Ryan Etten
Principal Solutions Architect, Broadcom | Organizer, CNCF Cloud Native Madison | Organizer, AAIF Community Madison | Organizer, DevFest WI | Founder, MOSAIC (Madison's Open Source & AI Communities)
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
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Ryan Etten is a Principal Solutions Architect at Broadcom, working at the intersection of cloud-native architecture and the human systems that sustain it. A Red Hat Certified OpenShift Architect, he guides organizations through secure transformations built on Kubernetes, GitOps, and Zero Trust. Beyond the stack, he leads core initiatives in CNCF's Merge Forward Neurodiversity group and, through his "Agile for Every Brain" framework, works to refactor community structures for diverse cognitive styles. He founded MOSAIC — Madison's Open Source and AI Communities — and organizes the local CNCF and AAIF chapters and DevFest Wisconsin, on the conviction that the human architectures behind open source should be as resilient and scalable as the code.
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What Customer Success Knows That Platform Engineering Keeps Relearning
Platform engineering keeps rediscovering what customer success worked out a decade ago. Onboarding decides who stays, a green dashboard can hide a quiet exodus, and adoption is earned, not mandated. The field treats these as fresh discoveries, missing a playbook most teams have never read.
Drawing on years of leading enterprise adoption, this talk starts where platform teams rarely look. You have no authority over whether a customer uses what they bought. Internal platform teams are in that exact position. Your developers are customers who churn quietly, routing around you, unseen by your metrics.
It matters more as platforms are asked to govern AI agents. Before a team trusts a platform with an agent, they have to trust it with a deploy, and that trust is built in the same adoption work CS has done for years. This talk maps that playbook onto internal platforms. It ends with the only adoption question that matters. If your platform vanished tomorrow, who would actually feel it?
Day 2 Neurodiversity: Moving Beyond Fundamentals with Merge Forward
Open source has made progress in recognizing neurodiversity, but most conversations remain at the level of awareness and good intentions. What happens on Day 2, after we agree that inclusion matters?
We will examine what is still missing in the open source neurodiversity conversation, critique the narrative of neurotalent, and evaluate whether framing neurodivergent contributors as inherently gifted helps inclusion or creates new pressures. We need to ask: are we reinventing existing initiatives, or does the real gap lie in how our contribution models, communication norms, and governance structures are designed?
Our goal is to tackle structural questions rather than proposing a new label or movement. How can open source communities reduce cognitive friction, clarify expectations, and design processes that support a wider range of thinking styles? What concrete steps move us beyond fundamentals and into sustainable practice? Join Merge Forward to help move open source from a culture of good intentions to one of engineered accessibility.
How UW Madison Monitors 25+ Clusters with Cilium and Prometheus Agent on a Student-Sized Budget
Budgets keep shrinking while observability demands explode—so how do you capture L7 insight across 25+ Kubernetes clusters without paying a sidecar tax? At UW Madison, we paired Cilium’s eBPF networking with the Prometheus Agent’s remote write, streaming rich flow telemetry to a central Grafana stack at a fraction of the usual footprint. Live on stage, we’ll fire test traffic with curl from a single app pod and watch Cilium Flow Metrics spike and Alertmanager light up within seconds—no sidecars, no context switching. You’ll leave with a field-tested playbook: scrape-target pruning, discovery patterns that survive air-gapped research zones, and the real story of what broke first—and how we fixed it. This case study demonstrates light weight mesh and light weight observability for a university budget.
GitOps for Skeptics: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Repo
GitOps can sound great in theory, but for a lot of teams (mine included), it starts out feeling like a lot. A lot of moving parts, a lot of automation, and a lot of things that could go wrong. This talk shares what helped me move from skeptical to confident, with a focus on small steps that made GitOps more approachable. Starting with one service, using pull requests as a safety net, and picking the right level of abstraction helped us adopt GitOps in a way that felt safe and sustainable. This session is beginner-friendly and designed for folks who are curious but not quite convinced.
CNCF-Hosted Co-located Events North America 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026 Sessionize Event
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2025 Sessionize Event
GitOpsCon Europe 2025 - Virtual Event Sessionize Event
Ryan Etten
Principal Solutions Architect, Broadcom | Organizer, CNCF Cloud Native Madison | Organizer, AAIF Community Madison | Organizer, DevFest WI | Founder, MOSAIC (Madison's Open Source & AI Communities)
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
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