Cloud Native and Kubernetes Edinburgh March 2025

March already and we've a jam-packed meetup generously sponsored by the following awesome companies:

Coder: The Enterprise development environment
Komodor: Simplifying Kubernetes management at scale

Doors opening at 6pm for food and drink, and then we'll kick off with the first talk at 6:30pm sharp.

Agenda

• Food and drink, sponsored by Coder and Komodor
• Visualization Power: Lowering K8s Barriers and Accelerating Troubleshooting (Andrei Pokhilko, Komodor)
• Gateway APIs and API Gateways - modern ingress demystified (Matt Turner, Tetrate)
• Crossplane, the Universal Control Plane (Steven Borrelli, Upbound)
• Wrap up, social

Talk Details

· Visualization Power: Lowering K8s Barriers and Accelerating Troubleshooting (Andrei Pokhilko)

This talk explores how visual interfaces enhance the Kubernetes experience across skill levels. We'll begin with a theoretical overview of visualization's role in complex systems like Kubernetes, examining how UIs complement traditional CLI approaches. The session will feature hands-on demonstrations of two practical tools: Helm Dashboard for release management visualization and Komoplane for Crossplane resource monitoring. Attendees will see how these interfaces both simplify the learning journey for those new to Kubernetes and provide rapid troubleshooting capabilities for seasoned practitioners. Join us to discover how the right visualization tools can transform your Kubernetes workflow.

· Gateway APIs and API Gateways - modern ingress demystified (Matt Turner)

Up until now, Ingress routes into K8s clusters have been defined by the Ingress kind, or by vendor-specific CRDs. Neither of these were satisfactory, so a new set of built-in k8s APIs was developed - the Gateway API.

In this talk, Matt will cover the motivation for a new API, its design, and show some examples of its use. He’ll then also cover implimentations of it today and in the future, and talk about the exciting merging of several of the existing ingress controllers into one new de facto standard - Envoy Gateway.

· Crossplane, the Universal Control Plane (Steven Borrelli)

Crossplane is an extension to Kubernetes that allows users to manage resources external to the cluster (like S3 buckets or GKE node pools) via the Kubernetes API. The project’s strong growth has made it a candidate for CNCF Graduation in 2024. This talk will be a technical discussion on using Crossplane and is aimed at Platform and Infrastructure Engineers.

This talk will be a technical discussion on using Crossplane and is aimed at Platform and Infrastructure Engineers.

- An Introduction to Crossplane
- Concepts: Managed Resources, Controllers
- Creating new APIs Composite Resource Definitions (XRDs)
- Creating infrastructure Compositions using function pipelines
- Using KCL to generate desired state.
- Authenticating methods including WebIdentity and ProviderConfigs
- Crossplane V2: what’s coming next