Adventures of Building a Platform as a Service for the Government
Talkat Open Source Summit Europe 2025 · on Tuesday, 2025-08-26· at 11:55· Elicium 2A (Elicium Level 1)·
summary
NAV builds and runs a production PaaS called nice that uses Kubernetes and a set of 10 custom operators to give 100+ product teams a golden-path manifest interface, GitHub Actions CI, and automated provisioning of Postgres, queues and caches. The public-sector community counts ~2,000 engineers across 86 organizations and ~3,000 public repos. SBOM coverage hits almost 100%, deployments scale from quarterly to thousands per week, and the platform enables crisis delivery—deploying a new system in days and paying ~1 billion NOK.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction to the talk
- 1:23Origin of the platform project
- 6:22Norwegian public sector primer
- 8:30Open sourcing government software
- 11:19Building the NAIS platform
- 13:27Adoption strategy with cake
- 14:33Platform architecture and operators
- 17:43Developer portal and UI
- 27:01Impact on software delivery
- 29:52Scaling and external interest
- 31:17Legal and procurement challenges
- 34:32Multi-tenant isolation model
- 36:21Key lessons learned
- 37:46Q&A session
related talks
25mBreaking the 2 Pizza Paradox with Platform Applications
33mPlatform as a Product - Transforming from Service Delivery into Continuous Operations
29m9-1-1: Cloud Native - Kubernetes For Public Safety Systems
32mBeyond Platform Thinking at Ritchie Brothers - Build Things No One...
33mPlatform engineering: Build your own PaaS
26mTwo sides of the platform coin with operator's and customer's voices
44mIs Platform Engineering a hype? Let's build a platform together!
40mAI-Augmented DevOps with Platform Engineering