AI
How 84 Public Sector Organizations Ended Up on Kubernetes
Two engineers met in a coffee queue at KubeCon Berlin. One worked for the Norwegian tax authority; the other for NAV, the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration. Both were building container platforms. They went home, invited colleagues from their own agencies and others facing similar problems, and the group grew. Ten years later that informal network covers 84 public sector organizations, coordinated through a Signal group with 100 more members. No central mandate drove any of it.
Survey Design: Measuring a Decade of Maturity
Flaatten’s team built a 30-question survey using the CNCF App Delivery TAG’s platform engineering maturity model as a base. Questions covered organizational metadata, platform engineering maturity, Kubernetes adoption, and public cloud adoption. They sent it to all 84 organizations and as many other public sector agencies as they could reach. The same survey ran in both 2024 and 2026. Because many of the same organizations responded both times, the data supports a longitudinal comparison, which Flaatten said has not been done before in this space.
What the Data Shows: Platforms Won
92% of respondent organizations run an internal developer platform. 83% of those run it on Kubernetes, spread across various managed Kubernetes services. Tooling has converged around build, deploy, observability, security, and automation, without any central body directing it. The convergence happened through knowledge sharing at events like KubeCon, where organizations compared notes and copied what worked. Agility remains the top reason organizations build platforms, though its lead narrowed in the second survey wave.
Security Jumps; Measurement Stalls
Between the two survey waves, security showed the most significant increase as a platform motivation. Norway passed a new digital security act in 2025, and Flaatten’s paper credits that legislation as a likely driver. Operations maturity improved across almost every category. The one exception: measurement. Organizations still struggle to define what a successful platform looks like and to collect data proving it. Most platform teams rely on usage statistics and anecdotal reports rather than defined success metrics.
The Open Problem: Defining Platform Success
Flaatten said the measurement gap came up repeatedly in hallway conversations at KubeCon. He asked attendees directly: how do you know your platform is working? The common answer was that teams track usage numbers but cannot connect them to outcomes. Defining success and building the instrumentation to confirm it remains unfinished work across the Norwegian public sector community. The full report is published on the community website for anyone who wants the complete dataset behind the five-minute summary.
Notable Quotes
two engineers walks into a cubecon and out on the other side is 84 organizations in the public sector connected. Hans Kristian Flaatten · ▶ 0:20
platforms won. There’s no questions. Uh of the respondents um 92% of the organization had an internal developer platform and 83% of them are using Kubernetes to run that platform. Hans Kristian Flaatten · ▶ 2:51
measurements did not that was the only one that didn’t really have any significant improvement that was how well are we measuring our platforms and the defining success of what these platforms look like. Hans Kristian Flaatten · ▶ 4:12
Key Takeaways
- 92% of 84 surveyed Norwegian public sector agencies run an internal developer platform.
- Kubernetes tooling converged across agencies through peer sharing, not central mandates.
- Platform measurement is the one maturity area that showed no meaningful improvement between 2024 and 2026.
About the Speaker(s)
Hans Kristian Flaatten is a CNCF Ambassador, Google Developer Expert for Cloud, and Grafana Champion. He works as a Platform Engineer at NAV, the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration, where he builds NAIS, a platform designed to increase development speed by giving teams a better experience building, running, and operating applications.