Harshita Varma
Associate Product Manager
Bengaluru, India
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Harshita Varma is a contributor to the Kubernetes project, actively involved in the SIG Contributor Experience community, with a focus on enhancing the contributor journey. She began her open-source journey by contributing to the Thanos project, sparking her passion for open source. In March 2022, she was selected as an LFX mentee for Kubernetes under the CNCF. Since then, Harshita has significantly contributed to Kubernetes, earning the prestigious Dan Kohn Scholarship to attend KubeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam as an attendee. Currently, she continues to engage with the open-source ecosystem, fostering collaboration and inclusivity within the Kubernetes community.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Securing Multi-Cloud Kubernetes with Cilium, Hubble, and Tetragon: A Real-World Case Study
n this lightning talk, I will share a concise case study from a mid-sized fintech company that leveraged Cilium, Hubble, and Tetragon to secure and observe their multi-cloud Kubernetes environment. The session will showcase how we implemented network policies, enabled transparent encryption, and utilized runtime enforcement to meet strict compliance requirements—without sacrificing developer agility. Attendees will see practical examples of troubleshooting, policy tuning, and real-time visibility, highlighting the integration of these CNCF projects to overcome real operational challenges.
From Noise to Clarity: Humanizing Observability in Cloud-Native Systems
As cloud-native environments scale in complexity, observability is no longer just about collecting logs, metrics, and traces—it’s about making sense of them. While modern observability stacks deliver a wealth of data, the real challenge is translating this information into actionable insights that everyone on the team can understand and use, from SREs and developers to business stakeholders.
This talk explores the next evolution: From Noise to Clarity. We’ll dive into practical strategies and open source tools (like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and emerging AI/LLM-powered solutions) that help demystify observability data. Attendees will learn how to:
Correlate signals across distributed systems for a unified view
Use AI and LLMs to generate human-friendly explanations of complex incidents
Build dashboards and alerts that surface root causes, not just symptoms
Empower teams to act quickly and confidently—regardless of their observability expertise
We’ll showcase real-world examples.
From Black Box to Crystal Clear: Real-World Troubleshooting with Cilium, Hubble, and Tetragon
Modern Kubernetes clusters can feel like black boxes when network or security issues arise. In this session, we share a real-world case study of how our team used Cilium, Hubble, and Tetragon to diagnose and resolve complex networking and security incidents in a multi-cloud environment. We’ll walk through the challenges we faced, demonstrate live observability with Hubble, and show how Tetragon’s runtime enforcement helped us catch and mitigate threats in real time. Attendees will leave with practical workflows and lessons learned to improve their own cluster visibility, security, and incident response.
Doing More With Less: Automating Developer Onboarding with Backstage and Open Source Plugins
Developer onboarding can be slow and resource-intensive, especially in fast-growing teams. In this lightning talk, I’ll share how we used Backstage and key open source plugins to automate onboarding, reducing setup time from days to minutes. I’ll walk through our approach to customizing Backstage, integrating it with existing tools, and streamlining the developer workflow—without increasing operational overhead. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for using Backstage to optimize onboarding and improve developer experience, even with limited resources.
Beyond the Basics: Authoring Custom Operators in PyTorch for Performance Gains
Unlock the full potential of PyTorch by building high-performance custom operators in C++ and CUDA. This session provides a deep dive into defining, implementing, and registering custom ops using the latest PyTorch APIs, including TORCH_LIBRARY for operator definition and backend-specific kernels. Attendees will learn how to write device-specific code, manage memory efficiently, and implement both forward and backward passes for autograd support. The talk covers hybrid Python/C++ registration, dynamic loading of compiled extensions, and integration with TorchScript and ExecuTorch for deployment on diverse hardware. Real-world examples will demonstrate how to profile bottlenecks, leverage operator schema management, and replace standard modules (e.g., nn.Linear) with optimized custom variants. By the end, you’ll be equipped to extend PyTorch for specialized workloads, accelerate inference, and contribute robust extensions to the open source community
Invisible Shields: Runtime Security and Virtual Patching in Kubernetes
Traditional patch management is insufficient for mitigating rapidly evolving threats in dynamic Kubernetes environments, where zero-day vulnerabilities can be exploited before official patches are available. This session presents a technical exploration of virtual patching—deploying runtime security controls at the kernel level to intercept and neutralize exploits without modifying application code or requiring downtime. Leveraging open source solutions such as KubeArmor, which utilizes eBPF and Linux Security Modules (LSM) for inline mitigation, and Kyverno for declarative policy enforcement, this talk demonstrates the orchestration of layered security policies that provide defense-in-depth against advanced threats. Attendees will see how to implement granular process, file, and network access controls, automate vulnerability detection and response workflows, and integrate virtual patching into CI/CD pipelines for continuous protection. Real-world use cases will illustrate how these controls block exploitation vectors in real time, ensuring workload integrity while maintaining operational agility
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming
OpenSSF Community Day Europe 2025 Sessionize Event
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