Olga Mirensky
Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Ping Identity.
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Olga is a Senior Staff SRE at Ping Identity with a deep technical foundation in Kubernetes, GitOps, FinOps, performance, and cloud-native systems, built across large enterprises in tech and financial services. Outside work, she runs AI experiments and local inference workloads on her DGX Spark homelab — and when she's not building, she's running half marathons with friends or camping in the woods.
What Managed Kubernetes Hid and Why It Matters Now
Kubernetes the Hard Way was treated as a rite of passage - something a brave soul would do to deeply understand Kubernetes and then never think about again. But what if I told you the "hard way" isn't just an exercise - it's just... the way.
Cloud GPU availability, egress costs, data sovereignty are harsh challenges in today's reality. The answer is a hybrid model - cloud orchestration, on-prem compute.
But how do you build it without falling into proprietary vendor lock-in?
We'll bypass cloud-packaged hybrid solutions and walk through an open-source blueprint. We'll explore how to connect a lightweight k3s control plane in the cloud to on-premises GPU over a secure, encrypted overlay network allowing standard Kubernetes primitives manage local AI inference workloads seamlessly. All built on CNCF projects that underpin planet-scale AI workloads at frontier labs and hyperscalers.
Moving to Cloud Run? Leave Your Kubernetes Luggage Behind
When moving from GKE to Cloud Run, engineers and security teams often bring their Kubernetes "luggage" with them—trying to replicate familiar concepts like network policies and perimeter-based security in a fundamentally different world. But what if this is the wrong approach? Instead of forcing old patterns, let's first step back to understand the new serverless paradigm and build security from there. "Where we going we don't need roads". We need identity.
This session explores the common traps you can fall into by applying Kubernetes recipes to Cloud Run. We'll focus on the native Cloud Run ecosystem and show how network security should be reimagined for a serverless architecture. In GKE, we carefully craft network policies and segment clusters to prevent lateral movement. In Cloud Run, you need a different mindset and a new set of tools.
A technical deep-dive demo will walk you through practical patterns for securing production Cloud Run applications, covering ingress control, egress management, and service-to-service communication in ways that work with Cloud Run's design, not against it. You'll leave ready to confidently set aside old habits and embrace the powerful, identity-first security model that Cloud Run offers.
Inside Open LLM Kubernetes Deployment
This session will provide a quick intro to open LLMs deployment on a public cloud Kubernetes cluster. We'll look into what the LLM actually is, how to get started with an Open Source LLM, what's involved in deploying and serving it on a Kubernetes cluster, understanding cluster hardware requirements and inspecting running deployment in the life demo.
I Came for the Kubernetes. The AI Did the Kubernetes.
This talk walks through my personal learning project that replicates a production-like Kubernetes fleet: managed end-to-end with Crossplane, GitOps powered by FluxCD, and structured around proper control-plane/workload separation and multi-tenancy patterns. This project served me as a turnkey platform where I tested ideas on a setup more sophisticated than a local kind cluster or a standalone managed cluster with default settings.
But when AI came along, initially as Claude chat, then Claude Code, then Claude agents, hooks, and eventually an agentic loop I built for this stack - I realised I had replaced myself out of the picture with an AI ecosystem I had built myself (well, with AI obviously). Like that proverbial frog that didn't notice the water getting hot, my project turned into an AI learning playground: while I was developing the agentic loop, the AI replaced Crossplane providers and performed a major version upgrade of Crossplane.
While I am still deciding whether I love this or hate it, one thing is for sure: I learned a lot about AI in the process, and I want to share these learnings in this session: context engineering, token cost, agent harnesses, and much more.
GitOps-Driven Platform Engineering: Mastering Cluster Fleet Management
This talk will showcase our advanced strategies in managing and scaling Kubernetes cluster fleets using the principles of GitOps. We'll discuss how to implemented GitOps to automate and streamline the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters, ensuring efficiency and reliability. Learn about the challenges we faced and the innovative solutions we adopted in creating a robust platform that supports the dynamic needs of our engineering teams. Our approach emphasizes the power of GitOps in achieving operational excellence, offering a blueprint for scalable, automated cluster fleet management.
From Bootstrap to Scale: Optimising Kubernetes Operators
Operators offer a powerful way to leverage Kubernetes for extending your platform, enforcing guardrails, automating infrastructure and so on. Tools like Kubebuilder make it easy to bootstrap an operator by handling the necessary plumbing, however, the core logic, design and implementation are entirely up to the developer. This is where many inefficiencies and potential mistakes can occur, especially when scaling for enterprise production environments. This session will cover the basics of operators and Kubebuilder framework, then delve into advanced features and performance tuning techniques. Drawing from our real-world experience, we’ll share the challenges we've faced, the mistakes we've made, and the strategies we've implemented to overcome them. Attendees will gain practical insights and best practices for developing high-performance scalable Kubernetes operators.
KSUG.AI Australia #69 - Melbourne Meetup @AWS - 7 Oct 2026 User group Sessionize Event Upcoming
KCD Melbourne 2026 Sessionize Event
Devfest Brisbane 2025 Sessionize Event
GDG Melbourne Devfest 2025 Sessionize Event
KCD Australia 2024 Sessionize Event
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