Cloud Native Aachen Meetup, October 2026
About this event
Join us for another Cloud Native Aachen Meetup! We're excited to bring the community together for an evening of Kubernetes, cloud native technologies, open source, and networking.
This meetup will take place at digitalCHURCH, the event space of digitalHUB Aachen. A big thank you to Ericsson for sponsoring the venue, food, and drinks, making another community meetup possible.
Talks
Our first talk by Arash Kaffamanesh introduces OpenKubes: Building and Operating Kubernetes Anywhere — from Bare Metal to the Edge.
OpenKubes is an open-source, modular Kubernetes platform distribution built on one core principle: the platform owns the contracts, not the components. In this session, Arash will take us under the hood of OpenKubes, showing how it provisions Talos workload clusters using Cluster API, KubeVirt, and Crossplane. He'll also share lessons learned from networking in nested Kubernetes environments, followed by a live demo deploying a complete AI workload, from cluster bootstrap to a running Open WebUI instance, in about 90 seconds.
About Arash: Arash Kaffamanesh is a cloud native engineer and open source contributor focused on Kubernetes, platform engineering, and modern infrastructure. He is the creator of OpenKubes, an open-source modular Kubernetes platform distribution designed to provide flexible, composable building blocks for running Kubernetes across different environments.
Our second talk by Tim Irnich from SUSE will focus on Cluster API (CAPI). The talk explores how Cluster API standardized Kubernetes Lifecycle Management, taking a look at how CAPI is shaping highly automated Kubernetes infrastructure management and its use in projects such as Project Sylva.
About Tim: Tim is the Head of Product Management for SUSE Edge for Telco, an open source based horizontal telco cloud solution. He is also a member of the Board of Directors at the LF Europe Sylva Project. Tim has been active in telco-related open source communities such as LF Networking, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, and OpenStack/OpenInfra for decades. Before joining SUSE in 2018, Tim ran the open source and ecosystem program for Ericsson's cloud business unit and helped found Ericsson's open source development arm, now known as Ericsson Software Technologies.
Venue Information
We're delighted to host this meetup at digitalCHURCH, the event space of digitalHUB Aachen, located at Jülicher Straße 72a, 52070 Aachen.
Food and drinks will be generously sponsored by Ericsson. We also thank digitalHUB Aachen for welcoming the Cloud Native Aachen community to their fantastic venue. We look forward to another evening of learning, collaboration, and networking.
Travel
The venue is located at Jülicher Straße 72a, 52070 Aachen. It is easily accessible by public transport, with Blücherplatz being the nearest bus stop. Parking is also available nearby.
-
6:30 PM - 7:00 PM CEST
Open Doors
in-personDigitalHUB ReceptionWe're looking forward to welcoming everyone from 6:30 PM. Grab some food and drinks, meet fellow attendees, and get settled before we kick off the evening.
-
7:00 PM - 7:10 PM CEST
Welcome Words
in-personHUBbar, digitalCHURCHA quick welcome from the Cloud Native Aachen organizers, followed by community updates and an introduction to the evening's talks.
-
7:10 PM - 7:55 PM CEST
OpenKubes: Building and Operating Kubernetes Anywhere - from Bare Metal to the Edge
in-personHUBbar, digitalCHURCHOpenKubes is an open-source, modular Kubernetes platform distribution built on one core principle: the platform owns the contracts, not the components. Instead of locking you into a fixed stack, OpenKubes defines capability contracts — cluster lifecycle, storage, networking, GitOps — that can be fulfilled by interchangeable implementation profiles, with every architectural decision codified as an ADR in Git. In this talk, we'll take a look under the hood: how OpenKubes provisions Talos workload clusters as virtual machines on a bare-metal infrastructure cluster using Cluster API, KubeVirt, and Crossplane, and what we learned the hard way about networking in nested Kubernetes (spoiler: Cilium L2 announcements and virtual machines don't mix the way you'd expect). The session includes a live demo deploying a complete AI workload - from cluster bootstrap to a running Open WebUI instance - in about 90 seconds, and closes with the project roadmap and how you can get involved.
-
7:55 PM - 8:10 PM CEST
Food & Drinks
in-personHUBbar, digitalCHURCHEnjoy food and drinks, connect with fellow attendees, and continue the conversations.
-
8:10 PM - 8:55 PM CEST
How Cluster API standardized Kubernetes Lifecycle Management
in-personHUBbar, digitalCHURCHCluster API is slowly but surely becoming the de facto standard for deploying and managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters across a growing range of infrastructure options. Its growing adoption goes hand in hand with the increasing popularity of Kubernetes on bare metal, as application developers increasingly standardize on containers and Kubernetes as their runtime platform. We'll briefly recap how one thing led to another on this journey, and then dive a little deeper (but not too deep) into how CAPI shapes highly automated cloud infrastructure management nowadays. We'll illustrate this at the example of Project Sylva, an LF Europe project, which makes heavy use of CAPI and GitOps principles for infrastructure deployment and lifecycle management.
-
8:55 PM CEST
Networking
in-personHUBbar, digitalCHURCHStay after the talks to meet the speakers, exchange ideas with the community, and enjoy refreshments before we wrap up at 10:00 PM.
