Immutable by Design: Building Drift-Free Platforms with Kairos and Hadron

Configuration drift is one of the quiet killers of platform reliability, including snowflake nodes, "works on my cluster" upgrades, and configuration management systems that promise consistency but still let systems slip out of sync. In this session, Mauro Morales (Staff Engineer at Spectro Cloud, maintainer on the Kairos project) walks through the image-based approach to infrastructure: instead of mutating a running system, you swap the whole image, or you don't. We'll look at what immutability actually buys platform engineers. No more drift, trustable SBOMs, measured boot and TPM-backed integrity and how projects like Kairos and the newly introduced Hadron make this practical across Linux distributions, not just at the edge. Expect real examples of building and rolling out immutable OS images for Kubernetes clusters, and a candid look at the tradeoffs platform teams should weigh before going all-in on image-based systems.