Composable Kubernetes Operators & Intent-Based Infrastructure

February pairs Kubernetes platform engineering with intent-based infrastructure. Tristan Smagghe from Infomaniak shows how composable Operators power Infomaniak's new Hosting platform, coordinating through contracts and owner references to enable rich interactions without tight coupling. Torsten Boettjer then makes the case for infrastructure that understands why - not just how: how Rescile's open source intent layer lets operators and AI agents describe desired state and drive autonomous, agentic operations. Plus the usual networking apero.

Here's what's planned for the evening:
17:30 - 18:00 - Arrival and first drinks
18:00 - 18:45 - When One Operator Isn't Enough: Designing Composable Kubernetes Controllers by Tristan Smagghe
18:45 - 19:30 - Infrastructure That Understands Why - Not Just How by Torsten Boettjer
19:30 - 20:30 - Networking, Open Space & More drinks*

When One Operator Isn't Enough: Designing Composable Kubernetes Controllers
Operators are at the heart of the new Infomaniak Hosting platform. This talk explores how to design composable Kubernetes Operators that coordinate through contracts and owner references, enabling complex interactions while also avoiding tight coupling.

Tristan Smagghe
Software Engineer @ Infomaniak
Tristan is a Software Engineer at Infomaniak in Geneva, Switzerland, specializing in Go and distributed systems. He focuses on building efficient cloud infrastructure and services with a sustainable approach, and helped design Infomaniak's new Hosting platform based entirely on Kubernetes. As a certified Kubestronaut, he has deep expertise in containerization, Kubernetes administration, cloud native security, and distributed systems.

Infrastructure That Understands Why - Not Just How
Rescile UCS: Open Source Intent Layer for Agentic Operations
Automating complex IT infrastructure hits a fundamental limit today: conventional pipelines and IaC tools require explicit, step-by-step instructions. They know how something should be done, but not why. For autonomous systems and agentic workflows, that is not enough. The Rescile project addresses exactly this gap as an open source initiative. Rescile UCS provides an intent-based execution layer that treats infrastructure and service configurations as declarative, semantically interpretable definitions rather than imperative scripts. Operators and agents describe the desired state of a system, and UCS handles composition, validation and publishing over REST, GraphQL and MCP in hybrid cloud environments.

The talk shows how UCS acts as a central enabler for autonomous operations:
Service catalog as ground truth: TOML-based service definitions as a machine-readable, agent-consumable source for infrastructure intent.
MCP as agentic interface: how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets LLM-based agents query, validate and modify configuration state without direct access to the underlying infrastructure.
Autonomous operation in practice: concrete use cases from MSP and hybrid cloud settings where UCS enables the shift from reactive automation to proactive, intent-driven self-management.
The project aims to build a community-driven reference architecture for agentic infrastructure operations: interoperable, extensible and production-ready.

Torsten Boettjer
Co-Founder @ Rescile, Head of Cloud Services @ inventx
Torsten Boettjer is co-founder of Rescile GmbH, where he leads the development of the Rescile Graph Engine ecosystem, focused on intent-based infrastructure automation and agentic operations for hybrid cloud environments. In parallel, as Head of Cloud Services at inventx, he shapes the hybrid cloud strategy for the Swiss financial and insurance market. Before that he led cloud initiatives at Swisscom, Cisco, Oracle and Avaloq, including the launch of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in Europe.

Many thanks to our sponsors:

• Catering Sponsor: DevOpsDays Zürich https://www.devopsdays.ch/
• Location Sponsor: Digicomp https://www.digicomp.ch/

* contact us min. 3 days prior to the event if you prefer a vegan option.