The Main Track
The technical heart of Edgecase. A full day of talks on Kubernetes, cloud native infrastructure, and everything that keeps modern platforms running — from hands-on deep dives to real-world lessons from engineers in the field.
Justin Garrison
Field CTO @ Sidero Labs
10.00 - 10.40, Mainstage
The “starter cluster” has evolved from the simple days of kube-up to powering the largest platforms in the world. Kubernetes is the application interface developers expect, but it doesn’t fit everywhere. Justin has spent years trying to meet that challenge. He’s built some of the smallest and largest clusters in the world using old, new, and custom-built hardware. He’ll share lessons learned from putting Kubernetes into places it wasn’t originally designed to run—and how those experiences are shaping a simpler path forward with Talos Linux.
Justin serves as Field CTO at Sidero Labs and hosts the Fork Around and Find Out podcast. He has been called the Steven Spielberg of Cloud Native and the Bill Nye of tech. His career includes contributions to Oscar-winning films, the Disney+ streaming platform, and Amazon EKS. In his free time, Justin enjoys building modern-retro computers and watching Moana.
Shantanu Gattani
SVP, Product @ Sysdig
11.00 - 11.40, Mainstage
For over a decade, cloud security has been a dashboard discipline. That assumption is breaking, and not because a vendor decided so.
Like their engineering counterparts, the most AI-mature security teams are rebuilding their workflows around the coding agent as the control surface: from posture and identity to runtime data through MCP, defining policy in natural language, and running end-to-end remediation from signal to merged pull request without opening a UI. Enter: Headless cloud security.
This keynote is a field report on that shift. Attendees will explore what these security teams are building, what holds up in production, where it breaks, and what it takes for a headless security platform to meet AI-mature teams where they already work.
With headless cloud security, the dashboard does not disappear, but it does stop being the destination. Keynote attendees leave with a way to evaluate the same evolution in their own program.
Shantanu Gattani is the SVP, Product at Sysdig, where he leads the development of cloud security solutions. With over 15 years in the security industry, he has a proven track record of creating and maintaining products that fill necessary market gaps. Before Sysdig, Shantanu held senior product management roles at Tenable and Accurics, focusing on cloud security and exposure management.
Merijn Keppel
Principal Consultant @TrueFullstaq
14.05 - 14.40, Mainstage
Earlier this year at KubeCon EU, a wild live demo appeared: we deployed and upgraded a Talos Kubernetes cluster in a completely air-gapped environment using Zarf, going from bare metal to a running cluster with zero internet connectivity, then upgrading it live on stage. Critical hit, crowd loved it. What we didn't get to show was the training montage behind the scenes: everything that had to go right to make that "magic" actually work.
This time, I'm revealing the moveset. In this session, I'll break down the real automation driving that demo, including how Talos Linux gives you a rock-solid, predictable OS built specifically for Kubernetes, and how Zarf bundles the OS, Kubernetes itself, and your applications into a single portable package you can deploy anywhere. I'll dig into the tooling that evolved "spin up a cluster with zero connectivity" from a flashy one-off into something repeatable and reliable, and where TrueFullstaq is taking this "magic" component next.
Merijn is Principal Consultant at TrueFullstaq, focused on declarative infrastructure such as NixOS, Talos Linux, and Zarf, with a particular interest in reproducibility challenges in disconnected and air-gapped systems.
Rick Brouwer
Practice Lead OPS @ DUO
15.15 - 15.55, Mainstage
(A duo talk with Harke Wijnsma)
What if your applications could scale themselves, intelligently, automatically, and ahead of demand?
In this session, we explore the world of event-driven autoscaling with KEDA: starting from the fundamentals and building all the way up to predictive autoscaling powered by Machine Learning. Whether you're just getting started with autoscaling or looking to push beyond traditional reactive approaches, this talk has something for you.
Rick brings over 20 years of IT experience to the stage. Currently serving as Practice Lead OPS at DUO, part of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, he is also an active KEDA maintainer, one of the people who helps shape the project itself. He brings technical insight straight from the source.
Harke Wijnsma
Practice Lead OPS @ DUO
15.15 - 15.55, Mainstage
(A duo talk with Rick Brouwer)
What if your applications could scale themselves, intelligently, automatically, and ahead of demand?
In this session, we explore the world of event-driven autoscaling with KEDA: starting from the fundamentals and building all the way up to predictive autoscaling powered by Machine Learning. Whether you're just getting started with autoscaling or looking to push beyond traditional reactive approaches, this talk has something for you.
Harke Wijnsma brings extensive IT experience to the table. As a Practice Lead OPS at DUO, he spent many years within DUO's Observability and Analytics team, giving him deep, hands-on knowledge of Machine Learning, metrics, and data. That background makes him perfect to talk about how deep observability and metrics expertise lays the foundation for truly intelligent autoscaling
Kris Budde
Product Owner @ STACKIT Edge Cloud
15.55 - 16.30, Mainstage
(A duo talk with Fabian Schmitt)
Building a platform sounds right until every team builds its own. At one of the world’s largest retailers, one platform didn’t fit all, but many siloed platforms did not scale. Different products, constraints, and experience levels drove divergence.
In this talk, we show how we addressed this by building an Open Source Platform Framework not as a rigid product, but as a shared foundation. It allows teams to own their platforms while sharing common practices, from standard cloud setups to 15,000+ edge locations.
I’m an infrastructure enthusiast turned Product Owner, with a deep background in SRE, virtualization, and Kubernetes. Today, I drive the product strategy for STACKIT Edge Cloud at Schwarz Digits, building the next generation of edge infrastructure management for modern cloud-native applications
Fabian Schmitt
Platform Engineer @ Schwarz Digits Cloud
15.55 - 16.30, Mainstage
(A duo talk with Kris Budde)
Building a platform sounds right until every team builds its own. At one of the world’s largest retailers, one platform didn’t fit all, but many siloed platforms did not scale. Different products, constraints, and experience levels drove divergence.
In this talk, we show how we addressed this by building an Open Source Platform Framework not as a rigid product, but as a shared foundation. It allows teams to own their platforms while sharing common practices, from standard cloud setups to 15,000+ edge locations.
I've been passionate about cloud-native tech for nearly 10 years, working in various DevOps and Platform Engineering roles along the way. Right now, I'm a team member and maintainer of the open-source tool 'kubara'—it started internally at Schwarz Digits and launched publicly in March 2026.
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September 24, Gooiland, Hilversum.