Julien Semaan
Senior Architect @Akamai | CNCF TAG DevEx Tech Lead
Montréal, Canada
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Julien is a Cloud Native Architect at Akamai and a Tech Lead in CNCF TAG Developer Experience. With a background in open-source and cloud-native systems, he has been using Kubernetes since 2017 and led the transition of network security projects PacketFence and Fingerbank to cloud-native architectures. He now focuses on building and scaling cloud-native products on the Akamai Cloud (Linode).
Area of Expertise
Topics
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!
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