Welcome to Cloud Native Trento #6 - Observability & GitOps at scale @ Afliant

A big thanks to the sponsor of this event, Afliant.

Join us for this event and help us shape the world of cloud native technologies in Trentino Alto-Adige.

We're an official user community group of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

What to expect

Vendor-agnostic talks, no sales pitch, from practitioners to practitioners

• 🗣️ Two/three speakers
• 👥 Meet old and new friends from the community
• 🍕 Free food and drinks afterwards
• ✔️ Just RSVP and book your ticket (it's free, but we need to know how much food and drinks to buy)!

Agenda

• 17:45 Doors open and welcome (intro and talks start at 18:00)
• 18:00 Davide Frageri - GitOps at scale: Running multicluster Kubernetes with Argo CD Agents
• 18:40 Marco Pernigo - From Metrics to Observability
• 19:30 Food and drinks
• 21:00 Event ends

Speakers

Davide Frageri - Davide Frageri is a DevOps engineer and architect at Afliant, where he works on multicluster Kubernetes covering the full delivery lifecycle across clusters. A developer by background, he has a persistent interest in writing performant code, benchmarking systems, and hunting down inefficiencies wherever they hide.

Marco Pernigo - Marco Pernigo is a DevOps Engineer at Zextras, where he contributes to the infrastructure behind Carbonio, an open-source email and collaboration platform. He is passionate about observability, making systems transparent and debuggable through OpenTelemetry, and about the open-source ecosystem that makes it possible. When he's not instrumenting code or wrangling Kubernetes clusters, he's tinkering with his homelab, testing new tools and ideas to bring back to his daily work. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Verona.

Sessions

GitOps at scale: Running multicluster Kubernetes with Argo CD Agents

Running everything in one large Kubernetes cluster is tempting — one control plane, one Argo CD, one place to look. But tenant isolation, blast radius, regional latency, and upgrade risk push most organizations toward many smaller clusters instead, and that's where GitOps gets hard. The traditional Argo CD topology puts a single control plane at the center, holding credentials for every cluster and reaching across network boundaries to reconcile them. We'll start with the GitOps principles behind declarative delivery, then examine why one big cluster stops being viable and what breaks as fleet size grows. From there we'll dig into Argo CD Agents, which invert the model so each cluster reconciles itself. Attendees will learn how to architect multicluster GitOps with agents, what it buys them in scale and isolation, and how to migrate an existing Argo CD installation.

From Metrics to Observability

Your service has dashboards. CPU, memory, request rate: all green. And yet, when something actually breaks, the first thing you do is ssh into a box and start grepping logs.

Dashboards answer the questions you thought to ask in advance. Production fails in ways you didn't. The difference between monitoring and observability is exactly that gap: monitoring tells you a known thing went wrong; observability lets you ask new questions of a running system, without shipping new code to answer them.

Location & Parking

Afliant is located at Via di Madonna Bianca 104, Trento. There's plenty of free parking nearby:

• In front of Isola dei Tesori
• In front of the MD supermarket entrance (just below Isola dei Tesori)
• The underground car park (note: it closes at 10:00 PM)
• In front of the Le Tentazioni restaurant

The sponsor

Afliant is an Italian tech company based in Trento, born from the merger of Thread Solutions, U-Hopper and Dimension. We design and build AI and data products, digital platforms and system integrations, helping businesses turn ideas into software that can grow and evolve over time. Our approach starts from one principle: deciding what's worth building matters as much as building it well.

Check them out here.

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