Ryan Etten
Senior Architect & Team Lead at Red Hat | Organizer, CNCF Cloud Native Madison
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
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Ryan Etten is a Senior Architect and Team Lead at Red Hat, specializing in the intersection of cloud-native architectures and the human systems required to sustain them. A Red Hat Certified OpenShift Architect, Ryan guides organizations through secure digital transformations rooted in Kubernetes, GitOps, and Zero Trust principles. Beyond the stack, he leads and drives the core initiatives behind CNCF's Merge Forward Neurodiversity group, a community advancing neurodiversity in cloud native, and advocates for "inclusive-by-default" governance. Through his "Agile for Every Brain" framework, Ryan works to refactor community structures for diverse cognitive styles. As the founder and organizer of the Madison, Wisconsin CNCF group, he remains dedicated to ensuring that the human architectures powering open source are as resilient and scalable as the code itself.
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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.
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
Senior Architect & Team Lead at Red Hat | Organizer, CNCF Cloud Native Madison
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
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