Julien Semaan
VP R&D @Kubex | CNCF TAG DevEx Tech Lead
Montréal, Canada
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Julien is the VP of Research & Development at Kubex and a Tech Lead with the CNCF TAG for Developer Experience. With deep roots in open source and cloud-native systems, he has been working with Kubernetes since 2017 and has led multiple product transitions to cloud-native architectures.
Area of Expertise
Topics
TAG DevEx State of the Union: What We're Shipping and Why It Matters
The cloud native ecosystem has spent a decade mastering how to run software. Now the hard problem is making it genuinely easy to build. TAG Developer Experience isn't just philosophizing about this shift, but we're shipping the standards to make it real.
The TAG DevEx chairs and tech leaders will give maintainers an unfiltered look at the work defining the next decade of cloud native productivity. We'll cover our OCI-compliant inner-loop tooling standards for AI engineers, the Application Integration Dependency Specification for declaring how apps interact with cloud services, our State of AI-Assisted Development research, and shared DevEx benchmarks across CNCF projects.
You'll leave with a concrete Developer-First framework backed by real contributor friction data. If you maintain a CNCF project and want to know what good looks like, this is your session.
GitOps Gone Wild: Hardening Delivery Pipelines for the AI era
GitOps promises safety and automation, but it will faithfully ship your mistakes at scale. With AI-assisted coding and emerging autonomous agents in the loop, those mistakes now move faster than humans can fully reason about their impact.
This talk dissects real-world GitOps failures where tiny configuration changes triggered outages, overly trusted pipelines amplified risk, and AI-generated patches were merged without understanding their consequences. None of these incidents were tooling failures. They were safety failures.
We’ll show how teams put guardrails back in place by enforcing policy before merge, using progressive rollouts to contain blast radius, applying Crossplane constraints to keep infrastructure changes reversible, and adding automated verification gates that catch problems before they reach production.
Fixing GPU Time-Slicing on Kubernetes: Dynamic, Memory-Safe Sharing for AI Inference
Time-slicing is often the only viable way to share GPUs on commodity hardware or in cloud environments where MIG and MPS are unavailable. In practice, Kubernetes time-slicing relies on static configuration and does not constrain GPU memory, leading to noisy neighbors, unpredictable performance, and OOM failures in inference workloads.
This session shows how to close that gap by combining memory-aware controls with smarter pod placement. Using KAI for GPU-aware scheduling and HAMi for per-workload memory limit enforcement, we demonstrate how to prevent memory overcommit, stabilize performance, and safely share GPUs across inference workloads. Under the hood, Kyverno mutates pod specs to inject KAI and HAMi configuration on inference pods that should share GPUs.
This talk shows how to get safe, OOM-free GPU sharing on standard Kubernetes clusters without hardware upgrades. Just dynamic scheduling and enforced memory limits that work with the GPUs you already have.
From Apps to Infrastructure: A Cloud-Native First Approach
Traditional infrastructure GitOps workflows, commonly built on tools like Terraform or OpenTofu, often struggle with state management, limited reconciliation, and delayed drift detection. Because these systems operate outside the Kubernetes control plane, infrastructure changes follow different lifecycle and failure semantics than applications, making it difficult to reason about system-wide correctness and safety.
We’ll present a unified approach for managing both applications and infrastructure through the Kubernetes control plane. This approach brings together GitOps controllers and Crossplane to extend the Kubernetes API to infrastructure via an ecosystem of community-supported providers spanning major clouds, alternative clouds, and on-prem. The result is a vendor-neutral foundation where applications and infrastructure follow the same review, lifecycle, and reconciliation model.
Shaping the future of Developer Experience: How TAG DevEx Supports CNCF Projects and Developers
This panel explores how the CNCF's Developer Experience Technical Advisory Group (TAG) supports CNCF projects to improve the daily lives of app developers—and by extension, software quality and delivery. We will take you through our group’s goals and initiatives where the TAG collaborates with maintainers to identify and address friction points, streamline workflows, and foster best practices that boost app developer productivity across the cloud native ecosystem. While developer experience is central, TAG DevEx’s scope goes further, covering essential areas like databases, microservices, and API management, ensuring the broader infrastructure also supports a seamless development journey. Join us to discuss how to integrate developer experience considerations into project lifecycles better, ensuring maintainers receive the support needed to build projects that truly empower developers to build, deploy, and manage applications more efficiently within a Kubernetes environment.
Rethinking Cluster Boundaries: Distributed Kubernetes with One Control Plane
What if we stopped defaulting to one cluster per region and started thinking of Kubernetes as one giant, global substrate?
This talk explores how we challenged conventional cluster architectures by running Kubernetes worker nodes across geographies from a single control plane. In edge and resource-constrained regions, deploying redundant control planes is both expensive and fragile. Instead, we designed a global worker-plane architecture, gaining a unified control surface, simplified observability, and efficient resource sharing.
We’ll share architectural patterns, lessons learned around latency, resiliency, and networking, and how this approach reduces operational sprawl. Attendees will leave with practical considerations and a new lens on cluster design.
Building PCI Compliant Kubernetes Platforms - Demystified, fun, and possible
Imagine building a secure, scalable platform as your organization's backbone—meeting PCI compliance while optimizing for efficiency. Let's explore crafting such a platform using self-managed Kubernetes, with lessons learned, a blueprint for technologies and practices that you can apply to your own environment.
GitOps and Zero Trust are our guiding principles. ArgoCD helps us automate, ensure consistency, and deliver traceable, auditable changes, enabling speed without compromising stability.
To manage Kubernetes' self-hosted complexity, we leverage tools like Crossplane and Cluster API (CAPI), enabling declarative management of clusters and resources with SDLC best practices that align workflows with PCI standards. We balance responsibilities between platform engineering and tenants, fostering collaboration and ease of use without sacrificing security. Join us and explore this path to a compliant, efficient, and trusted platform – it is possible to enjoy compliance!
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
CNCF Montreal: 2026 Meetups User group Sessionize Event Upcoming
Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026 Sessionize Event
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2025 Sessionize Event
Maintainer Summit: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 Sessionize Event
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