De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast

In deze aflevering gaan Ronald en Jan in gesprek met Eric de Witte, Cloud Native Solutions Architect bij Nutanix, over hoe moderne Kubernetes-platformen worden uitgerold en beheerd over virtualisatielagen, bare metal en de cloud heen. Eric heeft een lange geschiedenis die teruggaat tot de vroege vCenter-tijd, via de opkomst van container orchestration (Mesos, Docker Swarm) tot het huidige Cluster API-gedreven platform bij Nutanix.
Het gesprek behandelt hoe Cluster API de onderliggende infrastructuurprovider abstraheert (VMware, Nutanix, AWS, Azure, bare metal), waardoor Kubernetes zijn eigen clusters kan uitrollen en beheren, inclusief self-healing nodes en complete procedures voor het afsluiten en opnieuw opstarten van een datacenter. Ze bespreken verschillende filosofieën rond bootstrap clusters versus een permanent management cluster, en waarom Kubernetes geen besturingssysteem is, ook al wordt het vaak zo genoemd.
Een groot deel van het gesprek gaat over de huidige situatie rond VMware en Broadcom: de licentieveranderingen, de focus op grote klanten, en waarom veel organisaties hierdoor hun virtualisatiestrategie heroverwegen, ook al erkent Eric dat VMware technisch nog steeds een sterk product is.
Daarnaast wordt diep ingegaan op de operationele realiteit van databases en stateful workloads op Kubernetes, de toenemende afhankelijkheid van operators, de uitdaging om interoperabiliteit te valideren bij elke nieuwe Kubernetes-release, en waarom backup en disaster recovery op applicatieniveau moeten gebeuren in plaats van puur op VM-niveau. Ze sluiten af met een blik op soevereine cloud-ambities, de kloof tussen on-prem en hyperscaler-functionaliteit, en Eric's visie op de komende tien jaar van Kubernetes: meer enterprise-adoptie, meer abstractie, maar ook meer complexiteit, waarbij networking-kennis de grootste drempel blijft voor nieuwkomers.
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In this episode, recorded live at KubeCon, Ronald and Jan talk with Jannis Relakis and Michael Seiwald-McCarty, both senior platform engineers at Celonis. Celonis manages over 150 Kubernetes clusters across GKE, AKS, and EKS, but it wasn't always that clean. They started with six different Kubernetes flavors, including Gardener, K-Ops, and OpenShift (both Rosa and ARO), spread across multiple cloud providers.
In their KubeCon talk "No Shame in Just Paying," they shared how they tackled this consolidation project: migrating all workloads to three standardized, fully managed Kubernetes distributions. Key topics include their self-built cross-cluster connectivity tool called "Wormhole" (powered by Envoy's dynamic forward proxy), RabbitMQ federation for seamless message queue migration, and how they used Karpenter and Cilium to align node and network management across clouds.
They also get candid about what went wrong: an accidental ArgoCD sync that caused a 10-minute full environment outage, the pain of "snowflake" environments (including one requiring full HIPAA compliance with Istio mTLS), and the constant fight against scope creep that threatened to derail the entire project.
The episode closes with a forward-looking discussion on FinOps, resource rightsizing, the future of VPA, and whether Kubernetes and serverless can ever truly converge.Powered by ACC ICT
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ACC ICT Specialist in IT-CONTINUÏTEIT
Bedrijfskritische applicaties én data veilig beschikbaar, onafhankelijk van derden, altijd en overal
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In this episode, Ronald and Jan sit down with Luigi Nardi, founder and CEO of DB tune, at KubeCon. Luigi brings a rare mix of academic depth (PhD in computer science, postdocs at Imperial College London and Stanford, professor at Lund University) and startup pragmatism. The conversation digs into why database tuning is fundamentally a combinatorial optimization problem that humans aren't wired to solve well, and why AI is uniquely suited for it.

DB tune focuses entirely on Postgres and deploys a narrow, production-safe AI agent that reads performance metrics and iteratively adjusts server parameters (GUCs) until the system converges on an optimal configuration. No LLMs, no hallucinations — just purpose-built ML that operates in a closed feedback loop. The agent integrates with AWS RDS, Aurora, Azure Flexible Server, Google Cloud SQL, and Cloud Native PG (the Kubernetes Postgres operator).

Luigi shares a standout story: a water management company ran the agent on their production system — with a hospital's water supply on the line — and achieved a 2.5x performance improvement in just a few hours. He also explains how tuning isn't a one-time exercise: cloud workloads change, hardware scales up and down, and DB tune's model called "Newton" was specifically engineered to prevent unstable, oscillating parameter changes. The episode closes with a compelling FinOps angle: tuning doesn't just make your database faster, it can also shrink your instance size and cut infrastructure costs — a perfect fit for the Kubernetes-native world.

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ACC ICT Specialist in IT-CONTINUÏTEIT
Bedrijfskritische applicaties én data veilig beschikbaar, onafhankelijk van derden, altijd en overal
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In this episode, hosts Ronald and Jan are joined at KubeCon by two guests from Red Hat: Brian Stevens, AI CTO and one of the original architects behind the creation of Kubernetes and the CNCF, and Rob Shaw, co-lead of the vLLM project and maintainer of LMD.

Brian shares the remarkable backstory of how Kubernetes came to be open source, including how Red Hat negotiated a single committer seat before agreeing to be a launch partner, and how he later pushed Google to contribute Kubernetes to the newly formed CNCF rather than keeping it proprietary like TensorFlow.

Rob explains what an inference runtime actually is: the critical piece of software that takes an abstract AI model and runs it as efficiently as possible on a GPU or other accelerator — handling everything from CUDA-level kernel optimization to memory management and concurrent request scheduling. vLLM serves as a "Rosetta Stone" between the ever-growing zoo of models (Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral, Qwen, Nvidia Nemotron) and accelerators (Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Google TPUs).

The conversation covers model compression and quantization how techniques like 4-bit precision can deliver 2x hardware efficiency gains while preserving 99%+ model accuracy. Brian and Rob also address the "big model vs. many small models" debate, recommending to always start with the largest capable model to validate a use case before optimizing down.

Looking ahead, both guests see inference as potentially the single largest workload ever run on Kubernetes, and position LMD (now contributed to the CNCF) as the distributed inference layer that will make this possible across heterogeneous accelerator environments  preventing enterprises from ending up with 42 incompatible AI stacks.
The episode closes with a discussion on AI slop, human-in-the-loop thinking, and the future of Kubernetes as the universal platform for running AI agents at scale.

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ACC ICT Specialist in IT-CONTINUÏTEIT
Bedrijfskritische applicaties én data veilig beschikbaar, onafhankelijk van derden, altijd en overal
Support the show
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You can also find us on:
De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast - YouTube
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De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast

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In Episode 135 of the Dutch Kubernetes Podcast, Ronald Kers and Jan Stomphorst sit down with Mohamed Nasser, CEO of VEXXHOST and OpenInfra Foundation board member, together with Thierry Carrez, General Manager of the OpenInfra Foundation and Linux Foundation Europe. The conversation explores the growing relevance of OpenStack in a world increasingly focused on digital sovereignty, private cloud, AI workloads, and secure infrastructure.

The episode dives into how the industry shifted from private infrastructure toward hyperscalers between 2016 and 2020, and why many organizations are now reconsidering that strategy. Thierry explains how geopolitical tensions, vendor lock-in, and changing licensing models have renewed interest in sovereign cloud solutions powered by open source technologies like OpenStack.

Mohamed and Thierry discuss why OpenStack is still highly relevant at massive scale, especially for organizations requiring multi-tenancy, hardware abstraction, GPU enablement, HPC workloads, and advanced networking performance. They explain how Kubernetes has become the user-facing interface, while OpenStack increasingly operates invisibly underneath many modern platforms. Examples discussed include rail infrastructure, gaming companies, telecom providers, and even government environments.

The discussion also explores how Kubernetes and OpenStack complement each other instead of competing. Mohamed explains how many providers now run OpenStack itself on Kubernetes, leveraging cloud-native tooling such as Prometheus and Loki to simplify operations and observability. The hosts also discuss storage abstraction, CSI drivers, bare-metal provisioning with Ironic, and why virtualization still offers major operational advantages in large-scale Kubernetes environments.

Towards the end of the episode, the conversation shifts toward the future of open infrastructure, including confidential computing, Kata Containers, AI security, GPU orchestration, and the growing collaboration between the Linux Foundation, CNCF, and OpenInfra Foundation. Thierry highlights how secure container isolation and confidential computing are becoming increasingly important as AI workloads spread across Kubernetes platforms.

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ACC ICT Specialist in IT-CONTINUÏTEIT
Bedrijfskritische applicaties én data veilig beschikbaar, onafhankelijk van derden, altijd en overal
Support the show
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You can also find us on:
De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast - YouTube
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De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast

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This Podcast is powered by:
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