Cloud Native Computing Meetup | March 2025

Let's meet at the March 2025 CNC meetup on Thursday, March 6th, 2025, at 17:00 CET at Zühlke Engineering AG in Schlieren.

Location:
Zühlke Engineering AG
Zürcherstrasse 39j
8952 Schlieren

Thanks Zühlke for hosting!

Agenda:
16:30 – Door Opening
17:00 – Welcome, Intro, & Announcements
17:05 – Dig Smart: Creating A Reliable Cloud-Native DNS Service, Fabian Schulz & Joel Studler (Swisscom)
17:35 – 5 minutes pause
17:40 – PostgreSQL in Kubernetes: Day 2 operations, Borys Neselovskyi (EDB)
18:10 – 5 minutes pause
18:15 – Platform Engineering on AWS: Empowering Developers with GitOps, Crossplane, and Karpenter, Marco Kuendig (Copebit)
18:45 – 5 minutes pause
18:50 – The Platform Plane: Should It Go Open Source? Romano Roth (Zühlke)
19:20 – Final words, networking & apéro

Dig Smart: Creating A Reliable Cloud-Native DNS Service, Fabian Schulz (Swisscom)

This tech talk will show how we deploy, operate, and automate a highly available and geo-redundant DNS Service for Swisscom's 5G mobile network using a Cloud Native tech stack. We will provide an in-depth insight into our multi-cluster architecture that leverages ExternalDNS, PowerDNS, and CoreDNS to build a modern and reliable DNS setup. In addition, we will deep dive into the automation and demonstrate the interplay between ExternalDNS and Kubernetes resources such as Ingresses, Services, Istio Gateways, Contour HTTP proxies, and ExternalDNS DNSEndpoints. Our talk will be interesting for highly demanding DNS users – for instance, applications that require the use of relatively rare DNS Resource Records like NAPTR – as well as engineers and architects tasked with building a DNS service with cloud-native tools that are – for compliance, governance or availability concerns – not allowed to use a publicly available DNS-as-a-service offering.

Fabian Schulz is a cloud architect and Kubernetes specialist known for building resilient cloud-native solutions. At Swisscom, he currently focuses on designing next-generation 5G core services using open-source technologies. Passionate about innovation, Fabian shares his insights as a speaker at conferences like Container Days, empowering audiences with practical knowledge.

Joel is a DevOps Engineer and System Architect who currently works on a team building the cloud-native 5G core at Swisscom. He is experienced in infrastructure automation, software-defined networking, and highly available databases and is passionate about automation. He is CK* certified and has co-written several CRD/Operator-based Kubernetes extensions. Outside the tech sphere, he is an active musician, both live and in the studio.

PostgreSQL in Kubernetes: Day 2 operations, Borys Neselovskyi (EDB)

The talk will address the critical issues of running a database (in our case - PostgreSQL) in the Kubernetes environment:
1. Choosing the proper storage for the database—Many attempts to run databases in Kubernetes fail due to poor storage performance. Using examples, I will show how to choose the proper storage and implement performance tests in Kubernetes.
2. Database patching - every database needs to be updated at specific intervals. Also, in Kubernetes, patching databases is one of the most essential tasks for DBAs. Using a demo, I will show how easy it is to upgrade a Postgres database in Kubernetes - especially when using the "Minimal Downtime Upgrade" method.
3. High availability and geo-redundancy are very important in the database environment. If my data center goes down, can we continue to run the database operation? Can we run a copy of the database in a remote data center so that it can be refreshed promptly? The answers to these crucial questions will be clarified in the presentation, and a demo will show how disaster recovery can work in a Kubernetes environment.

Borys Neselovskyi is a Senior Sales Engineer at EDB, where he empowers clients to develop and implement open-source strategies centered around PostgreSQL. With over 20 years of experience in the IT sector, Borys specializes in designing and deploying robust infrastructure solutions. His expertise spans high availability, security, performance tuning, environment consolidation, virtualization (P2V), and migration of complex systems, including implementing Oracle Engineered Systems.

Platform Engineering on AWS: Empowering Developers with GitOps, Crossplane, and Karpenter: Marco Kuendig (Copebit)

Join us for an in-depth session on how we implement Platform Engineering on AWS to streamline and automate infrastructure management. We will showcase how GitOps, Crossplane, Karpenter, and other key technologies enable seamless developer experiences. See firsthand how we empower teams to deploy applications on Kubernetes—including databases, certificates, DNS records, and more—through a live demo. Discover how to enhance efficiency, reduce complexity, and scale your cloud-native environments effortlessly.

Marco Kuendig is the CTO at copebit, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner. With 12 years of AWS experience and 9 AWS certifications, he has worked with hundreds of customers, guiding them through cloud migrations and AWS operations. Marco specializes in cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, and automation to drive scalable, resilient platforms on AWS.

The Platform Plane: Should It Go Open Source? Romano Roth (Zühlke)

The Platform Plane, co-created by Zühlke and LGT, is transforming platform engineering with its innovative approach to managing cloud-native environments. In this talk, I’ll share the story of the Platform Plane—how it was conceived, its evolution, and the challenges it addresses. A live demo will highlight its key features and potential to streamline platform operations.
Following the demo, I’ll turn to you, the audience, for your valuable insights and guidance. Should the Platform Plane be open-sourced? What are the potential benefits and risks? How can we effectively convince management to support open sourcing? Your expertise and perspective are essential to shaping the next chapter of the Platform Plane.

The event will be recorded and made available later on VSHN's YouTube channel: https://vshn.tv – subscribe to be notified of updates!

We expect all participants to abide by VSHN's Conference Code of Conduct: https://www.vshn.ch/en/code-of-conduct/

If you want to share your cloud-native projects at the CNC Switzerland meetup events or sponsor future events, please submit your talk suggestion here: https://cnc-meetup.ch. We look forward to hearing from you!