API-First IDPs on Kubernetes: Unifying APIs, Workloads & Developer Experience

Internal Developer Platforms often begin as SRE-focused clusters and CI/CD pipelines, but their real value emerges when they become API-first. In this talk, we explore how API-first Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) can unify API design, service and workload deployment, gateway policies, security, observability, and developer workflows into a single, cohesive experience built on Kubernetes. We'll walk through a practical API-first reference architecture that shows how teams can design and publish APIs, deploy workloads via GitOps, apply security guardrails automatically, and access architecture and topology insights from one platform. Along the way, we highlight key business outcomes such as faster time-to-market, improved onboarding, lower operational overhead, built-in security and compliance, reusability, and better visibility for engineering and product stakeholders. Using an open-source IDP (OpenChoreo - https://github.com/openchoreo/openchoreo) as a reference implementation, this session demonstrates how API-first platform engineering accelerates delivery, reduces cognitive load, and creates golden paths that developers genuinely want to follow.