Coming to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City next month? Members of the CNCF End User Technical Advisory Board (TAB) pulled together their top talk recommendations with insights into their recommendations 🙂 Worth a look!
Mario Constanti:
Practical Supply Chain Security: Implementing SLSA Compliance from Build to Runtime – Enguerrand Allamel, Ledger
Why Mario is interested:
Modern Software depends increasingly on open-source packages and libraries. Attacks on the supply chain have a huge impact and can give attackers extensive authorizations in your own system. Therefore, it’s becoming increasingly important that open-source projects increase their supply chain security and that we, as users, adopt the same patterns in our build and release processes.
The Policy Engines Showdown – Gabriel L. Manor, Permit.io; Andres Aguiar, Okta; Omri Gazitt, Aserto; Anders Eknert, Styra; Sarah Cecchetti, AWS
Why Mario is interested:
Building platforms still requires increasing security policies, best practices, or other governing rules to reach a common internal standard. Enforcing and maintaining these kinds of policies works best if they are treated as code. It will be super interesting to see how the maintainers of all these different frameworks argue to hopefully get a rough idea which engine best fits my needs.
Joseph Sandoval:
Why Joseph is interested:
I’m particularly excited about The Maintainer Monologues because it dives into project maintainers’ real, behind-the-scenes journeys within the CNCF ecosystem. Discussing how maintainers are “made”—through hard work, trial and error, and navigating a complex landscape—feels deeply relatable. Maintainers are vital to our community, and hearing their stories is important.
The Node Tetris Rabbit Hole: Why Your Binpacking Might Be Underperforming – Hannah Taub (Adobe)
Why Joseph is interested:
Okay, yes, this is a shameless plug for my colleague on the Adobe Ethos team, but I’m genuinely excited about The Node Tetris Rabbit Hole. If you’ve ever wondered why your autoscaling isn’t maximizing node capacity, this talk dives into real-world strategies for improving bin packing efficiency at scale. It’s a must-watch for anyone dealing with Kubernetes resource optimization.
Ricardo Rocha
Best of Both Worlds: Integrating Slurm with Kubernetes in a Kubernetes Native Way – Eduardo Arango Gutierrez, NVIDIA & Angel Beltre, Sandia National Laboratories
Why Ricardo is interested:
The world is thirsty for GPUs. While cloud providers increase their offerings, a large number of old and new HPC centers are being built or upgraded with the latest generations of these accelerators but mostly blocked to the cloud native world. Bridging the gap between cloud and scientific computing infrastructure will open up new doors for end users requiring this type of hardware.
Orchestrating Quasi-Real Time Data Processing in the Computing Farm of the ATLAS Experiment at CERN – Giuseppe Avolio, CERN
Why Ricardo is interested:
Scaling problems appear in different areas and with different sizes. But when scaling clusters to 5000 nodes and ensuring 25000 pods are up and running in less than a minute, things get entertaining. Add 5TB/s of data processing plus a multi-billion dollar scientific experiment and it’s guaranteed this is an awesome story to tell your cloud native friends.
Mike Bowen
Optimizing Load Balancing and Autoscaling for Large Language Model (LLM) Inference on Kubernetes – David Gray, Red Hat
Why Mike is interested:
As generative AI language models (LLMs) become more integral to business applications, managing the compute-intensive nature of LLM inference is crucial. David’s talk introduces the KServe platform for deploying LLMs on Kubernetes, focusing on efficient use of GPU hardware to manage costs and power usage.
Automated Multi-Cloud Blue-Green Cluster Rotations: Zero Downtime Upgrades at Scale – Sourav Khandelwal, Databricks
Why Mike is interested:
I look forward to hearing Sourav present Databricks’ system for managing cluster rotations across an extensive fleet of over a thousand cloud-managed Kubernetes clusters on AWS, Azure, and GCP. There is no shortage of complexity executing blue-green cluster rotations or cluster swaps at scale. I am excited to learn more about the methodologies employed and challenges they faced to identify the significant benefits of automating multi-cloud Kubernetes upgrades at scale.
Chad Beaudin
OpenTelemetry and Prometheus sessions
I am excited to see the progress and new features that have been added to the OTEL landscape. As Prometheus continues to mature it is great to see how user pain points have been addressed as well as new features that will provide business value inside of Boeing.
Lastly, I like to find out things I wasn’t aware of (but should have been). There is just so much going on, it’s always a challenge to keep up.
Henrik Blixt
Evolving Reddit’s Infrastructure via Principled Platform Abstractions – Karan Thukral & Harvey Xia, Reddit
Why Henrik is interested:
Kubernetes is tablestakes but complexity still looms large. At Intuit, like many others, we’re focused on simplifying that complexity by abstracting infrastructure, enabling developers to focus on innovation, not operations. The target is self-service and AI-driven automation, avoiding the need for large infrastructure teams while keeping things efficient and focused on the developers’ needs. Reddit’s journey in tackling these challenges is sure to resonate, offering valuable insights for anyone facing—or about to face—similar hurdles and I’m excited to see how they’ve tackled it
Space Age GitOps: Lifting off with Argo Promotions (Live Demo!) – Michael Crenshaw & Zach Aller, Intuit
Why Henrik is interested:
GitOps has cemented itself as the process to follow when developing cloud native applications, but as we learn, adapt and evolve, so must our technologies and tools. Led by two Argo CD maintainers from Intuit, this talk addresses some of our challenges and how we envision the future of Argo CD in our GitOps tool chain and will offer valuable insights for other GitOps practitioners and Argo CD users.
(and live demos are always cool!)
Platform Engineering for Software Developers and Architects – Daniel Bryant, Syntasso
Why Henrik is interested:
The best saved for almost last… Platform engineering is all about creating the optimal platform that truly empowers developers, but it goes beyond just delivering cool features. It’s about setting the right expectations on how the platform will drive developer productivity and providing ways to measure that impact effectively. Equally important is how the platform, architecture, and development process align to maximize efficiency. This session promises to cover all of that, and I’m really excited to see how Daniel will address these challenges.