Cloud Native Computing Meetup | September 2025

Let's meet at the September 2025 CNC meetup on Thursday, Sep 4th, 2025, at 17:00 CET.

Location:
VSHN tower, 8th floor, Neugasse 6, 8005 Zürich

Agenda:
Would you like to speak at this event? Contact us at https://cnc-meetup.ch! Guidelines:

• All sessions are held in English.
• No product or sales pitches are allowed.
• All projects showcased should be open source.
• We cannot cover travel costs, but welcome speakers from other regions.
• We're seeking more diversity among our speakers: underrepresented groups are welcome!

16:30 – Door Opening
17:00 – Welcome, Intro, & Announcements
17:05 – How we used Crossplane for the things we should not have: Liene Luksika (VSHN)
17:35 – 5 minutes pause
17:40 – Case Study: Kubernetes at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS, Dino Conciatore (CSCS)
18:10 – 5 minutes pause
18:15 – Bridging AI and Cloud-Native: Building Scalable AI Platforms with Platform Engineering Principles, Michael Mueller (re:cinq)
18:45 – Final words, networking & apéro

How we used Crossplane for the things we should not have

Frameworks are meant to be tweaked; that is just a part of being an engineer. Even if a new cloud native, open-source framework is exactly what you are attempting to build.
This talk tells the story of what Crossplane is and what we wanted it to be. It highlights the need for the emerging Crossplane V2 and explains why it differs from its predecessor. It also illustrates a real-life story when bending leads to breaking, resulting in the loss of 230 production databases for a customer during maintenance. The silver lining - we kept the customer, but changed our approach.

Liene is a data scientist by training and a product owner at VSHN by passion, with experience spanning the highly regulated healthcare industry to the fluid open-source ecosystem.

Case Study: Kubernetes at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Dino Conciatore (CSCS)

The talk presents how the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) built a hyper-converged cloud infrastructure by combining RKE2, Rancher, ArgoCD, Harvester, and Terraform/OpenTofu. Dino Conciatore explains how Kubernetes clusters are managed across bare-metal and virtualised environments, and how ArgoCD enables consistent, automated deployments. The presentation also covers the hybrid Virtual/HPC cluster that integrates with the new ALPS supercomputer to support demanding workloads like AI, showcasing the architecture, workflows, and operational benefits of this approach.

Dino Conciatore is a System Engineer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), specializing in private-cloud infrastructure, automation, and observability. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, kitesurfing, and fly fishing.

Bridging AI and Cloud-Native: Building Scalable AI Platforms with Platform Engineering Principles, Michael Mueller (re:cinq)

As AI becomes integral to modern applications, building robust and scalable AI platforms is crucial. This session explores the commonalities of AI and Platform Engineering, demonstrating how cloud-native principles can be used to build AI platforms that can handle data-intensive workloads. We will show the unique challenges of AI systems—such as large-scale data management, complex model training cycles, and seamless deployment pipelines—and show how adopting proven platform engineering strategies can address these issues. Attendees will gain practical insights into automating AI workflows, ensuring system resilience, and integrating CNCF tools, such as Kubernetes, Kubeflow, and Argo Workflows, to enhance AI capabilities within cloud-native environments.

Michael Mueller is a widely recognised expert in cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, transformation, and sustainable software, with a career spanning over two decades—from technological innovation to senior management roles. As a former CNCF Ambassador and current Co-Chair of the Green Software Foundation’s Policy Working Group, he has made significant contributions to advancing the cloud, AI, and sustainable IT industries. Michael shares his knowledge as a lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and as a speaker at various industry conferences.

The event will be recorded and made available on VSHN's YouTube channel: https://vshn.tv – subscribe to stay 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 would like to share your cloud-native projects at the CNC Switzerland meetup events or sponsor future events, just send us your talk suggestion here: https://cnc-meetup.ch. We look forward to hearing from you!