De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast

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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In episode 134, Ronald and Jan reconnect with Carl Moberg from Avassa, live from KubeCon Amsterdam, nearly two years after their first spontaneous conversation about edge computing.
Since that first meeting, the edge landscape has evolved rapidly. What was once a niche topic has now become a serious focus area for industries ranging from retail and manufacturing to telecom and AI-driven infrastructure.
Carl shares how organizations are increasingly moving workloads closer to where data is created, whether that is inside factories, retail stores, industrial environments or remote edge locations. The discussion explores the differences between IoT, edge and far edge computing, and why these environments introduce unique operational and security challenges.
A major theme throughout the episode is the role of Kubernetes at the edge. While Kubernetes remains a powerful platform, Carl explains why it is not always the most practical solution for highly distributed or resource-constrained environments. The real challenge is often not starting containers, but everything around them: observability, secrets management, lifecycle management, networking, upgrades and reliability at scale.
The conversation also connects naturally to the previous episode with Neil Cresswell from Portainer. Both episodes explore the same core question from different perspectives:
How do you reliably run modern applications across thousands of edge locations?
An in-depth discussion about containers, operational complexity, AI at the edge, industrial automation and the future of distributed application platforms.
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In this episode, Ronald and Jan talk with Neil Cresswell, CEO, CTO, and co-founder of Portainer. Neil shares how Portainer started as a simple Docker UI and evolved into a platform for managing Docker, Podman, and Kubernetes environments at scale.
A key topic in this episode is Kube Solo, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that can run on roughly 200 MB of RAM. The goal is to make Kubernetes usable in environments where traditional clusters are too heavy, such as IoT, edge, and far edge use cases. Think of AI-powered cameras, self-checkout systems, Nvidia Jetsons, and even tractors running intelligent workloads.
Neil explains that Kubernetes itself isn’t getting simpler, but it does need to become more intuitive. Portainer aims to make Kubernetes accessible to IT generalists, reducing the need for highly specialized teams while still leveraging the full power of the ecosystem.
This episode explores simplicity, scalability, edge computing, and what it takes to bring Kubernetes everywhere.
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In this episode, Ronald and Jan are joined by Nigel Douglas, Head of Developer Relations at Cloudsmith, to discuss the upcoming Kubernetes 1.36 release and the broader evolution of the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Nigel shares his journey from help desk and cybersecurity roles into open source, eventually working closely with Kubernetes through projects like Calico and Falco within the CNCF ecosystem. 
The conversation centers around Kubernetes 1.36, which marks a shift from foundational features toward optimization and new use cases. A major theme in this release is the growing importance of AI workloads. Kubernetes is increasingly positioned as the orchestration platform for AI, with features like Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) enabling better management of GPUs and specialized hardware. 
Security is another dominant theme. Many of the changes in this release focus on closing gaps and improving control, such as more fine-grained authorization, better admission control during node startup, and addressing previously existing vulnerabilities. 
Additionally, the episode highlights several practical improvements, including better snapshot capabilities for stateful workloads, enhanced observability features like native histograms, and improvements in workload scheduling that take hardware topology into account. 
The discussion also touches on a common challenge in the Kubernetes world: upgrading. Many organizations still run older versions due to the complexity of dependencies and ecosystem changes, making transitions non-trivial. 
Looking ahead, Nigel emphasizes the need for more standardization within Kubernetes to make it easier for organizations to adapt when components change or become deprecated, reinforcing the importance of a stable and predictable ecosystem. 
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In this episode, Ronald and Jan talk with Zahra Dehghanpour (platform engineer at bol.com) and Feike Wierda (Senior DevOps Engineer @Bol. via HCS Company) about software supply chain security in Kubernetes environments.

Zahra shares her journey from development to platform engineering, driven by the constant challenges and unpredictability of working with infrastructure. Her earlier experience working in Iran, where infrastructure had to be built and maintained under constraints, shaped her approach to designing resilient and fault-tolerant systems.

Feike explains that software supply chain security covers everything that touches your software, from dependencies and tooling to people and processes. At bol.com, this is addressed by standardizing pipelines, controlling dependencies through internal repositories, and applying security scanning early in the process.

A key theme is balance: developers need freedom, but within secure guardrails. That’s why pipelines are not immediately blocked on vulnerabilities, but first used to provide visibility and gradually increase maturity.

The episode also highlights that security is never “done.” It’s an ongoing process where automation, better tooling, and AI will play an increasingly important role, especially in areas like code review and vulnerability management.
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Bedrijfskritische applicaties én data veilig beschikbaar, onafhankelijk van derden, altijd en overal
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