Powering Platform Engineering: OpenChoreo and AI-Driven IDPs

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to our Techstrong TV coverage from SUSECON in Prague. Well, the keynotes laid out, sessions are on, but it's just past lunchtime.

People, I think, are just finishing their meal and getting into their afternoon sessions. I want to introduce you to our next guest. His name is Christian Gerkisch.

Yeah? Yes. And Christian is with WSO2.

Christian, first of all, welcome to Techstrong TV. Thank you. Thank you for coming on.

We're going to talk about WSO2, we're going to talk a little bit about IDPs and so forth, AI. But let's first talk about you a little, if you wouldn't mind sharing with our audience a little bit of your background and what you do. Yeah.

So I actually started in corporate world with 15 years of Microsoft, done various roles in various parts of the world. Started in my home country of Slovenia, moved to Munich, and then to Redmond, and then to UK. And after that, I really started working on various startups, and they mostly were kind of the cloud-native space, even before cloud native was calling that.

But, six months ago, I joined WSO2 as a SVP of channel to really now overall channel all the indirect revenue streams. And WSO2, I think most of our audience may have heard of WSO2, but I don't know if they really know this company. Yeah.

It's one of those companies that kind of underpins the overall fabric, if you will, of both the cloud native before the mobile world. So WSO2 existing for over 20 years. It's kind of known from our traditional projects, such as the whole API management suite, integration, identity.

Almost everybody at least touched some of the applications that powered by WSO2. So if you stayed in Hilton Hotel or if you ever took the tube in London, a lot of those applications or those connectivity is done through WSO2. Really?

Yeah. So it's one of those anonymous, almost kind of companies. Kind of as with all the plumbing in a way- Right ...

that's connecting things. Yes. But you can't live without them.

Correct. Yes. Can't live without them.

And now, most recently, you're here at SUSECON this year. It was an announcement around a, well, I guess it's sort of an AI-empowered IDP. Is that fair, or?

That is correct. Yes. So, we had our own developer platform for a long while already.

It's called Choreo, which is available as a SaaS. In the last year, we actually kind of made, essentially, the second generation of Choreo, but we actually work with CNCF and donated to CNCF. It's now CNCF Sandbox project.

Oh, very cool. OpenChoreo. OpenChoreo.

OpenChoreo. Okay. Yeah.

And this also allows us to really look deeply in our relationship with SUSE, because we have some joint history with SUSE. Of course, we also equity portfolio company, right? Their CEO actually sits on our board, and so on.

Oh, okay. So it's very tight. Yeah, very tight.

We have some number of joint customers. But we're looking, what is the area that we could kind of naturally collaborate together, right? And we're looking at maybe some opportunities to strengthen the appeal of Rancher as a end-to-end platform for cloud-native developers.

So we actually now have a kind of optimized version of OpenChoreo that runs on Rancher Prime. Excellent. And so it ships as part of the Rancher...

No, it's fully pre-configured. We actually posted a blog that you can just follow. It's actually a pretty easy guide, how to deploy OpenChoreo on.

And essentially, it's very easy and of course, you can go to Rancher marketplace as well, but, essentially, it's very easy to provision this. Right off. Yeah.

On top of it. Right. Now, look, platform engineering is one of the probably fastest growing communities.

Yeah. And I think one of the reasons is, when platform engineering first came out, it was about getting Kubernetes to run right. Yeah.

We've seen a transition to it more to IDP- Mm-hmm ... for internal development platform. But what we've also seen, and especially with AI coming into the mix, SREs- Mm-hmm ...

data engineers, data scientists. Yeah. DevOps always was part of the mix.

Security. They're all realizing that, if you're going to do this right, you need one platform that underlies it. Not just a platform for the developers, a different platform for the SREs, a different platform for the DevOps, yet another platform for security.

We want a platform- Mm-hmm ... that all of these folks work in. And AI is a help and a hindrance, right?

Because AI can help us bring that all together. And also multiplies your problems dramatically. Exactly.

It adds infinite- Yeah ... craziness. How does the AI question fit in here?

Because everyone wants that today. Yeah. So we have a term, essentially, it says, AI for code and code for AI.

And so essentially, we covering both aspectsWhen we say AI for code, it means how do you use AI to make our product, in that case OpenCorio, better. Right? So you mentioned SRE.

We have built in SRE agents. Okay. We have built in architecture agents or the portal agents.

But if I go a step back, we are fully part of the whole CNC community, and then we understand platform engineering evolution from the start, right? From DevOps team, and then platform engineering- Yeah ... and so on.

And one of the most popular projects there is Backstage. Right? Yes.

As we know, and Backstage is excellent portal. You can catalog it, you can really... And we've seen a lot of customers who try to build their own developer platform on top of Backstage.

And what do you need to do? You need to have all the end services, API manager, now AI gateway, identity, all the authentication, everything, all the CI/CD works. You need to build so many things.

And say, well, not every organization can afford to do that themselves. So that's how OpenCorio came about. I got it.

It's built on Backstage, but you have all these- So it has a Backstage core, if you will. Correct. Correct.

The UI that you see, and you can approach it differently. You can go to UI that's Backstage, or you can, of course, MCP these days- Right ... or APIs or CLI, and you can do different way, and you can run it.

Now, there are several commercial variations of Backstage. Mm-hmm. What makes Corio different?

Well- Better? First, it's not just a portal, it's the developer platform. It's complete developer platform.

It's very modular by design. So we come with our own AI gateway or our own identities providers on. We also have our agent manager on top as a modularly.

But you can now pick, if you run some other API gate and so on, you can just pick and choose that. So you can fully customize that. I mean, the whole premise of OpenCorio is how much time do you want to spend building your platform?

That's number one. The second is how much time can you afford to maintain it? Right.

Right? And the answer is, that's not really what we want to do, then OpenCorio becomes a really good, pure open alternative, that actually it's already built on all the stack that you use today. So for me to use Argos, everything is there.

All the tool set that you would do yourself and try the integration, we pre-configure, we integrated everything out of the box. And now, of course, fully integrated the use of Rancher and Rancher Prime. Watching all these demos with Liz there, mega agent.

" I mean, it's a compelling future. Yeah. I use AI a lot myself.

Mm. And sometimes getting from here to there doesn't always work like that, right? Correct.

And also need, that's what we have the full traceability in all the things, and we can... Yes, we assume things going to go wrong, right? But also the other thing is because this version of OpenCorio was developed in '25, agentic AI is part of the design, right?

Right. It wasn't add-on, it wasn't something- Wasn't an afterthought ... from the start.

Correct. Yes. Now, from your company's, WSO2's perspective, is OpenCorio sort of an open core where you add premium modules that you offer above that?

Or... No, so we are very similar business model and philosophy than SUSE. Everything's open source.

All of our enterprise products are completely open source. Of course, you can have commercial relationship. We provide commercial support and enterprise support, but everything including OpenCorio or API manager integration, and identity, access management, it's fully open source.

So anybody can use it and run it themselves. Yeah. I get it.

So it's all out there. And you mentioned though it's part of CNCF now as a SAM- OpenCorio is. The rest is Apache license over.

Apache. Yeah. Yeah.

Excellent. Yeah. Excellent.

And do you offer a SaaS version of it as well? Correct. Of all of our products, we offer also the SaaS version.

And it depends how customers want to run. Some run SaaS, some want it on-premise, some want still hybrid or mixed environment. So we give this full flexibility as well.

We never mentioned the website. com. There you go.

O2 with O, not zero. Not zero. Not zero.

Yes. O. O like oxygen.

Yeah, like oxygen. Yeah. Yes.

Yeah. Christian, this is great. I'm sure this is something, and knowing the audience here this year at this, and with the themes that are out there, this kind of plays right into it.

And for our platform engineers out there, maybe there's something... I'll talk to you offline. com.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So we'll chat.

We're going to take a break here at Techstrong TV. We'll be back in a minute. com and their new AI-backed IDP with Rancher support.

We'll be here all day. We'll be back.