Where state meets sync: Scaling platforms without the hype

Most platform engineering stories highlight polished portals and custom controllers. In reality, many teams operate in the space between state of the art and what is practical for their organization.

In this talk, Maryam Tavakkoli shares how RELEX Solutions evolved its internal platform from a Terraform-only setup to a GitOps-driven model using Terraform Cloud and Argo CD to support multiple teams across AKS clusters without a dedicated portal.

This session explores the realities of platform engineering, including managing infrastructure versus Helm releases, scaling across teams, balancing self-service and governance without a dedicated portal, and structuring GitOps repositories. Attendees will gain practical patterns, lessons learned, and strategies for building scalable, maintainable internal platforms using open source foundations.