OSS + ELC EU 2026

For a decade, the default answer to "where does Kubernetes run" was someone else's cloud. But lately, regulated organizations, telcos, banks, and the public sector are pulling sensitive workloads back onto hardware they own and operate — for cost, performance, sovereignty, and increasingly to run AI and GPU workloads they control. The hard part is doing that without giving up the automation the cloud offers.

This talk covers the open-source stack for running your own bare metal, with each layer explained by the people who work on it. At the bottom, Metal3 turns physical servers into declarative Kubernetes resources and manages their lifecycle through the Kubernetes API. At the top, k0rdent manages fleets of those clusters with templates, policy, and drift detection. In the middle sits Cluster API, the standard both layers build on.

We'll walk through the layers working as one — from a rack of bare metal to provisioned clusters to a managed fleet, on hardware we run ourselves. Attendees get a reference architecture, practical guardrails, and clear criteria for when this fits. We'll be honest about the trade-offs: slower provisioning and elasticity bounded by the servers you have.