Sarah Christoff
A Software Engineer just looking for that dangling pointer
Bressanone, Italy
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Sarah is a self taught software engineer at who loves making complex code more digestible. She is the self-proclaimed founder of the Leslie Lamport fan club. When she's not bugbusting, she is running her animal rescue and competing in triathlons. She believes code should be like cats: intelligent, fluffy, and easy to take care of.
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Stir to Combine: Creating Porter Mixins
Porter packages your application, configuration, and scripts into an installer that is easy to distribute and use. Mixins are the special seasonings that help make Porter bundles. They are extensions of Porter that allow Porter to work with a tool or system like Helm, Terraform, or Docker. Together we’ll go over what Porter does, how it uses mixins, and how to make your own! Afterwards you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to contribute your own mixin to Porter.
Kontainer Kombat
Different orchestrators will test their might in Kontainer Kombat! We'll go into the past to discover an orchestrators journey, where they began and where they are now. Then, diving into the stats, what are the weakness, strengths, special skills and combos of each orchestrator. We can stack different orchestrators against each other to see who may win in a battle, and be best for a company's or application's needs. In Kontainer Kombat it's a fight to a production!
From The Beginning: Hypervisors, Virtual Machines, Containers
With all the breakouts, breakthroughs, and leaks it feels the term “isolation” is as muddled as “synergy”. When Kubernetes came out many were under the impression that containers “contain”.
It’s time to journey back to the 1970s, when calculators and pocket protectors were cool. That’s where this all started, and where we can start to remember the definition of the term “virtual”. From there we see the transformation of the word “isolation” in the early 2000s, and why we have landed at it being a security buzzword in 2025. The audience will leave knowing the difference between physical, virtual, and “hype” isolation.
From Contributor to Maintainer: Sustainably Running a Project
From making your first PR, whether a small typo fix or fixing a test flake, to becoming a maintainer and beyond, how do you do this without burning out? Every project has different contribution ladders to promote users to different statuses, but once a maintainer there is a struggle to juggle reviews, meetings, community and code. Learning how to sustainably maintain an open source project without catching your brain on fire is a skill. We'll cover lessons learned from maintainers and models to implement within projects to keep all maintainers sane.
Porter: Bundling the Strength of the Community
Porter is a bundle installer that takes your application, everything it needs, and all the tools you use to deploy it into a bundle. Porter Maintainers will transparently discuss the triumphs and challenges encountered in 2023.
This retrospective journey sets the stage for an interactive discussion on how the community can contribute to and shape the future of Porter in 2024. Be prepared for a candid exploration of lessons learned, successes celebrated, and challenges overcome.
Discover how you can play an integral role in advancing Porter's capabilities and fostering a collaborative ecosystem. This talk isn't just about the technology; it's about the shared experience of building something great together.
Was Leslie Lamport Right?
Leslie Lamport, the Father of Distributed Systems, has produced extensive research, many of which date back to the 1970s. These theories are often quoted as "impractical" in modern distributed systems, but how many millions of dollars could we have saved by implementing them if they weren't?
We will learn a little history about distributed systems and the man whose thinking started a movement. We take dense concepts such as concurrency, consistency, and clocks and teach through fun, real-world, practical experiments reminiscent of high school science class. Once class is out, it's time to bring it back to the real world, showcasing how Lamport influenced cloud native systems.
As a takeaway, we will provide blueprints for these experiments, from bare metal to multi-cloud. Empowering you to deliver research-driven change within your organizations and minimizing 3 AM pages while adding content to make resumés shine.
Finally, you will be able to answer: Was Leslie Lamport Right?
The Sound of Gossip
Gossip Protocols help with maintaining membership and messaging in a distributed system by propagating messages throughout a cluster similar to how gossip spreads through a high school. Mimicking a dispersed band, we’ll strap together a cluster of nodes to make music to find out if gossip protocols are identical to their namesake. We will explore different implementations of gossip protocols, their use cases and downfalls, and open source projects that use them. Afterwards, we’ll listen to the song the cluster made as a musical immersion into a hefty distributed computing topic. This will clarify a commonly used, but less commonly understood key part of distributed systems infrastructure that will one day aid in resolving a late night page.
Consistent workflow for application deployments using Porter and CNAB
For many people, the idea of a single application stack standardized on a single technology is unfortunately impossible. Organizations often leverage many environments, from Kubernetes and Nomad to Virtual Machines and serverless functions. Deploying these applications also uses various technologies from Capistrano, Kubernetes YAML, and Terraform.
In this talk, you will learn how to leverage Porter and CNAB bundles to create a single and consistent workflow for deploying your applications, regardless of the application type or deployment environment. You will learn to leverage Porter to develop and deploy a CNAB bundle that deploys a Ruby on Rails application using Capistrano and leverages Terraform Cloud to create the required infrastructure. As a bonus, you will learn how the same workflow can deploy a modern container-based application to Kubernetes.
By the end of the talk, you will understand the benefits of a standardized deployment workflow regardless of your application or environment and how this approach helps streamline application deployments across the entire organization.
Dinner with Philosophers: How to Stop Food Stealing
E. W. Dijkstra proposed the dining philosophers problem in the early 1970s to showcase problems within concurrent programming. Nowadays, most programmers don’t happen to think about concurrency in programming when using languages like Golang or Python.
However, this oversight in how we write resilient software can lead us to upsetting security engineers, or dealing with ourselves being paged late into the night. Let’s revisit the dining philosophy problem, uncovering concurrency history - and leave with the foundational knowledge how to strengthen our systems against bad actors who use these foundations for evil.
Stir to Combine: Creating Porter Mixins
Porter packages your application, configuration, and scripts into an installer that is easy to distribute and use. Mixins are the special seasonings that help make Porter bundles. They are extensions of Porter that allow Porter to work with a tool or system like Helm, Terraform, or Docker. Together we’ll go over what Porter does, how it uses mixins, and how to make your own! Afterwards you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to contribute your own mixin to Porter.
Tales from the Crypt: Application Packaging and Delivery Nightmares
Join Sarah Christoff and Scott Rigby, maintainers of widely used CNCF tools Porter and Helm, for a cringe-worthy yet enlightening journey through the dark alleys of application packaging and delivery anti-patterns. In this session, we'll delve into the spooky stories of real-world application and configuration delivery nightmares that left teams haunted by unnecessary complexity, perplexing custom code, and security skeletons in the closet. With a blend of humor and hard-learned lessons, we'll expose the ghosts of past mistakes and share the exorcism techniques that could have saved us all some sleepless nights. Whether you're a seasoned Kubernetes operator or new to the cloud-native realm, come prepared to shiver, laugh, and learn how to avoid the traps that have ensnared so many before.
The Maintainer Monologues
Are maintainers born? Or made? Made. They’re definitely made. Oftentimes it’s a combination of trial and error, luck, and lots of hard work.
With a mixed group of first time and experienced maintainers, join us for a panel covering the origin stories and learnings of CNCF sandbox/incubating/graduated project maintainers. They’ll share their journeys as their projects evolved, and cover topics such as:
- Project milestones (inception, MVP, & donation)
- Learning the ecosystem
- Blind spots
- Navigating social dynamics (community building, getting more help, navigating challenges)
- Work life balance / open source burnout
With this knowledge, you’ll be better equipped to become the next open source contributor, maintainer, or creator of projects, ready to navigate the ecosystem.
Cloud Native Days Austria Sessionize Event
Project Lightning Talk + Maintainer Track + Contribfest: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 Sessionize Event
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 Sessionize Event
CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024 Sessionize Event
Community Over Code NA 2024 Sessionize Event
Maintainer Track + ContribFest: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 Sessionize Event
HashiTalks 2024 Sessionize Event
Denver Dev Day | October 2023 Sessionize Event
Hashiconf EU 2019
Hashiconf 2018
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