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 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 k0s control plane in the cloud to on-premises GPU over a secure, encrypted overlay network — allowing standard Kubernetes primitives to manage local AI inference workloads seamlessly. All built on CNCF projects that underpin planet-scale AI workloads at frontier labs and hyperscalers.

Benefits to the Ecosystem

• Demystifies Core Primitives: Bridges the gap for engineers who grew up on managed Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), giving them a newfound appreciation for how the decoupled control plane and bare-metal kubelet work under the hood.
• Vendor-Neutral AI Architecture: Provides the community with a practical, cost-effective alternative to proprietary hybrid cloud solutions, keeping AI orchestration strictly open-source.
• Real-World CNCF Validation: Demonstrates a highly relevant 2026 use-case, proving how foundational tools like k0s and Cilium solve pressing enterprise challenges around data sovereignty, compliance, and local LLM inference.

Event Details

Event: KCD Melbourne 2026

Date: 5 August 2026

Location: Collins Square Events Centre, 727 Collins Street, Docklands, VIC 3000, Australia

Slides

Coming soon