Mario Fahlandt's Speaker Profile @ Sessionize

Quo vadis Cloud Native - The step in the second decade

A decade ago, Kubernetes started a revolution. This year, the CNCF—the foundation that nurtured it into a global standard—turns ten. The CNCF evolved to hosting most of the largest Open Source projects in the world. Let's take a look at what happened in the past decade of Cloud Native and how it helped to shape a whole tech ecosystem.

Also with the reforming of the Technical Advisory Groups we are looking into a new era of support from the community for the Community. Let’s find out how you can help TAGs and what you can gain from them.

The first 10 years only have been the beginning of an exciting journey. Join me as we look forward, exploring the next massive force set to redefine our fast-moving world: Artificial Intelligence.

Contributing to Kubernetes in Its Second Decade - How ContribEx enhances the journey!

SIG Contributor Experience has been wildly successful in helping grow the contributor base of Kubernetes in the first ten years of the project via New Contributor Workshops. We stressed on the importance of growing existing contributors in our last maintainer track session. However, the other side of the sustainability coin is ensuring that contributors who get started with contributing to Kubernetes, actually stick around. A lot has changed in the last decade, and we also need to change how we teach folks to contribute and interact with the community. Join us as we give a comprehensive overview of the Kubernetes governance and community structure, where you can seek help and what some pitfalls are that you will unexpectedly but inadvertently face in your contributor journey. We will highlight areas that are suited for folks from all backgrounds: marketing, content creation, event planning, community elections, automation and so much more!

Comms & Social Media - Why does a project need it

All the projects have at least a website. Most of the projects try to have some kind of Social Media presence. However, let's face the hard truth - Comms for a project is hard, and we can run into various pitfalls, and it is a lot of ground to cover.

Let's discover what channels and processes you can employ in a project to ensure good communications.
We start with the identification of target groups for comms. What channels to use and will end in drafting social media policies and guidelines for the contributors when they are publishing comms in the name of a project.
Also, have you ever thought of critical comms for a project - how do you handle comms if something critical is happening?
After the session, you have ideas for your project to move towards a more consistent and reliable communication.

Can You Put a Price Tag on Open Source?

Earlier this year, the Harvard Business School released the paper titled “The Value of Open Source Software,” estimating the worldwide value of OSS at 8.8 trillion, and on average, it would cost companies at least 3.5x more to develop similar projects internally. Yet, many organizations and engineers struggle to understand or realize this kind of value from contributing to these projects. In this talk, Mario will discuss the many benefits individuals and companies can achieve by contributing to open source and guide you through the first steps to becoming a contributor. He will also cover how to develop a lightweight open source strategy and convince your organization that an open source first approach can yield great returns.

AI-Powered DevOps: The Next Frontier of DevOps

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming our world, and the Cloud Native world is no exception. AI-powered DevOps tools can help teams to automate tasks, improve efficiency, and reduce the risk of errors.

This talk will explore the latest trends in AI-powered DevOps and discuss how these tools can be used to improve Infrastructure management. We will also discuss the benefits of using AI-powered DevOps tools, such as increased productivity, reduced risk, and improved performance.
Let us take a deep dive in tools like k8sgpt and shellgpt to see the benefit they provide you in a day-to-day work. Also, we will take a look where the road might lead and what to be aware of if we utilize AI in our Kubernetes environments.

AI-Powered DevOps: Revolutionizing Kubernetes Workflows with ShellGPT and K8sGPT

Join us for this cutting-edge workshop on AI-Powered DevOps, where we delve into the revolutionary impact of ShellGPT and K8sGPT. Discover how AI tools are transforming the DevOps landscape, making infrastructure management more efficient, reliable, and secure. Learn how ShellGPT, an AI-powered shell automation tool. You will learn how K8sGPT helps you diagnose and triaging issues in simple english. Powered by AI it helps you to pull out the most relevant information and empowers your debugging skills. Enhance your skill set, accelerate deployment processes, and optimize your container orchestration in this hands-on workshop designed to reshape the future of DevOps in Kubernetes.

The Bedrock of Efficient modern day Software Delivery are API driven platforms

In today's fast-paced development landscape, it becomes harder for organizations to keep up momentum while not drowning in technical debt and creating increasingly complex systems.
Platform Engineering is not only the practice of designing and building internal tool chains and workflows as a self-service product. Platform have evolved beyond internal use and are a tool to combine and deliver solutions for internal and external customers.
The true potential of Platform Engineering is unlocked only when built upon a solid, deliberate foundation. Core infrastructure reliability, clear standards, a collaborative culture, and critically, well-defined API-driven interfaces are non-negotiable prerequisites. Treating the platform's foundation seriously, with an API-first mindset for its interfaces, is essential to avoid common pitfalls and truly empower development teams, reduce their cognitive load, and accelerate innovation.

Stop Playing Catch-Up: Secure Your Future Before the CRA Hits!

The clock is ticking. With the vulnerability reporting deadline in Q3 2026, and the full weight of the Cyber Resilience Act hitting in December 2027. That's less time than you think to prepare for a seismic shift in digital product security.
Are you ready for the CRA? Spoiler: Most aren't.
According to a Linux Foundation Survey, 62% of companies have low familiarity with the requirements. Don't get caught flat-footed. "CYA before CRA" isn't just a catchy phrase – it's your survival strategy.
Let's explore how Open Source already can help you to proactively assess and mitigate risks with tools for SBOM generation and threat detection. How you can use the same tooling OSS is using to identify vulnerabilities before they become compliance nightmares. Learn to turn compliance into a competitive advantage by demonstrating your commitment to security and Open Source. This is an opportunity for companies and the OSS community to unite and address the CRA's challenges collaboratively.

Solving Supply Chain Security, Together - How Open Source helps you!

The clock is ticking. With the Cyber Resilience Act's 2026/2027 deadlines, transparency into your software dependencies is now critical. Other regulations and inner company security also require more transparency when it comes to dependencies in your Software.

The CNCF has proactively built a central, GUAC-based visualization to explore the SBOMs of all its projects. This provides a single, queryable source of truth for the entire cloud-native supply chain.

Let’s take a look at what we built, how we did it, and how you can leverage this open-source model for your company. As it is built on top of Open Source tools and itself is open source, let’s see what you can take advantage of for your own companies.

Employ Open Source as Secret Weapon for Leadership, Tech, and Talent Acquisition

Today's competitive tech landscape presents engineering leaders with ever more new challenges.
The relentless pressure to build high performing teams, staying ahead of the curve and attracting top talents.
The key to success in all of these areas is hidden in plain sight - Open source. Often it is seen as a volunteer activity and often neglected as not a company goal beneficial.
We will explore the reasons where this view was built and why it is utterly wrong. Let's explore why supporting open source contribution, both personally and within your company, is a strategic investment in your leadership, technical expertise, and recruitment efforts.

Prepare arguments for your management level, why open source contribution is long-term a benefit for the company - not only to retain talent, but also for a direct business impact. All learnings are supported by practical experience of a company deeply involved in the Cloud Native Open Source community for 7 years.

Can you put a price tag on Open Source?

Earlier this year, the Harvard Business School released the paper titled “The Value of Open Source Software,” estimating the worldwide value of OSS at 8.8 trillion, and on average, it would cost companies at least 3.5x more to develop similar projects internally. Yet, many organizations and engineers struggle to understand or realize this kind of value from contributing to these projects.

In this talk, Mario will discuss the many benefits individuals and companies can achieve by contributing to open source and guide you through the first steps to becoming a contributor. They will also cover how to develop a lightweight open source strategy and convince your organization that an open source first approach can yield great returns.

Employ Open Source as Secret Weapon for Leadership, Tech, and Talent Acquisition

Today's competitive tech landscape presents engineering leaders with ever more new challenges.
The relentless pressure to build high performing teams, staying ahead of the curve and attracting top talents.
The key to success in all of these areas is hidden in plain sight - Open source. Often it is seen as a volunteer activity and often neglected as not a company goal beneficial.
We will explore the reasons where this view was built and why it is utterly wrong. Let's explore why supporting open source contribution, both personally and within your company, is a strategic investment in your leadership, technical expertise, and recruitment efforts.

Prepare arguments for your management level, why open source contribution is long-term a benefit for the company - not only to retain talent, but also for a direct business impact. All learnings are supported by practical experience of a company deeply involved in the Cloud Native Open Source community for 7 years.

How to create a story? - A Road trip to follow from Topic creation to proposal writing

There are a lot of conferences out who are looking for speakers. Placing a talk is still hard. Before we even get to the point of placing a talk, we need to come up with the hardest part, what to talk about.
Let’s dive into a Road trip, beginning with undoubtedly the hardest part: how to come up with a Topic to talk about.
Continuing from there, we move forward on how to draft the proposal for the talk - I will share a bit from both sides - what a speaker wants to deliver and what a program committee wants to see.
We will also take a quick look on how to find the events that might be interesting and how to get support.
In the end, let's also chat about how to deal with rejections - as they will come.

Datacenter in a Suitcase - a real small edge case

The challenges brought to the cloud native community are ever expanding. Luckily also the tools and the hardware support is expending.
Edge is a topic which appears ever more often. The challenges there are as much as the use cases. Here we want to explore how to build a true portable datacenter what can travel easily and brings enough power to support certain applications. A datacenter which fits in a suitcase and is possible to bring to remote locations to help there to bring computing power directly to the place to be.
With the help of various CNCF projects, this comes to live. The base is a MiniITX Clusterboard with multiple ARM based hardware nodes. On top the utilization will take place with KubeVirt, and we utilize the small control plane approach of the Kubermatic Kubernetes platform to create a real multi cluster Datacenter. Follow me in this Case Study to unlock a really portable Datacenter.

This case study and the open source approach of its design is aimed to give a possible solution for small real edge datacenters. An easy to built public available blueprint for a portable datacenter shows the strong parts of our Open Source community. The utilization of multiple CNCF open source projects and the sharing of the created blueprint to everyone.
So it will be easy for more people to explore the edge world by themselves and can create their on solutions based on it

Automated deployment in Google Cloud, secretly easy with Kubernetes!

Bothering with infrastructure and get your code running can be annoying. We will achieve a complete automated progress, starting on your repository to the running application inside of your Kubernetes Engine in less than 20 minutes all in Google Cloud. We will use Docker, the Container Builder Kubernetes Engine and Code Repository to get rid of all the exhausting Pipeline Setup and extra tools.

Goodbye Pod Security Policy - Hello stronger alternatives

Back in December, it was announced to deprecate the pod security policy (PSP) in Kubernetes version 1.21 and to remove the API completely at version 1.25. This decision could leave many Kubernetes users at risk of being exposed to various exploits.
In the meantime, stronger alternatives have emerged in the form of Open Policy Agent and Kyverno. Each of them brings its own strengths and weaknesses.
Both of these projects are viable replacements for PSPs, they are vastly more capable than simply acting on Pods alone--they are full Kubernetes policy engines.
Let's have a look together to figure out which one fits your requirements.

Real Industry 4.0 - Running Kubernetes in a Manufacturing Line

Imagine your manufacturing line is controlled by services running in your datacenters’ Kubernetes clusters. You have facilities in locations all over the world. You provide a managed service with uptime SLA. Now, there is an issue with the internet connection. Or security is shutting down all connections to defend against a cyberattack. And your production line must keep working because every downtime is money.

This was the challenge to solve, and we did! Did you ever think about – how to run basic Infrastructure Services like DHCP and DNS in a cloud native way for manufacturing services? How to autoscale cluster on-prem? Follow us in the rabbit hole using all kinds of CNCF projects to build a setup that scales, is able to shift and redeploy workloads, and continues to function without relying on cloud vendors or external services. We will show you the obvious and non-obvious challenges of cloud native adopters in the industry 4.0 sector, including some true edge computing cases.

Set-up HA Kubernetes Cluster - the easy way with KubeOne

Getting a Kubernetes Cluster Up and running can be painful, especially when you need to perform this on multiple environments.
There is an easy solution for this called KubeOne - this Open Source Cluster Lifecycle management Tool for High Available Kubernetes Cluster makes it easy to Set-Up and Update your Kubernetes Clusters easily.
In it's declarative style based on the Kubernetes Cluster API we will see how we can install, configure, extend and update your Kubernetes Cluster with KubeOne

AI-Powered DevOps: The Next Frontier of DevOps

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming our world, and the Cloud Native world is no exception. AI-powered DevOps tools can help teams to automate tasks, improve efficiency, and reduce the risk of errors.

This talk will explore the latest trends in AI-powered DevOps and discuss how these tools can be used to improve Infrastructure management. We will also discuss the benefits of using AI-powered DevOps tools, such as increased productivity, reduced risk, and improved performance.
Let us take a deep dive in tools like k8sgpt and shellgpt to see the benefit they provide you in a day-to-day work. Also, we will take a look where the road might lead and what to be aware of if we utilize AI in our Kubernetes environments.

Cloud Native Security: A New Paradigm for a New World

Cloud native computing has revolutionized the way applications are developed and deployed. However, it has also introduced new security challenges. The traditional security paradigm, which is based on perimeter-based security, static security controls, and a reactive security posture, is no longer sufficient to protect cloud native environments.

This talk will discuss the need for a new security paradigm in the cloud native world. It will introduce the concepts of zero-trust security, shift-left security, and continuous security, and explain how these concepts can be applied to cloud native environments. The talk will also discuss the benefits of the new security paradigm, such as improved security posture, reduced risk, and increased agility and scalability.

Finally, the talk will provide some examples of organizations that have successfully implemented the new security paradigm, and discuss some emerging cloud native security technologies.

Mario Fahlandt

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Mario Fahlandt

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