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From tractors to Marvel: Edgecase highlights
A new year, a new Edgecase, the largest Kubernetes event in the Netherlands. This is where Cloud Native experts, Engineers, and IT professionals come together for a full day of inspiring talks, hands-on workshops, and meaningful connections. If you were there or unfortunately missed it, here’s a summary of an incredible day.
As nerd as you can be
In true rockstar fashion, Bart Farrell opens the fourth edition of Edgecase. He is known as the Head of Community at the Data on Kubernetes Community since 2020 and a freelance consultant, but most of all as a CNFC Ambassador full of energy. He connects with the audience and asks who was here before and who wasn’t. The event is making a name for itself because there are a lot of first-timers in the audience. Maybe it’s because of the LEGO prizes that can be won this year, who knows? Bart encourages everyone to ask questions after the talks and really dive deep. Or, as he puts it, “be as nerd as you can be”.
Why ‘The Multiverse Saga’?
Bart introduces Gerrit Tamboer, founder of Fullstaq and Chief Evangelist at TrueFullstaq, who has over 15 years of system engineering experience. He explains to the audience that this Edgecase is almost like the previous ones. There are great talks, great sponsors, and great connections, but one thing is different. The theme this year is The Multiverse Saga. Why, you ask? Well, Gerrit is a self-proclaimed Marvel nerd. He tells us all about his passion for the cartoons and movies, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) that started in 2008. He talks about Phases 1, 2, and 3, in his eyes, the glory years of the MCU. From Phase 4, it went downhill, but the upside to the last three phases is that they are The Multiverse Saga.
This means multiple universes and timelines. Multiple stories can exist at the same time because of this. Take the several Spiderman movies, for example.
According to Gerrit, there is a big parallel between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Multiverse of Cloud Native: they both started with a sacred timeline. In the Multiverse of Cloud Native, it started with containerization and went on to container orchestration, Kubernetes, observability, security, service mesh, GitOps, until Platform Engineering.
There may be some discussion about the order (just like Marvel fans do), but another similarity is that both Multiverses saw a diversion from the sacred timeline, in this case, edge computing. The requirements are totally different, and the timeline is not always linear.
According to Gerrit, edge computing and platform engineering are the two most important timelines we will be discussing today. However, there will also be discussion about embedded, virtualization, and AI native, although Gerrit admits he doesn’t know what AI native means. A lot is happening in the Multiverse Saga. This goes for both Marvel and cloud native.
Navigating the healthcare Multiverse
Next up: Dan Acristinii, Global Product Manager Edge Foundations at Roche, and his colleague Niyazi Erdoğan, Experience Lead Edge Foundations and Senior DevOps Engineer at Roche.
Dan specializes in driving innovation and operational excellence in complex environments, delivering engaging presentations that bridge business strategy with advanced Kubernetes infrastructure solutions. Niyazi leads experience initiatives for edge foundations, ensuring complex technical solutions remain user-centered and accessible in an increasingly connected technological landscape. Together, they share how Roche united cloud and edge with a platform engineering saga, so they can navigate the Healthcare Multiverse as they please.
Roche operates globally, and every region had its own way of working. The lab software was highly fragmented. Niyazi called it “a beautiful mess of different stacks and solutions.” Then came the ‘knock knock moment.’ A simple solution was needed—yet powerful enough to handle everything. Step by step, the company moved from a traditional OS to a Kubernetes Native OS. The lessons from the Roche saga are clear: Keep it simple. Don’t sell a platform—deliver a solution. And remember: the most important user is not the developer.
Kubernetes on a tractor
Get out your farming boots and fire up that tractor, because Wieneke Keller, CTO at Aurea Imaging, and Sebastian Lenartowicz, Software Engineer at Aurea Imaging, take us on an agricultural adventure. Their story about precision farming powered by K3s, Python, and TensorRT at the Far Edge was, ironically, slightly interrupted by technical difficulties, but still made an impact on the audience.
Increasing populations and decreasing prices are driving farmers to be leaner and more efficient than ever before - and that means they should innovate or hang up their overalls and find a new job. Recent years have seen the rise of precision farming, combining cutting-edge technologies with traditional agricultural know-how to increase per-hectare yields and cut costs.
However, these are highly challenging applications to build and make work effectively - dirty outdoor datasets, poor connectivity, limited compute, and many other factors combine to make this a domain not for the faint of heart. In their talk, Wieneke and Sebastian went over some of the main challenges in the space, and how Aurea Imaging has leveraged cloud-native tools and thinking to solve them and massively boost development velocity versus more "traditional" approaches.
The AI Trifecta: securing, using, and defending with AI
If there was one industry trend, or even global trend, that we can’t ignore, it is, of course, AI. Emanuela Zaccone, Staff Product Manager at Sysdig, inspired us on this subject.
Modern attackers don’t wait. They’re fast, stealthy, and willing to experiment. The AI-powered security shift has accelerated our arms race as we face scale and unpredictability at machine speed. This year's emergent trend: threat actors exploiting CI/CD pipelines and moving through cloud workloads before you can blink, with some help from AI.
In this session, Emanuela guided the audience through the 2025 cloud threat landscape, revealing where attackers are going next and how runtime security has become a non-negotiable pillar of any modern defense.
She also shared insights into the AI security trifecta, offering practical recommendations on how to:
- Secure the AI being adopted;
- Integrate AI into your security operations;
- And defend against AI-powered threats.
Once upon a time…
Everything that happens at Disney is magic, right? Well, there was definitely some magic involved in the technical adventure that Justin Garrison, Head of Product at Sidero Labs, shared with the audience about the lessons he learned from building and shipping Disney+ a few years ago.
Or as he explains it: “Everyone has a plan until they get 10 million sign-ups in a day.“ Products need demand, and infrastructure has to plan accordingly. In his session, Justin shared what worked (and what didn't) when a plan meets reality. A tail as old as [epoch] time that we have to live happily ever after with or learn to let it go.
Yep, there were a lot of Disney references. Including Justin kicking off with “Once upon a time…”. But there were more than enough technical details to keep the crowd satisfied. For example, how Disney+ was built on AWS ECS and how just three VMs handled all the traffic, so ultrafast upscaling was required. Just storytelling, no slides at all!
Meanwhile, C-level dives into the sovereignty dilemma
This year, TrueFullstaq hosted sessions in the C-level zone for the very first time, designed especially for CTOs, CIOs, and other executives. Bert Hubert, a leading expert in digital sovereignty and strategic IT, gave the kickoff. His message couldn’t have been clearer. He criticized our heavy dependence on America when it comes to cloud servers. So, how do we deal with that? There are three flavors: choosing the Edge, going for rented capacity with Kubernetes and containers, or keeping your head in the cloud. And it’s precisely that last option we need to move away from.
Guided by moderator Chris Baars, CCO of TrueFullstaq, Kim McMahon, Head of Marketing at Sidero Labs, Emanuela Zaccone, and Bert Hubert joined the audience for the second C-level session. A wide range of topics came to the table: from AI and digital sovereignty, to GAIA-X (the failed attempt to build a European Federated Secure Data Infrastructure), to cyber legislation, supply chain management, and even the operating system running on Hubert’s standalone computer for his little programs. There’s a lot happening right now, and that’s exactly what these C-level sessions capture. Hopefully, we’ll be back again next year.
Secure your container supply chain
Let’s go back to the mainstage. When you ask Denis Maligin, Sr. Sales Engineer at Chainguard, something about security, he can easily talk about that. Even before he started, he already apologized for the fact that there probably wouldn’t be any time left for Q&A afterwards. He was right, by the way.
As Kubernetes has evolved, we’ve seen multiple “timelines” emerge: the original path of large-scale Platform Engineering, and a divergent path where Kubernetes powers constrained Edge environments. Each universe has its own challenges, yet one problem spans them all - vulnerability chaos in container supply chains.
Denis explored how mutable tags, bloated base images, and metadata-driven scanners create unpredictable risks across environments in his talk. Together with the audience, he looked at why traditional patch cycles lead to persistent CVE debt, and how these challenges play out differently in datacenter versus edge deployments.
Most importantly, proven strategies were discussed to bring order to this chaos: reproducible builds, digest-based deployments, minimal images with smaller attack surfaces, and the use of SBOMs and signed provenance for compliance. Through a live demo, Denis compared common public images with hardened alternatives, showing how teams can eliminate CVE noise, improve pull performance, and build supply chains that are truly verifiable. The audience walked away with practical techniques to secure your container supply chain and tame vulnerability chaos across the Kubernetes multiverse.
Bridging the last‑mile divide with cloud‑native airgaps
An engineer obsessed with bringing cloud native best practices to places the cloud can’t always reach? Meet Brandt Keller, Software Engineer and Open Source Maintainer at Defense Unicorns. At Edgecase 2025, he showed how a cloud native airgap mindset turns traditional delivery on its head—hardening the software supply chain, reducing operational toil, and enabling mission-critical systems to thrive whether they’re in a data center, a desert, or on the deck of a ship.
He demonstrated this with the open source tool Zarf, the Airgap Native Package Manager for Kubernetes. Software by trade and Mission by heart, that’s how Brandt describes himself. These two qualities came to life while he was on stage, inspiring his fellow engineers in the room.
Beefs we shouldn’t have in 2025
Why does Erwin de Keijzer, Principal Consultant at TrueFullstaq, have beefs? And why does he have to share them with us?
It’s 2025, and we have had more than enough time to adapt to modern software engineering practices. "Erwin's beefs" is about times when it doesn’t happen and how modern practices can make our lives much easier.
According to Erwin, in 2025, we shouldn’t:
- Deploy the LGTM stack and call it done on observability.
- Develop an application and hand it over to an operations team to handle it from there.
- Jenkins
Instead, we should:
- Develop cloud native applications;
- Use Infrastructure as Code (and let LLMs help you);
- Check out (k)yam;
- And talk about your mental health (with Erwin reflecting on his own experience with winter depression).
Everyone's a winner here
Bart and Gerrit opened Edgecase 2025, and they are also the ones to round it up. The cloud native (and Pokémon) focused quiz at the end is very popular, mainly because of the prizes (big LEGO sets). Sysdig and AWS also give away some great prizes.
All in all, everybody wins at Edgecase 2025. Because of the many inspiring talks and break-out sessions, the new connections and conversations with fellow edge-professionals, and, of course, a great day made possible by great sponsors.
