Cloud Native Belgium

🚀 We're thrilled to announce the next Cloud Native Meetup @ ING!

Come join us for an evening of talks, great conversations, and good food. Expect fresh insights, real-world stories, and the kind of hallway chats that spark your next big idea.

Agenda
🕕 18.00 — Doors open | Food & drinks
🎤 19.00 — Welcome
🔐 19.15 — What I'll Tell My Kids About K8s Security (Lars Lefebvre, ING)
🚀 19.45 — K8s-wish and other LLM adventures (Andrew Yourtchenko)
☕ 20.15 — Break
⏳ 20.30 — Kubestronaut Panel
🤝 21.00 — Networking

Getting here
📍 Venue and parking details coming soon — stay tuned!

Sessions:
Session 1: What I'll Tell My Kids About K8s Security (Lars Lefebvre, ING):
What I'll Tell My Kids About K8s Security is a creative and story-driven talk that makes Kubernetes security approachable — even for those who aren't deep in the weeds of K8s. Framed through metaphors and everyday analogies, the talk explores complex security challenges in a fun and memorable way. In the second half, I'll share the story behind an open source tool we built at ING to help teams uncover and understand real-world security issues in their clusters.

Bio: Lars is a dedicated Cloud and Application Security Engineer with a strong background in the Cloud Native stack. He’s experienced in managing multi-cloud environments, promoting cloud-native practices, and enhancing security measures in software development lifecycles.

Session 2: K8s-wish and other LLM adventures (Andrew Yourtchenko)
Can we use LLMs to avoid writing YAML? This talk explores two approaches — a single-shot LLM call and a full agentic loop — using two open source projects, and what each gets right and wrong.

Bio: After 25 years at Cisco across three lives — TAC Security, IPv6 technical marketing, and high-performance networking software — Andrew is now building open source agentic AI tools and doing occasional consulting. He is a coauthor of DHCPv6 and other RFCs, and holds 4 US patents.

Session 3: Kubestronaut Panel 30 minutes | Q&A
Meet a panel of Kubestronauts, some even Golden. We'll kick off with a quick intro to what a Kubestronaut (and Golden Kubestronaut) actually is, then dive straight into an interactive Q&A. Hear about their journey, what the grind really looks like, and what they'd do differently. This session is all about the conversation.

Bio Olivier Calzi (Golden Kubestronaut):
From pulling Ethernet cables as a student in France to becoming a Golden Kubestronaut, I have spent 10 years learning the stack from the ground up. Now a Cloud Native Expert with 15 CNCF certifications, I focus on SRE and infrastructure architecture. I'm a firm believer in the "work-study" model and a lifelong student who still finds engineering deeply fun.

Bio François Duthilleul (Golden Kubestronaut):
François Duthilleul is a Principal Solutions Architect at Red Hat, leading the security domain in the EMEA Telco CoE, co-author of the OpenShift Security book, and contributing to O-RAN and Sylva standardisation. The first Belgian Golden Kubestronaut and 2025 Top SSA, he brings 15+ years of network cloudification experience — and you'll find him at rock concerts, on a road bike, or talking cloud-native over a craft beer.

Bio Evelien Schellekens (Kubestronaut): Evelien is a Principal Solutions Architect at Elastic. She enjoys sharing knowledge through public speaking and interacting with the technical community. She’s passionate about observability and open source technologies like Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry.