Kubernetes and Cloud Native North Dallas

There'll be 2 presentations:
"An AI Agent Already Escaped Kubernetes. Is Your Cluster Next?
Crossplane (introduction, use cases, demos)

1st Presentation: "An AI Agent Already Escaped Kubernetes. Is Your Cluster Next?"
Description: That's not hypothetical. In May 2026, Sysdig documented an AI agent, with no human in the loop, that escaped its container, replayed a stolen service-account token, and dumped the cluster's entire Secret store. Kubernetes wasn't built to contain autonomous agents holding credentials, so a compromised one hands over its full blast radius: permissions, tools, and runtime. This talk hardens all three, using Ledger, a legacy billing platform migrating to Kubernetes under an autonomous agent.
Layer 1: Permissions Ledger's agent runs with more access than deploying code needs, so one prompt injection reaches every Secret in the cluster. We walk through the Sysdig kill chain, then the minimal-RBAC baseline every agent pod should start from: no auto-mounted tokens, namespace-scoped roles, and just-in-time credentials. Layer 2: Tools Ledger runs its schema migrations through an MCP server, a trust boundary most teams leave wide open. We cover what a compromised server can reach by default, and how to lock it down: its own namespace, a dedicated service account, a restricted pod-security profile, and schema validation on every tool call. Layer 3: Runtime The first sign that Ledger's agent is compromised usually isn't an alert. It's a spike in API calls, pod creation, or inter-pod traffic that nothing was watching. We cover the signals that catch an agentic attack before exfiltration completes: token replay in audit logs, runaway spawning, and resource spikes. This already ran on a production cluster, and the CNCF's 2026 agentic standards now treat it as first-class. The question is whether yours is hardened before the next one.
You leave with:
The Agent Blast Radius: the three layers a compromised agent breaks out through
Least-Privilege Baseline: the minimal RBAC every agent pod should start from
Hardened MCP: how to deploy an MCP server that can't become a foothold
Runtime Tripwires: the signals that catch an agentic attack in progress"
Speaker: https://sessionize.com/moeez-khan

2nd Presentation: Crossplane (introduction, use cases, demos)
Will go through what crossplane is, what it's used for, what sets it apart from other infrastructure as code tools
Speaker: https://sessionize.com/artisticcheese

6:30 - 6:45 - Social
6:45 - 6:55 - Club Business
6:55 - 7:30 - Building Rootless, Stateless, and Immutable Containers
7:30 - 8:30 - DevSecOps and CloudNative Security Best Practices
8.30 - 8.35 - Social/Wrap-up

We are excited to announce the February meetup scheduled for Wednesday February 19th.

There'll be 2 presentations on Container Security:

*Building Rootless, Stateless, and Immutable Containers
*DevSecOps and CloudNative Security Best Practices

1st Presentation:
Building Rootless, Stateless, and Immutable Containers

Increased Portability, Improved Scalability, Simple and Fast Deployment, Enhanced Productivity, Reduced Infrastructural Cost with Improved Resource Utilization - hard to disagree with the values Containerization brings on the table! However, we all know that Great Power comes with Great Responsibility!
Containers can elevate your IT Delivery and Operations drastically at the same time can also impose a significant risk if not done rightly! Let's look at those Security and Risk adversity principles are and ee how can we build Containers that are Rootless, Stateless and Immutable!

Speaker Bio:
Himanshu Patel is a technology enthusiast and evangelist, leading Middleware Technologies at Aventive.
Himanshu's expertise includes building Enterprise-grade platforms for Microservices, Distributed Messaging with Kafka and DevOps with Kubernetes/Docker. Himanshu has implemented several DevOps projects and have build Advanced CI/CD pipelines for build, release and deployment automation, configuration management.

2nd Presentation:
DevSecOps and CloudNative Security Best Practices

DevOps practices are well known but not so much the practice of DevSecOps. Microservices applications have
such a wide attack surface that using manual and traditional security practices is just like putting a square peg in a round hole.
This talk will discuss DevSecOps in a CloudNative environment with an emphasis on Kubernetes' best practices. Demos will accompany the presentation.

Speaker Bio
Damian Igbe is one of the organizers of Kubernetes and CloudNative North Dallas. Damian holds a PhD in Computer science and he is the CTO of Cloud Technology Experts, a Cloud training and Cloud consulting company. Damian obtained his CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) back in 2016 and has been a Microservices/Kubernetes Instructor since then. Damian has a wealth of experience in Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem.

6:30 - 6:45 - Social
6:45 - 6:55 - Club Business
6:55 - 7:30 - Building Rootless, Stateless, and Immutable Containers
7:30 - 8:30 - DevSecOps and CloudNative Security Best Practices
8.30 - 8.35 - Social/Wrap-up

We are excited to announce the February meetup scheduled for Wednesday February 19th.

There'll be 2 presentations on Container Security:

*Building Rootless, Stateless, and Immutable Containers
*DevSecOps and CloudNative Security Best Practices

1st Presentation:
Building Rootless, Stateless, and Immutable Containers

Increased Portability, Improved Scalability, Simple and Fast Deployment, Enhanced Productivity, Reduced Infrastructural Cost with Improved Resource Utilization - hard to disagree with the values Containerization brings on the table! However, we all know that Great Power comes with Great Responsibility!
Containers can elevate your IT Delivery and Operations drastically at the same time can also impose a significant risk if not done rightly! Let's look at those Security and Risk adversity principles are and ee how can we build Containers that are Rootless, Stateless and Immutable!

Speaker Bio:
Himanshu Patel is a technology enthusiast and evangelist, leading Middleware Technologies at Aventive.
Himanshu's expertise includes building Enterprise-grade platforms for Microservices, Distributed Messaging with Kafka and DevOps with Kubernetes/Docker. Himanshu has implemented several DevOps projects and have build Advanced CI/CD pipelines for build, release and deployment automation, configuration management.

2nd Presentation:
DevSecOps and CloudNative Security Best Practices

DevOps practices are well known but not so much the practice of DevSecOps. Microservices applications have
such a wide attack surface that using manual and traditional security practices is just like putting a square peg in a round hole.
This talk will discuss DevSecOps in a CloudNative environment with an emphasis on Kubernetes' best practices. Demos will accompany the presentation.

Speaker Bio
Damian Igbe is one of the organizers of Kubernetes and CloudNative North Dallas. Damian holds a PhD in Computer science and he is the CTO of Cloud Technology Experts, a Cloud training and Cloud consulting company. Damian obtained his CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) back in 2016 and has been a Microservices/Kubernetes Instructor since then. Damian has a wealth of experience in Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem.

6:30 - 6:45 - Social
6:45 - 6:55 - Club Business
6:55 - 7:30 - Building Rootless, Stateless, and Immutable Containers
7:30 - 8:30 - DevSecOps and CloudNative Security Best Practices
8.30 - 8.35 - Social/Wrap-up