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Edgecase 2026: we caught 'em all
On 24 September 2026, the fifth edition of Edgecase took place at Gooiland in Hilversum. Cloud native professionals came together for a full day of Kubernetes, security and infrastructure talks, with a healthy dose of Pokémon on the side. Missed it, or want to relive the highlights? Here's a look back at the day.
Pokémon & CNCF: brothers from another mother
“Is AI gonna take my job? Am I gonna have to stand on stage wearing a Pokémon suit?” Well, the answer is no, but Edgecase host Bart Farrell dressed for the occasion anyway. This year’s theme is ‘Gotta catch ‘em all’, and we actually did not have to search far and wide to come up with it. Gerrit Tamboer, Chief Evangelist at TrueFullstaq, explained why in his opening: Pokémon and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) are brothers from another mother.
Take the names. Overqwil, Snivy and Sawk are all Pokémon, but they could easily be CNCF projects. It works the other way around too. Sidero, Sysdig and OpenNebula would make pretty convincing Pokémon characters.
Then there's the sheer size of it all. The CNCF landscape has grown massively and is now a wall of logos, much like the Pokédex every trainer carries around. Which makes the Edgecase speakers the Pokémon trainers of the day.
Both also faced early resistance. When Pokémon made its way to the West, it met plenty of pushback. Today it's simply part of our culture, says Gerrit. Kubernetes went through the same thing, from skepticism to the standard for managing applications.
That brought Gerrit to his one thought for the day: both are here to stay. If you haven't adopted Kubernetes yet, you're late to the party. Luckily, all of Edgecase’s speakers have fully embraced Kubernetes and cloud native. So let’s dive into some talks.
Justin Garrison: Gotta build 'em all
'Gotta build 'em all' is the motto of Justin Garrison, Field CTO at Sidero Labs. Justin is a true tinkerer who's happiest in his garage, taking vintage computers apart and rebuilding them. His mission was, and is, to make everything as small as possible, as he demonstrated on stage. But according to Justin, scaling down works on the same principle as scaling up. So you might as well build the biggest cluster in the world. His approach is contagious, and he made a strong case for creativity and, above all, fun. "Make mistakes and share your ha-ha moments with others," because that's how we learn from each other. "That's something AI can never take from us."
Shantanu Gattani: The dashboard is dead
"The dashboard is dead," claims Shantanu Gattani, SVP, Product at Sysdig. Well, 'dead' is a big word. It's just no longer the destination. That shift comes down to the rise of coding agents. Judging by the few hands that went up in the room, not many people use them yet. But they can resolve security incidents much faster, in seconds or, at most, ten minutes. The question is how you make sure those agents operate safely. According to Shantanu, they're 'hyper-intelligent five-year-olds', and you need to keep them in check. So make sure there's always a human in the loop.
Constantino Vázquez: Elastic Kubernetes needs a home
Constantino Vázquez, Head of Systems Engineering at OpenNebula Systems, showed how infrastructure and Kubernetes are becoming increasingly intertwined. The open-source vendor presented how organizations can manage their private cloud and roll out Kubernetes clusters from the same platform. Kubernetes gets complicated once multiple teams start working with it. Clusters need to be deployed, permissions set up, and environments kept manageable. As usage grows, so does the operational burden. OpenNebula's OneKS is built to handle this 'elasticity' of Kubernetes.
Gerrit learns cloud native security
Is it confidence? Is it bravado? TrueFullstaq's Chief Evangelist Gerrit Tamboer once called himself the 'LeBron James of vibe coding'. Yet his colleagues managed to hack his app within minutes... So what did he do? Gerrit called Marcel Claassen of Sysdig and asked for help. In public, mind you. It all happened during the hottest days of the year. The 'sweat sessions' were recorded, and the videos are now online.
At Edgecase, it was time for Gerrit's final exam. Marcel posed a series of tough cloud-native security questions to the entire room. And guess what... Gerrit passed! He didn't come out on top, though. The LeBron James of vibe coding finished ninth, just inside the top 10.
Merijn Keppel: Behind the scenes of Talos + Zarf
Earlier this year, Merijn Keppel, Principal Consultant at TrueFullstaq, gave a pretty spectacular demo at KubeCon EU. He showed how to spin up and upgrade a Talos Kubernetes cluster in a fully air-gapped environment, using Zarf. The live demo went off without a hitch. At Edgecase 2026, he took the audience behind the scenes of that demo. He also shared an update on where Zarf stands today, since the project is constantly evolving.
Rick Brouwer and Harke Wijnsma: Autoscaling with KEDA
Rick Brouwer and Harke Wijnsma, both Practice Lead OPS at DUO, the Dutch government's education executive agency, took the audience through the ins and outs of Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA) to better handle peaks in data flows. KEDA relies on historical data and often still operates in the present, according to Brouwer and Wijnsma. But it's actually a great tool for predicting the future. In two demos, they showed how that works. The DUO duo was also in it for the fun, so they used minikube and KEDA to conjure up Pokémon on screen. The louder the audience shouted, the more Pokémon appeared. Hilversum delivered. "I've never counted this many!" said an enthusiastic Rick Brouwer.
Kris Budde and Fabian Schmitt: Get your platform bootstrapped
What if your platform doesn't work for every team, but separate platforms for each team don't scale? Then you build a 'platform for platforms', as Kris Budde and Fabian Schmitt of Schwarz Digits demonstrated on the main stage. They came up with the idea for one of the world's largest retailers, and then built a dedicated tool for it: Kubara. It's super simple to use and quick to spin up locally. The current record stands at 5 minutes and 32 seconds.
Breakouts: Going deeper
Alongside the keynotes, the Edgecase program also featured a series of breakout sessions. Paul Bootsma of Dell, for example, shared his vision on modern infrastructure with Dell Private Cloud and Azure Local. Both sessions focused on how organizations can combine cloud capabilities with control over their own environment, data, and infrastructure.
Django Beek of Chainguard showed how organizations can tackle vulnerabilities earlier and earlier in the software supply chain. As AI speeds up software development and the use of open source components continues to grow, so does the risk of vulnerabilities and malware. By rebuilding software components from the ground up and eliminating known CVEs wherever possible, Chainguard aims to make security a standard part of the development process instead of an afterthought.
Game over (for now)
And that was Edgecase 2026. Thank you to all the speakers, partners and attendees for a day full of sharp insights, good conversations and at least one Pokémon suit. See you at the next edition!
