Presentations

Most observability systems focus on reliability, scale, and insight, but rarely on sustainability. Every metric scraped, trace collected, and log retained consumes energy and storage, often far beyond what’s needed. This talk examines what the open source observability community can rethink to make monitoring greener and more efficient.

We’ll discuss how projects like Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Loki, and OpenTelemetry can adopt lighter defaults, smarter sampling, and retention strategies that reduce waste without sacrificing visibility. We will focus on real-world examples to show how optimizing data flow and cardinality can lower energy use and infrastructure costs.

By the end of the session, attendees will understand where open source observability can evolve and what practical steps maintainers and users can take to build systems that balance reliability, performance, and environmental responsibility.

Kubernetes governance tools are powerful, but they often operate too late in the software delivery lifecycle—usually in CI/CD or at admission control. By the time a misconfiguration is caught, developers have already pushed code, reviewers must intervene, and pipelines waste costly compute.

In this talk, I introduce Guardon, a lightweight, local-first browser extension that brings Kubernetes guardrails directly to developers while they edit YAMLs in GitHub or GitLab. Guardon performs instant, offline validation of multi-document YAML files, imports Kyverno policies, and surfaces real-time guidance—all before a pull request is even created.

We’ll explore how this browser-native approach shifts compliance further left than existing tools, reduces friction for developers, and enables DevOps and platform teams to enforce organizational best practices without slowing teams down. This session includes a live demo, architectural breakdown, and insights into the future of developer-first Kubernetes security.

This class will teach attendees what they need to know to pass the Technician class amateur radio license exam and get started in amateur radio. It includes six hours of instruction, with the exam administered immediately after the workshop. Participants will increase their chances of passing the test if they download the study guide from www.kb6nu.com/study-guides/ and familiarize themselves with the material before coming to the workshop. The text for this workshop is Dan’s No Nonsense Technician Class License Study Guide. The PDF version of the study guide is available for free at the above page. EPUB and print versions are also available for a small charge.

This class will teach attendees what they need to know to pass the Technician class amateur radio license exam and get started in amateur radio. It includes six hours of instruction, with the exam administered immediately after the workshop. Participants will increase their chances of passing the test if they download the study guide from www.kb6nu.com/study-guides/ and familiarize themselves with the material before coming to the workshop. The text for this workshop is Dan’s No Nonsense Technician Class License Study Guide. The PDF version of the study guide is available for free at the above page. EPUB and print versions are also available for a small charge.

A client came to us with a problem we’re seeing more and more, their large language model (LLM) was deployed, but inference was painfully slow, GPU usage was unpredictable, and costs were spiraling out of control. Kubernetes alone wasn’t enough, they needed a production-ready, efficient, and scalable stack.

In this talk, we’ll walk through how we diagnosed and solved the issue using open-source CNCF tools, turning a chaotic deployment into a well-oiled inference machine.

You’ll learn how to:
1. Use KServe and Kubeflow to serve LLMs reliably.
2. Benchmark and auto-scale workloads using Volcano and KEDA while optimizing resource usage and latency.
3. Track model performance and drift with Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.

We’ll share benchmarks, architectures, and lessons from the field, all based on open-source tooling you can try today. Whether you’re running LLMs at scale or just exploring GenAI, this talk is packed with real-world solutions to help you do more with less.

When the PostgreSQL query planner selects a suboptimal plan, the culprit is often missing information. This session examines the mathematics of cardinality estimation, demonstrating how Extended Statistics provide the cross-column correlations needed to improve the estimates. We will dissect the underlying probability formulas and preview a proof-of-concept regarding statistics for joins.

The innovation cycle is compressing dramatically. At Hydrolix, a real-time analytics platform company, we're witnessing this transformation firsthand within our product development team. What once took months now takes days.

AI enables rapid experimentation, faster customer feedback loops, and dramatically shortened time-to-market for proofs of concept. However, this speed doesn't eliminate the need for human expertise—it transforms it. 

In this session, Director of Field Engineering Tom Howe will explore how AI is reshaping the innovation timeline, the competitive advantages this speed creates, and why human judgment and oversight have become more critical than ever—just in fundamentally different ways.

Imagine you are in the middle of editing a Hollywood film and realize you have the actor in the wrong jacket in post. Instead of trying to do a re-shoot, which may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, can we use AI to fix in post?

This talk demonstrates a practical workflow for production-quality video editing using open-source AI models for video editing. The workflow combines masked region editing, pose guidance, and LoRA fine-tuning to achieve Hollywood-grade results.

The talk is about the process of creating an operating system from scratch, what I learned, the issues I ran into, and the design choices I made. The talk will be about some of the early x86 initialization for an operating system, filesystems and the file system abstraction layer, the scheduler, device management, and creating a window manager.

Over 30 years of experience succeeding in Open Source, we will discuss the pitfalls many technical people run into when trying to climb the ladder.

In the observability space, many assume that OpenTelemetry Collector performance scales linearly—until it doesn't. This talk reveals the critical performance limits that practitioners encounter in real-world deployments, especially at scale, and highlights the blind spots that traditional telemetry metrics often miss.

We demonstrate how to diagnose and prevent high-throughput pipeline failures using latency histogram analysis, external HAProxy sidecars, and advanced profiling. These insights benefit both collector developers and platform engineers who manage telemetry pipelines across organizations.

App reviews are an incredible way to help your user community and get valuable feedback for developers. They’re also time-consuming to answer, and time isn’t often something FOSS developers have. Communications staff or volunteers can help tackle this work, but not have the deep knowledge to easily provide answers. Ignoring reviews isn’t an option; what is a project to do?

In this talk, I share insights from how the Thunderbird projects handles reviews for our Android app through collaboration between developers, comms staff, and our support community. We’ll discuss how comms can collaborate with and learn from community support experts to troubleshoot and answer reviews, even in tricky edge cases. Additionally, we’ll go over how to embed comms into your development team in an unobtrusive yet effective way. We’ll even cover what we’ve learned for turning reviews into developer feedback.

Wouldn't it be great if we could provision entire systems, VMs, and edge devices as easily as we build and deploy application containers to Kubernetes?  This would make it possible to make lightweight single-purpose systems, while using our favorite CI/CD tools and even IDEs.  Well, we can do that  now, thanks to bootc.  In this talk, the speaker will walk you through creating a bootc container image for a full system, testing it, and then provisioning that image to a portable computing device. 

Many of us love to use AI - it's a great tool to help with so many of the things we need to do...

But people are still people!
And they will join, hire, buy from and prefer to work with people that they know, like and trust.

So Human connection is everything!

Your credibility and visibility are products of your ability to communicate with other, often less technical, people.

Attend this fun, practical and inspiring session to learn the 7 bandwidth boosters of Human to Human (H2H) connectivity.

Put them to work, and watch everyone (especially you) win faster!

Generic fitness apps give generic advice. I wanted a running coach that actually knew my training: my long runs, my recovery patterns, even my bad habits. So I built one: a Slack bot that pulls data from Strava, Coros, Peloton, and my own chat logs, feeds it into an open weight LLM running on Groq, and gives me personalized guidance for pocket change.

The bigger idea is simple: this isn’t really about running. It’s about building personal software that understands your life in a way generic apps never will.

As an app developer, my goal is to serve my users. I may love my tech stack, but secretly, I am terrified of the data layer.

These days we have more and people building apps and the database is only given the thought of a prompt or simple setup. The database should be loved and enjoyed, not feared. In this talk, I'll share how approachable PostgreSQL can be for app developers using the tools that we know and love, like ORMs and AI.

Learn how to securely and efficiently install Asterisk and FreePBX using declarative, idempotent instructions stored in a version-controlled cloud-init.yaml file. This approach minimizes arbitrary commands, reduces risks of command injection and privilege escalation, and ensures validation and error handling through cloud-init. In this session, we’ll walk you through a cloud-init.yaml configuration for installing FreePBX with robust management and security best practices.

The Apereo Foundation supports the development and sustainability of open source software in higher education through a global, community-led model. Indeed, several Apereo projects enjoy 20+ years of success. This session introduces Apereo’s evolving approach and roles in fostering open technologies that power critical academic services, research computing, and administrative systems, including authentication/authorization, online learning, video capture and editing, calendaring, scheduling, and registration, as well as data management. Attendees will learn how Apereo supports projects through granting and corporate funding, incubation and health metrics, community development and management, unique to higher education, but applicable to any open source community of practice. Specific initiatives, such as Apereo Micro-Conferences as an awareness and engagement strategy, and the emerging “Community as a Service” model toward self-sustainability, will be introduced.

This talk presents a multikernel Linux architecture where multiple independent Linux kernel instances execute on a single machine with kernel-enforced resource partitioning. Unlike previous replica-based multikernel design, our isolation-based design addresses dynamic resource management through device tree based allocation and Linux hotplug operations. We discuss the architectural design, implementation leveraging existing kernel infrastructure: kexec, device tree, hotplug subsystems. Use cases include AI agent sandbox, zero-downtime kernel updates and automatic crash recovery with backup kernel. This design maintains full Linux compatibility while providing strong isolation without virtualization overhead.

AI is changing how developers learn, collaborate, and contribute.

Are AI coding tools eroding community participation? Is Stack Overflow’s decline a warning sign? Will AI-generated contributions overwhelm maintainers? How do people contribute to open source when using AI tools?
This session uses real data on developer behavior, GitHub contribution patterns, and changes in project development. You’ll learn what’s actually changing, where AI is truly supporting open source work, and where it risks undermining long-term sustainability.

Join Nix Foundation President Ron Efroni and industry legend Kelsey Hightower for a discussion on Nix, AI, and the present and future of the SDLC. AI amplifies an already high-complexity status quo, with agents refactoring code, running builds, and managing production. AI workloads are stochastic, but environments can’t be. When toolchains drift, teams fall into an Abgrund. Nix brings reproducibility, determinism, declarative environments, and atomic rollbacks across OSes, architectures, and infrastructure. So—is now the time for Nix, or a both/and future, where Nix provides the deterministic foundation for agentic automation at scale?

FreePBX is a key component of many VoIP deployments, making its security essential. This session covers real-world vulnerability discovery, responsible disclosure, and remediation based on Horizon3.ai's research.

In this keynote, Farzan Karimi draws on nearly two decades of experience leading offensive and defensive security teams at organizations including Google, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Moderna to explore what happens after the exploit, when human behavior matters more than technical skill. From red team operations that triggered internal friction, to incidents that escalated into arrests through cross-functional trust, this talk explores why the most dangerous zero-day in modern enterprises is not always found in code.

Join Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a SCaLE 2026 keynote presentation.

Imagine transferring data and software from one computer to another in the 1970s, before the Internet.  What media could one use, and how did transfers occur?  This talk provides a glimpse into the technology of that world, and highlights how it affected the process of software transfer.

The advent of the Internet completely changed software transfer and enabled the open source movement.  The increased speed of transfer only forms part of the story.  The talk will outline significant advances that the Internet introduced, and describe how they enable the efficient software distribution scheme that we now enjoy.