Ever wondered what it really takes to run a government-grade Kubernetes cluster in a warehouse environment with little to no internet access?

This talk explores a real-world deployment of a highly secured, near-air-gapped Kubernetes platform operating far from the comforts of the cloud. With strict compliance requirements, limited connectivity, and physical infrastructure constraints, many common assumptions about “cloud-native” operations had to be rethought.

We’ll walk through the architectural decisions that made this possible, including why RKE2 played a critical role in enabling secure, repeatable operations in a constrained environment. Along the way, we’ll cover image distribution, upgrades, certificate management, observability, and the operational patterns that emerge when connectivity is a luxury rather than a given.

This session is aimed at engineers and architects working in regulated, edge, or high-security environments who want to understand what actually changes when Kubernetes is designed to run disconnected—and what careful planning makes possible.