Cloud Native Compass

Mauro Morales and Dimitris Karakasilis explain how Kairos turns any Linux distribution into an immutable, A/B-upgradeable OS shipped as an OCI image, and where it fits alongside bootc and other immutable system efforts.

Flatcar maintainers Thilo, Mathieu, and Chewy explain the immutable A/B partition layout, Ignition provisioning, systemd-sysext for Kubernetes, LUKS/TPM disk encryption, and how Nebraska coordinates monthly fleet updates without SSH.

Evelyn Osman joins David and Laura to defend AWK and Bash, argue platform engineering must start by asking "why", and pick apart whether every workload really belongs on Kubernetes. Also covers decoupling CI from CD.

Laura quizzes David on how he uses Claude as a CLI coding partner across the Rawkode Academy monorepo, why he calls it smart coding rather than vibe coding, and the trade-offs around productivity, skill atrophy, and the environmental cost of AI tools.

Adriana Villela explains why developers, not observability teams, should instrument their own code. We cover OpenTelemetry's auto vs manual instrumentation, sampling and cost trade-offs, single-pane-of-glass backends, and the environmental impact of telemetry.

Hazel Weakly unpacks open source sustainability through Eleanor Ostrom's commons principles, covering reciprocity, governance, VC funding pitfalls, maintainer burnout, and why web browsers should be treated as international public utilities.

Pepe Amengual, a core maintainer of Atlantis, joins David and Laura to walk through the Terraform pull request automation server: how it runs plan and apply from PR comments, OpenTofu support, the path to 1.0, and the security model around credentials.

Otavio Santana joins Laura and David to dispel myths about modern Java on Kubernetes. They cover JVM container awareness, GraalVM native compilation for serverless cold starts, and frameworks like Quarkus and Spring.

Mark Fussell, CEO of Diagrid, explains how Dapr's building blocks (pub/sub, state, workflows, virtual actors) tame microservice complexity, and how Dapr Agents extends that same actor and durable-workflow model to agentic LLM systems.

Koray Oksay (Kubermatic, CNCF Ambassador) joins David to discuss why Kubernetes adoption still trips up teams: skipping container fundamentals, picking between managed services and self-hosted clusters, navigating tooling choices like Flux vs Argo CD, and structuring multi-cluster environments.

Mikkel Mørk Hegnhøj from Fermyon joins David and Laura to unpack Spin 3.0, WASI 0.3, and the WebAssembly component model. They cover running Wasm on Kubernetes via SpinKube, polyglot components, and built-in OpenTelemetry.

Kat Cosgrove joins David and Laura to unpack how SIG Release ships Kubernetes: team structure, CI signal, bug triage, press embargoes, maintainer burnout, and why a Kubernetes 2.0 is unlikely.

Jason Hall walks through Chainguard's migration of its image-serving infrastructure from Kubernetes and Knative to Google Cloud Run, covering multi-region Terraform modules, least-privilege IAM, R2 for blob storage, and BigQuery-backed event logging.

InfluxDB, a time series database, underwent a major rewrite to create InfluxDB 3.0, also known as IOx. The decision to rewrite the database was driven by the need for strict control over memory management and high performance.

JJ Asgar joins to discuss IBM watsonx.ai and why enterprises distrust today's black-box AI. The conversation covers training data provenance, The Pile, Hugging Face, hallucinations, copyright, and the human problem of verifying AI outputs.

Liz Rice explains how eBPF lets you safely run programs inside the Linux kernel, why the verifier makes it safer than kernel modules, and how projects like Cilium, Falco, and Pixie are using it for networking, security, and observability.

Marino Wijay and Matt Turner unpack Istio Ambient Mesh, walking through ztunnel, HBONE, and waypoint proxies, the trade-offs against sidecars, and how eBPF, CNI plugins, and the Gateway API fit into Istio's post-graduation future.

In this episode, hosts David and Laura, sit down with Laslo Fogas; a self proclaimed WebAssembly sceptic. They discuss the future of Cloud Native and improving the broken developer experience.

Natan Silnitsky shares how Wix operates 2,500+ microservices and 70 billion Kafka events per day. We cover when to choose event-driven over RPC, schema evolution with Confluent Schema Registry and protobuf, Kafka cost optimisation, polyglot services, and ZIO on the JVM.

Marc Boorshtein, CTO of Tremolo Security, explains why long-lived kubeconfig certificates are an anti-pattern, how OIDC and impersonation deliver revocable cluster access, and how workflow identity via OIDC JWTs replaces static service account tokens in CI/CD pipelines.

Rachel Sweeney shares Built Technologies' migration to Kubernetes: when (and when not) to adopt it, taming developer experience with DevSpace, and the ecosystem of Argo CD, Flux, Helm, Kustomize, KEDA, and Crossplane that powers their platform.

Eli (Scaleway), Neil (Portainer), and Abdel (Google) join the inaugural Cloud Native Compass to debate cloud pricing beyond the big three, whether Docker is still trustworthy, WebAssembly's role alongside containers, and the rise of internal developer portals like Backstage.

In this episode, David interviews Frank, a staff engineer at Personio, a big HR company based out of Germany. Frank has been in the industry for close to 15 years and has worked with various programming languages such as PHP, TypeScript, Kotlin, Java, Go, and Rust.

Kate Goldenring (Fermyon), Connor Hicks (Suborbital), and Kevin Hoffman (Cosmonic/wasmCloud) explore server-side WebAssembly: WASI, the component model, runtimes, and how Wasm sits alongside containers and Kubernetes.