2025-09-16 –, Bierstadt Lagerhaus Stage
At growing companies, developers move faster than process. If your platform can’t keep up, they’ll route around it.
Guardrails aren’t stop signs, they’re lane assist. In this talk, we’ll explore how internal platforms can scale developer self-service safely using policy guardrails. We’ll cover how to design policy-driven automation that adapts to business needs, building secure, cost-aware, and flexible delivery paths that scale. We'll show how to build internal developer platforms that earn trust, reduce toil, and become the easiest path to production.
In the Rockies and beyond, teams are building platforms to get value to customers faster. But moving fast safely is the real challenge. Most companies are somewhere between expansion (every team building their own path to prod) and contraction (central IT trying to win them back). The winning strategy? Developer self-service: Let development teams focus their innovation on customer value instead of delivery, and without sacrificing safety, security, or cost control. And you'll do that with guardrails.
This talk will cover:
• What policy guardrails are and why they’re the cornerstone of platform self-service
• How to apply them across the entire delivery lifecycle: code, pipelines, and infra
• How guardrails differ depending on context: prod vs dev, life-critical vs low-risk
• Real-world examples of security and cost control guardrails
• Why exception handling, rule analytics, and feedback loops matter
• How treating guardrails like product features turns friction into flow
We’ll also explore how well-crafted guardrails can help reduce the “accountability vs responsibility” tension between security, ops, and dev teams, turning blame into collaboration.
Whether you’re building a platform from scratch or refining what you’ve got, this talk offers concrete patterns to help make your platform the obvious path, not the bureaucratic one.
Member of the DevOpsDays community since 2011. Over the years, I've attended more than 20 DevOpsDays conferences and spoken at events in Los Angeles, Austin, Santa Clara, Buffalo, and other locations.
Alayshia Knighten has many years of experience in the DevOps realm. Alayshia specializes in enhancing technical and team-related experiences while educating customers on their journey with and beyond security. In her words, “Getting ish done while identifying how to accelerate at the person beyond the tooling is the real meat and potatoes.” She enjoys solving the “so, how do we solve that?” problems and meeting people from all walks of life. Her tiny hometown and Southern background inspire Alayshia. She enjoys hiking, grilling, painting, and making random bird calls with her father in her spare time.