Michael Forrester
Preparing Tomorrow's Innovators, Elevating the Average
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
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Michael Forrester is a student, an explorer, and an educator who keeps finding himself at the boundary between humanity and technology.
Over 25+ years he's held roles from CTO to individual contributor, crossing operations, AI, machine learning, cloud infrastructure, and platform engineering — including time at AWS, ThoughtWorks, Red Hat, and Honeywell. Today he focuses on helping organizations adopt generative AI in ways that are sustainable, secure, cost-effective, and meaningful — building on training programs that have reached over a million engineers across AWS, Kubernetes, and AI-driven operations.
He speaks regularly at KubeCon and CNCF events and co-hosts podcasts exploring how artificial intelligence is reshaping the engineering discipline. His work spans Claude Code and MCP integrations, AI safety frameworks for platform engineers, and courses on everything from AWS certifications to K8sGPT.
His take on the 2020s: engineering isn't going away — it's evolving. Systems thinking, design thinking, and architecture matter more than ever, even as the tools change around us. Tools don't transform organizations. People do.
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Auditor Who Had Nothing Left To Ask: GitOps and Runtime Security for Sovereign Compliance
Let us tell you about the time an auditor absolutely destroyed us.
"Show me your access logs." Three systems, none talking to each other.
"Prove this deployment was approved." We Slacked around for 20 minutes while they watched.
"What happened at 2 AM last Tuesday?" No idea.
They gave us a second chance.
After two weeks digging through logs like archaeologists, we fixed it. Not with some expensive GRC platform..with ArgoCD and Falco, two CNCF Graduated projects. We wrote rules that tag detections to NIS2, DORA, SOC2. We made Git our audit trail. We built workflows that captured evidence before anyone asked.
Next time the auditor showed up, they were slightly wowed. Most questions they asked, the system had already answered.
This talk is that story: the disaster, the fix, and a live demo where I break things on purpose so you can watch continuous compliance in action. You'll leave with working code, compliance-mapped Falco rules, and an architecture that worked for us.
6 Autoscalers in 6 Months: A Kubernetes Scaling Horror Story
It started innocently. We should add auto scaling. This is crazy. We're doing manual scaling. Well....
Six months later, we had deployed HPA, Cluster Autoscaler, Karpenter, KEDA, VPA, AND Kueue. Each one solved a problem and created three more. This is that story: the dumb failures, the "why didn't we read the docs" moments, and the gotchas that only show up in production.
5 minutes. 6 autoscalers. A whole lot of regret. An object lesson in what not to do when dealing with auto scalers, even as we evolved into AI workloads
I'll speed-run through each autoscaler in the order we actually adopted them... HPA + Cluster Autoscaler together on day one, Karpenter when CA was too slow, KEDA when CPU metrics failed us, VPA when we finally admitted our resource requests were fiction (because why not), and Kueue when AI training jobs started fighting each other.
Come laugh at our pain. Leave knowing which autoscaler you actually need or at least which one you want to avoid, and which gotchas will bite you.
The Day Claude Code Deleted My Cluster: A Cautionary Tale About AI Guardrails
"You have full access to the pipeline. Do what you need to do."
Famous last words.
In this lightning talk, I'll share the hilarious (and horrifying) story of what happened when I gave Claude Code full pipeline access and stepped away for 30 seconds. When I came back it had not only completely wrecked the Kubernetes cluster but not even two troubleshooting systems sessions later it wrecked almost every network card in the set of Linux systems.
This is a story about nondeterministic systems, the illusion of AI understanding, and why "the AI knows what it's doing" is the most dangerous phrase in modern DevOps. I'll share the actual troubleshooting spiral that escalated from "let me help" to "I've destroyed your cluster and systems," and the guardrails I now enforce religiously.
5 minutes. 20 slides. And one very hilarious probably very blameful post-mortem with Claude Code afterwards. One very expensive lesson about trusting AI agents with infrastructure access even if it was just for a short while.
Come for the disaster. Stay for the wisdom.
The Auditor Who Had Nothing Left to Ask: a story about Continuous Compliance with Falco and ArgoCD
Three months ago, an auditor walked into our environment expecting the usual dance—requests for evidence, scrambling engineers, screenshots of logs from six months ago. What they found instead made them uncomfortable.
Instead of asking questions and waiting for answers, they watched our system answer in real-time. Unauthorized shell access? Detected and alerted in 3 seconds. Configuration drift? Caught and reverted before they finished asking. Malicious workload? Isolated, evidence captured, incident ticket created,,,,all while they watched.
By the end, the auditor had nothing left to ask. Every question they could ask or imagine, the system had already answered. That's when we realized... compliance isn't about periodic evidence collection. It's about continuous proof.
This talk shows exactly what that auditor saw: a live demonstration of Falco (runtime detection) + ArgoCD (GitOps delivery) working together to create continuous compliance evidence. I'll trigger real alerts, show automated responses, and demonstrate how Git becomes your auditor's best friend..an immutable, timestamped, cryptographically signed record of every change. Huzzah!!!!!
As Kelsey Hightower said: "The ability to move the needle without permission is a form of sovereignty." This architecture gives you that sovereignty....the ability to prove control to any authority, at any moment.
The 90-Minute IDP: AI Ate My Implementation. Let's Build a Platform Together and Score What's Left.
I've already built this IDP end-to-end with Claude Code. ArgoCD, Kyverno, Falco, OpenTelemetry, Backstage — the whole stack, from an empty cluster to a production-grade platform. I know exactly where the AI crushes it, where it faceplants, and where it gets dangerously close to something brilliant before going sideways. It gets weird. It also produces something awesome.
Now I'm doing it again, live, in front of you.
In this workshop, I'll hand Claude Code a build spec with test-driven gates and let it rip through building a complete Internal Developer Platform in real time. We'll provide lightweight lab environments so you can build alongside me — just bring your own Claude Code access. Got your own cluster? Bring that too.
Here's what I've learned: AI didn't just speed up implementation. It ate most of it. The Terraform modules, the Helm values, the boilerplate YAML — Claude Code handles that faster than any human. But what's left is the hard stuff: integration between systems, sync wave ordering, architecture, business context, policy conflicts, and the judgment calls that turn a pile of tools into a platform. Every component (k8s, argocd, prometheus) gets scored on a live scorecard so you can see exactly what AI ate and what it choked on. Oh and we scorecard not just the installation, but hte integration and the platform usability as well.
The implementation layer is supposedly disappearing. Let's find out what replaces it.
AI Assisted Hands-On Learning - the Future of Education
In an era where Cloud Native skills are in high demand, traditional learning methods often fall short. This session explores the transformative power of AI-assisted hands-on learning in revolutionizing Cloud Native education. We'll delve into how interactive labs have enabled us at KodeKloud to effectively teach millions of students, equipping them with practical skills in Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, and more. Discover how AI-driven interactive platforms are shaping the future of education by providing personalized, immersive, and scalable learning experiences. Join us to uncover best practices and innovative techniques that can elevate your approach to Cloud Native training, ensuring your learners are prepared for tomorrow's challenges.
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024 Sessionize Event
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