KubeCrash Fall 2025

Lisa-Marie Namphy, CNCF Ambassador, Director Developer Relations, Intuit; Danielle Cook, CNCF Ambassador, Co-chair CNCF Cartografos Group, Senior PMM, Akamai

Lisa Shissler Smith, Director at Women Who Code; Former Engineering Manager at Netflix and Zapier

The key to good platform engineering is reliability, but you can't provide that stability if you have a toothpick in your Jenga tower. We'll talk about avoiding the migration trap, reducing tech debt in core systems, and multimodal approaches to creating a strong and stable platform your organization can rely on today and in the future.

Billy Thompson, Senior, Global DevOps & Platform Engineering - Office of the CTO, Akamai

Dima Shevchuk, Staff Software Engineer, Production Engineering, Grammarly

What happens when a "you build it, you own it" culture meets rapid growth? At Grammarly, it led to a complete re-platforming, transitioning from hundreds of ECS services owned by individual teams to a Kubernetes-based, SRE-led platform that treats infrastructure as a product.

In this talk, Dima Shevchuk, a Tech Lead at Grammarly, will discuss the reasons for this change, the critical people and process shifts that were more impactful than the technology itself, and the open-source stack that powers it all today. Join us to learn candid lessons you can apply proactively, before scale forces your hand.

Rob Koch, Senior Principal, Slalom Build; Co-Chair CNCF Deaf & Hard of Hearing WG

Communication barriers exclude millions of people from fully participating in everyday interactions. For the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, the absence of scalable, real-time sign language interpretation remains a persistent challenge. In this session, we will demonstrate a forward-looking AI-powered application that translates sign language into spoken language, deployed and orchestrated on Kubernetes. This application leverages generative AI (LxMs) to scale for multiple users, representing a step toward a future where communication is accessible to all.

Using the sign language translation use case, the session will demonstrate how Kubernetes is well-positioned to support AI workloads, how it optimizes cluster resources for video and language processing, and how it integrates seamlessly with generative AI use-cases.

Julia Furst, Veeam; Nicol Daňková, Henkel

Marino Wijay, CNCF Ambassador, Staff Solutions Architect, Kong; William Rizzo, CNCF Ambassador, Strategy Lead - CTO Office, Mirantis

The "sidecar vs. sidecarless" debate in service meshes is an important one. It's an architectural choice that profoundly impacts how your mesh handles proxy sharing and multi-tenancy. While sidecars offer advantages like no application code changes, language independence, and clear operational models, they also present trade-offs such as potential resource overhead. Depending on what you put into the sidecar, they may turn into side-trucks. Understanding these nuances is key to selecting the right mesh for your environment.

In their session, Marino Wijay, [title] at Kong, and William Rizzo, [title] at Mirantis and Linkerd Ambassador, will walk you through the different service mesh architectures, benefits, and trade-offs. As you'll see, the core distinction lies in proxy sharing. Join this session to learn more and make the right service mesh decisions for your use case.

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Kaslin Fields, Google (moderator);  Liana Anca Tomescu, SonnyLabs.ai; Annie Talvasto, Waovo

AI promises to transform how we build, run, and scale cloud native platforms—but for platform engineers, the real question is: what should you actually automate? With so many AI tools, services, and frameworks available, deciding where to start can be overwhelming. Should you use AI for incident response? Cost optimization? Developer experience? And what does success even look like?

This panel explores how platform engineers are integrating AI into their workflows today—what’s working, what’s not, and how they’re evaluating tradeoffs. We’ll unpack the hype, share end user stories and discuss how platform teams can strategically adopt AI without losing sight of long-term goals. If you're trying to figure out where AI fits in your platform strategy, this session is for you.

Petr Svoboda, CEO, CodeNOW

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Recent surveys show more than half of developers see infrastructure automation tasks as a necessary evil that pulls them away from delivering business value. While those tasks do bring consistency and automation, in practice, they often add complexity, slow onboarding, and distract engineers from their core work. In this lightning talk, Petr will explore why developers are frustrated with infra automation today and touch on the hidden costs of maintaining it. He'll also discuss emerging patterns and practices that free developers from infrastructure toil while keeping platforms secure and compliant.

Join us for a fast-paced look at how teams can turn infra & DevOps automation around and refocus developers on what they do best: building great software that brings value!

Christopher Khanoyan, Tech Lead, Booz Allen Hamilton, CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing WG Member; Flynn, Linkerd Evangelist, Buoyant

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Are you running AI or ML on Kubernetes? Is everything really working… or is it just running while silently failing behind the scenes?

AI and ML pipelines are being increasingly deployed in cloud-native environments, and people are paying a lot of attention to the mechanics of running them. But what comes after getting your huge training workloads running and your model queries properly load balanced? There’s a whole class of operational challenges that’s not getting talked about very much: how do you know that everything is really working correctly?

Join us for a look into AI observability! In this session, we’ll talk about the metrics that are usually available and what they really mean, what you need to know to use them to spot problems, and how you can use modern cloud-native tooling for a clean AI-centric metrics pipeline. We’ll wrap up with a demo showing these techniques live in the wild so that attendees can walk away with useful, practical insights into the brave new AI world!

Lisa-Marie Namphy, CNCF Ambassador, Director Developer Relations, Intuit; Danielle Cook, CNCF Ambassador, Co-chair CNCF Cartografos Group