Giant Conversations

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

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Introduction to Antonia, Xavier and Team Rocket:

Antonia von den Driesch is a Platform Engineer on Team Rocket at Giant Swarm and alongside Solutions Architect Xavier Avriller work with Manuel Gawert and Simon Weald on "Bringing seamless Kubernetes experiences on-premises, from edge to cloud."

Hamburg, Atlanta, Aarhus, Warsaw, London, Edinburgh

Q: You've been traveling across Europe and went to the US talking about this technology. What's the one thing that surprises people most when they first hear about what KubeEdge can do?

A (X): We found that people often enquire about reliability because of the extra components that make up Kubeedge and show interest in how data syncs back to the cluster after being offline. NOTE Resources footprint (70MB).

Q: Favorite city? Cuisine? Atlanta perhaps?

A (X): London for the variety and Atlanta for the fried chicken!

Q: Can you explain KubeEdge in simple terms — and then give me a real-world example of it solving a problem that would have been really difficult to solve before?

A (A): KubeEdge allows to run kubernetes nodes on small machines with capabilities to interact with IOT devices and sustain connectivity outages. One of the fun use cases done in China is around satellites to improve flood prevention mitigation.

Q: Who are the kinds of companies that typically come to you — and what are they usually struggling with before they find you?

A (X): At GS we mostly interact with manufacturing companies who want to improve the efficiency of their factories through cloud native technologies. The main struggles are around building and managing a distributed platform with all the components that go along with it, GS has experience in multi tiers cloud to edge architectures. Customers also often need to address unreliable connectivity and sometimes even need air gap in the most extreme cases.

Q: When this all works the way it's supposed to — what does that actually change for the people on the ground? Like the person working in the factory or the hospital?

A: (A) It will often automate tasks that used to be done manually by a person, this improves consistency and reliability. It may simplify troubleshooting steps on a factory line or simply maintain operations during a network outage.

Q: For a company that's convinced this is the direction they need to go — why does it matter who helps them get there? What does Giant Swarm bring that they couldn't just figure out on their own?

A (X): Honestly they could figure it all out all on their own, but it takes a lot of time and money to get there. GS gets you up and running in a week and you get specialized teams that have been doing this for years available to help and get the pages.

On Stage - Kubernetes at the Edge – Come see It In Action!

ContainerDays 2026 — Warsaw

Blog Post from Manuel Gawert: Treat the edge like infrastructure, not an exception

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Introduction to Manuel Gawert: Technical PO for On-Premise Giant Swarm. Working with manufacturer's on Edge, IIoT, and On-Premise. Learn about Giant Swarm's IIoT offering here.

Q: Why should a traditional manufacturer care about adopting IIoT now?

Q: Can you give a real-world example /use case of how our IIoT platform helps improve factory operations?

Q: What's the "high-level" approach to scaling IIoT infrastructure across multiple facilities or geographic locations?

Q: How do Kubernetes-native architecture benefit industrial customers compared to legacy systems?

Q: How is IIoT important to digital transformation trends like AI, cloud adoption, or supply chain automation?

Q: Do these platforms (our platform) help reduce costs? I'm sure they do, but how?

Q: How do we handle interoperability with existing factory systems like SCADA, PLCs, and MES platforms?

Q: Where do you see the future of manufacturing heading with platforms like ours?

Blog Post: What works in Industrial IoT: lessons from real-world smart factories

Blog Post: Unlocking smart factory success

Blog Post: GitOps in hybrid factory environments: simplifying deployments, hardening operations

Blog Post: Seamless Industrial IoT management: Azure Arc integration for hybrid environments

Join us for AI Beyond the Hype from Giant Swarm

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

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Recap of AI for Infrastructure - Mainly the presentation about AI: Your New Superpowered, Semi-Intelligent, Tireless Partner

Your New Role: The Product Manager

AI is Both Smart & Dumb alongside "Shit in Shit out"

Vibe coding as the new development flow

The human aspect of AI for Infrastructure

Giant Swarm's Muster

Manufacturing IIoT with Manuel Gawert

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Start with the basics: NOT what is Monitoring and Observability - why is monitoring and observability important for DevOps? What is an example?

Observability is evolving: 2025 observability is less about shiny graphs and more about getting answers faster, safely, and at scale.

Grafana 12 release (May 07 2025): Observability as Code, Grafana Alerting improvements, Grafana Drilldown General Availability, and more

Key enhancements:

OpenTelemetry + Grafana Labs roadmap (May 20 2025)

OpenTelemetry pushed stable, turn-key Spring Boot instrumentation and added resource-aware Prometheus export, so labels like k8s.node.name flow straight into Prom dashboards.

AI Event: AI for Infrastructure - How Will AI Change the Life of a Platform Engineer? Giant Swarm CTO, Timo Derstappen will walk us through the event while going over questions from our audience.

Giant Swarm NEXT: Coffee edition with QAWare

AI for Infrastructure: How Will AI Change the Life of a Platform Engineer?

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

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Location: Mallorca - near Santanyi

Sessions:

Team Atlas and Cabbage: Release Requirements Session

Planeteers: (OLI FILLS IN)

TeamUp:

Shield:

Example:

Are there things that even the expensive commercial tools don't do that we can do for customers?

Examples:

Any fun stories?

TeamUp got to run into 3 other teams while there - Teams Cabbage, Atlas, and Shield

Jonas swam around 300 Meters to a deserted Island

Jonas also snuck out at night with a night camara and came back with 2 sea cucumbers. He also mentioned that he scared some people

We tested the well in the house - it works.. the water was probably not potable

Next Onsite?

Alicante - the whole company

Mary Meeker's Bond AI Special Report:

340 slides into her new BOND “Trends – Artificial Intelligence” report. If you want to get the most out of it - ask ChatGPT to summarize it for you:

Easy Takeaway - Adoption

Old AI News - Starting today [April 10th 2025], memory in ChatGPT can now reference all of your past chats to provide more personalized responses, drawing on your preferences and interests to make it even more helpful for writing, getting advice, learning, and beyond.

Reference: Dress this dog in a pelican costume. Sign in the back written Half Bay Moon

Yeti TikTok "powered" by AI: yetibubbavlog

CloudFlare is trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth.

AI for Infrastructure: How Will AI Change the Life of a Platform Engineer?

AI-powered agents already making waves in the space — including tools like kagent, robusta.dev, and incident.io, which are helping teams detect issues faster, reduce toil, and boost operational confidence.

Special Guests:

Moderated by Tommy Hobin

June 12, 2025 Dominik Schmidle will be talking about Monitoring and Observability.

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

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Special Guests:

Heather Clancy

Joe Salisbury

Date: 1-4 April 2025 in London

Giant Swarm Lineup - KubeCon:

Giant Swarm Lineup - KubeCon (Platform Engineering Day):

Giant Swarm Lineup at Rejekts:

Anyone on this Pocast a bit nervous?

Only a 5 minute walk from Holborn Tube Station: The Novelty Automation Museum - very reminiscent of our invention hero Simone Giertz

Oi, check this out >> https://www.timhunkin.com/a260_travel-by-tube.htm

Have y'all thought about going to an arcade? Do y'all say y'all? I don't care, here's a list of arcades.

The Dishoom paradox (Kricket)

Episode Date: March 12 2025

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Contributors:

Date: 1-4 April 2025 in London

Giant Swarm Lineup - KubeCon:

Giant Swarm Lineup at Rejekts:

Oliver's Take: You don't often go to conferences. I've heard there are three kinds of people who go:

Opsgenie end of support – effective April 5th, 2027: On this date, access to Opsgenie will be shut off, and the product will no longer accessible. Any unmigrated data in Opsgenie will also be deleted at this point.

This a reasonable amount of time to do something about it - right?

Researchers have identified undocumented vendor-specific commands in the ESP32 microcontroller, a widely used chip enabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity in over a billion IoT devices as of 2023.

The security issues include:

Moving to Teams…

Why is Microsoft doing this?

Rise of Competitors: The emergence of platforms like Zoom and WhatsApp, offering user-friendly interfaces and reliable services, diminished Skype's market share.

Strategic Shift to Teams: Microsoft's focus shifted to Teams, a platform that seamlessly integrates with its suite of productivity tools, aligning better with modern communication needs.

Key findings:

The data for our 106 clusters shows

In Ireland, data centers' share of electricity consumption was 21% in 2023 and is projected to reach 32% by 2026. This article covers

Geographical Flexibility: Locating data centers in regions abundant in renewable resources—such as wind-rich northern Europe or sun-rich southern Europe—allows for optimal utilization of local renewable energy capacities.

Operational Flexibility: Scheduling non-time-sensitive computational tasks during periods of high renewable energy availability can reduce reliance on non-renewable power sources.

Dynamic Load Shifting: By distributing computing tasks across various locations based on real-time renewable energy availability, data centers can minimize energy costs and emissions. For instance, when wind generation is low in one area, tasks can be shifted to another region with higher wind output.

Key Features of AIFS:

Enhanced Accuracy: AIFS leverages machine learning techniques to provide more precise weather predictions, improving the reliability of forecasts.

Energy Efficiency: The system's AI-driven approach drastically reduces the computational resources required, leading to substantial energy savings.

Operational Integration: As the first operational forecasting model extensively utilizing machine learning across various parameters, AIFS represents a significant advancement in meteorological practices.

Episode Date: March 5 2025

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Subscribe to Marcus' Kubernetes Newsletter https://cloudnative.now/

Marcus Noble: Tekton Incubation Application - This is from May 1, 2024. Is it new?

Martin Proffitt: Introducing Flux 2.5 GA.

Puja Abbassi: Six Sins of Platform Teams

Marcus Noble: CVE-2025-0426: Node Denial of Service via kubelet Checkpoint API. A security issue was discovered in Kubernetes where a large number of container checkpoint requests made to the unauthenticated kubelet read-only HTTP endpoint may cause a Node Denial of Service by filling the Node's disk. What is this process?

Simon Weald: Tolerating full cloud outages with Monzo Stand-in

Puja Abbassi: Confidential computing is a new technology that enables 1Password to bring its end-to-end encryption model into the cloud.

Confidential AI with: https://www.edgeless.systems/

Puja / Timo: Introducing agent mode for GitHub Copilot in VS Code, announcing the general availability of Copilot Edits, and providing a first look at our SWE agent.

Puja: ChatGPT for DevOps: otto8.ai. Easily integrate CLIs, Docker Images, JavaScript, Python, and Shell scripts with AI.

Episode Date: February 12 2025

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Contributors:

Zach Stone - TIL about this k8s native global load balancer project, currently CNCF sandbox: A cloud native Kubernetes Global Balancer

Advantages:

New Applications:

Puja Abbassi - Our friends from Polar Signals built a nice tool to detect cross-zone traffic: eBPF Tool Identifies Cross-Zone Kubernetes Network Traffic

From The New Stack: Polar Signals couldn't figure out why it had so much expensive cross-zone traffic. So it turned to eBPF to deliver the answers, and cut its cloud bill in half.

Martin Proffitt - Why I Changed My Mind About Backstage? A Brutally Honest Opinion

What is his brutally honest opinion? It IS difficult to work with. But so was Kubernetes in the past. Better options back then would have been Docker, Mesosphere, etc. But NOW K8s is the defacto standard. Port for example may be easier now, but he believes Backstage will become the main choice in the future. Predominantly because of CNCF involvement.

Marcus Noble - Kubernetes History Inspector

This tool parses Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) logs, generating a comprehensive timeline of all events within a cluster.

Key Features:

Xavier Avrillier - Cilium Releases v1.17.0: https://github.com/cilium/cilium/releases/tag/v1.17.0

The new Cilium version includes some pretty cool new features including:

Timo Derstappen: - Let's different llms talk to each other to find consensus. llm-consortium

Key Features:

Iterative Refinement: Through multiple rounds of evaluation, the consortium refines responses to improve accuracy and coherence, ensuring that the final output is well-vetted.

Advanced Arbitration: A designated arbiter model synthesizes responses from various LLMs, evaluating and combining them to produce optimal results.

Blockchain Verification: Decisions and consensus are recorded on the Solana blockchain, providing transparency and verifiability of AI-generated outputs.

Puja Abbassi - DeepSeek claims its ‘reasoning’ model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks

Tim from Netlight mentioned is running most of his LLM workloads on K8s through: https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm

Timo Derstappen - Openai launched their first agent: https://www.youtube.com/live/CSE77wAdDLg

Simon Weald - Trolling SMS spammers with Ollama: https://evan.widloski.com/software/sms_llm/

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Last year's predictions: Was Oli right?

Looking Ahead: 2025's Unfolding Story

1. Gateway API:

The upcoming Gateway API v1.3 is expected to be released around the end of January 2025. It will possibly include:

2. Stronger focus on UI: Flux, Headlamp, Backstage etc.:

Why Together They Matter and complement each other:

This will help solve:

3. More indie community activity. KCDs and more "grassroots" style events and communities (the CNCF is still very active in these):

4. Formalisation in the platform space around capabilities and maturity:

This formalization is driven by the need to manage complexity, foster innovation, and ensure scalable, secure, and reliable platform ecosystems.