Cloud Native Vienna: September 2026 MeetUp

We'd like to invite you to our fifth installation for the Cloud Native Vienna MeetUps in 2026!

Again we'll have two deep-dive talks and time to network and chat with friends in the Viennese Cloud Native community.

A big thank you to Dynatrace for hosting us and providing food and drinks!

Agenda:

• 17:30: Doors Open & Networking
• 17:55: Welcome from the Organizers
• 18:00: Talk 1: Andrii Soldatenko (Dynatrace)
  The essense of Graceful Shutdown
• 18:45: Break & Refreshments
• 19:00: Talk 2: Reza Chalak (ProLion)
  Immutable, Minimal, Mighty: Running Kubernetes on Bare Metal with Talos
• 19:45: Open Networking

We look forward to seeing you there! Until then, have a great summer everyone :)

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Talks:

Andrii Soldatenko (Dynatrace)
The essense of Graceful Shutdown

What is graceful shutdown? Not many people know this term and do not know how to use it properly. Recently, every app can be deployed using containers and orchestrators of containers, which makes this problem even more critical.

So our workloads must be “Cloud Native Apps,” which means they rely on orchestrators like Kubernetes or another container orchestrator. The lifecycle usually includes killing workloads, which we need to adapt appropriately. When the orchestrator sends unique signals to restart the workload, we need to understand what signals are and why we have all of them.

In this talk, I’ll walk you through different patterns of adding graceful shutdown to your services and apps, why it’s crucial, and how to investigate and adapt to orchestrators and be in sync with them regarding signals. Also, I’ll demonstrate how to shut down long-running tasks and connections gracefully so your users will be happy during releases and other maintenance work.

Reza Chalak (ProLion)
Immutable, Minimal, Mighty: Running Kubernetes on Bare Metal with Talos

What if your entire Kubernetes operating system consisted of just 12 binaries? No SSH, no shell, no package manager — just a minimal, immutable, API-driven OS purpose-built to run Kubernetes.

In this talk, we'll introduce Talos Linux as the most powerful foundation for bare-metal Kubernetes. Starting from blank hardware, we'll spin up a production-grade cluster live on stage, then take it further: bootstrapping FluxCD for GitOps-driven cluster management and running a local container registry to keep images fast and close to the metal.

Along the way, we'll dig into what makes Talos different — its immutable design, machine configuration via declarative API, built-in security hardening, and painless upgrades — and discuss why removing the traditional OS layer might be the best decision you make for your clusters.

You'll leave knowing how to go from bare metal to a fully GitOps-managed Kubernetes cluster with a radically smaller attack surface — and just 12 binaries.