topics include multi-cluster routing and failover, east-west vs. north-south tooling decisions, infrastructure cost pressure, and the sovereignty concerns that are now dominating platform conversations. We'll also cover why Gateway API adoption has stalled for most teams, and what that means for architecture decisions in 2026.
Speakers
