Security Showdown & AI Workloads with KServe and Kubeflow Lite

Announcements: KCD Texas Austin 2025!

We proudly announce that KCD Texas Austin has been picked as one of four KCDs in North America in 2025!

Please buy your tickets and mark your calendars: May/15/2025!!
More details at https://linkedin.com/company/kcdtexas

April 24th at 6pm at Capital Factory

We will meet at Padawan Room on the 5th Floor! Our schedule is as follows:

6:00-6:30 - Food/Social!

6:30-7:15 - Security Showdown: The Overconfident Operator Vs the Nefarious Ne’er-Do-Well

7:15-8:00 - ML on K8s: Running AI Workloads with KServe and Kubeflow Lite (Akshay Mittal from PayPal)

https://community.cncf.io/events/details/cncf-kubernetes-austin-presents-security-showdown-amp-ai-workloads-with-kserve-and-kubeflow-lite/

ATTENTION: WE KNOW PARKING IN DOWNTOWN IS TRICKY!

So, you can park in the building garage for just $8.00 (validation parking tickets will be distributed)!
Street parking will still be an option. More information on parking here: https://www.capitalfactory.com/parking/

Please RSVP here, and please make sure you follow our official social media platforms and stay tuned with the latest news about Kubernetes Austin:

https://linkedin.com/company/k8sAustin
https://instagram.com/k8sAustin
https://x.com/k8sAustin

Everyone is invited to join! We hope to bring the latest about the Kubernetes and CNCF projects.

We have several special guests: Whitney Lee from Datadog, Cris Nevares from Insurity, and Akshay Mittal from PayPal!

Descriptions

Security Showdown: The Overconfident Operator Vs the Nefarious Ne’er-Do-Well

Ozzie the Overconfident Operator has secured their cluster! They have done it all: role-based access control, encryption at rest, TLS…and as they congratulate themself on a job well done, Nova the Nefarious Ne’er-do-well watches from around the corner, drooling with anticipation. Spoiler alert⎯Ozzie is about to get HACKED. In this talk, the speakers play the characters of Ozzie and Nova and playfully demo cluster security as Nefarious Nova exploits each of Ozzie’s security decisions. What can Overconfident Ozzie do when Nova gets the upper hand? How can Ozzie proactively keep Nova’s threats at bay? Take security beyond the firewall and discover cloud native security concepts such as identity management, container image scanning and signing, creating and implementing policies, runtime security, and secrets management. Learn security basics alongside Overconfident Ozzie, who is sure the cluster is COMPLETELY secure this time. There is nothing Nova can do to break… uh-oh. Not again!

ML on K8s: Running AI Workloads with KServe and Kubeflow Lite

Machine learning is increasingly moving from notebooks to production—and Kubernetes is where the action is. However, deploying scale-based models with observability, versioning, and autoscaling can get complex fast.
In this session, we’ll explore how KServe, a CNCF incubating project, simplifies the process of serving ML models on Kubernetes. Using a minimal Kubeflow-lite setup, we’ll walk through a live deployment of an ML model (sci-kit-learn or HuggingFace) and demonstrate production-grade features like autoscaling, traffic splitting, and real-time monitoring.
This talk is aimed at developers, ML engineers, and platform teams looking to operationalize AI workloads without reinventing infrastructure.

More information: k8saustin.com