Ketan Jani
Staff SRE at Apple. CNCF KubeCon Program Committee (EU + India 2026). 5x CNCF/Linux Foundation certified. Kubernetes at scale.
Durham, North Carolina, United States
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Ketan is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Apple operating Kubernetes infrastructure at significant scale. He has served on the CNCF KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Program Committee for both Europe 2026 and India 2026. He is a CNCF TCG organizer for Software Supply Chain Security, an organizer for DevOpsDays Raleigh conference, and holds five CNCF/Linux Foundation certifications (CKS, CKA, CKAD, KCNA, PCA). Ketan is focused on building resilient, scalable infrastructure and simplifying operations in cloud-native environments.
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Talk to Your KubeCon: An MCP Server for Multi-Year Knowledge Retrieval Across Sessions and Speakers
Planning KubeCon usually means scrolling Sched and scanning abstracts one at a time, keyword search misses synonyms and tells you nothing about what's trending.
An MCP server sits between an MCP-compatible AI client or chat bot and a semantic index over every KubeCon session, abstracts video transcripts, enriched with speaker, company, and tool metadata. Four tools (search, ask, lookup, details) power session retrieval and conversational queries like "Can you tell me more about session X", "which previous KubeCons covered Y subject?", or "build me an agenda focused on domain Z."
Most of the design work happens on the corpus side: metadata narrows candidates before vector search, and pre-built vector snapshots cut cold start from 30s to <1s. We iterate through video transcript sessions, chunking each talk (~4k words vs 200 in abstracts) and storing them in object storage so the system can answer deeper, content-level questions abstracts alone can't.
The Anti-Playbook: How To Delete Brittle Scripts and Let Kubernetes Handle It
Platform and infrastructure teams often rely on ad-hoc scripts to manage operational knowledge—until complexity, scale, and reliability demands break those workflows. In this session, the speakers will present how to replace fragile operational scripts with a purpose-built Kubernetes controller to handle real-world workflows as native Kubernetes resources.
This session will include a walkthrough of designing your own controller using controller-runtime, writing reconciliation loops, and ensuring safe, idempotent behavior in production. The speakers will share lessons from building a controller that coordinates multi-step workflows (such as upgrades, or compliance checks), and handles failure gracefully, with appropriate re-queueing and controller concurrency.
Attendees will walk away with a clear design patten for deciding when a Kubernetes controller is the right choice—and when it’s not—plus actionable patterns for replacing brittle scripts with resilient, reusable automation.
Kubernetes Upgrades on Autopilot: Zero Downtime, Zero Headaches
Upgrading Kubernetes sounds easy — until you’re operating a large fleet of production clusters, each with different workloads, requirements and complexity. This session will empower you to automate Kubernetes upgrades across a multi-tenant platform — with zero downtime, built-in observability, and automated verification.
This session will also cover lessons learned from building a custom Kubernetes controller using controller-runtime, building orchestration pipelines for Kubernetes upgrades, and maintaining service availability, even for singleton workloads that do not allow any disruption.
The audience will take away:
* Design patterns for safe, repeatable Kubernetes upgrades
* Integration of open-source tools like controller-runtime, and Spinnaker
* How to shift upgrades from a scary event to a routine, automated process
Ketan Jani
Staff SRE at Apple. CNCF KubeCon Program Committee (EU + India 2026). 5x CNCF/Linux Foundation certified. Kubernetes at scale.
Durham, North Carolina, United States
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