Reperio Health

Let’s kick off 2025 with another great evening of cloud-native learning, real-world talks, and hallway conversations with Portland’s platform-engineering community.

Date: Thursday, January 22 Time: 5:30–7:30 PM Location: Reperio Health, 4784 SE 17th Ave Suite 120, Portland, OR Recording: Talks are typically recorded (opt-in by speakers)

The Observability Reset: 4 Foundational Principles for O11y That Scales by Noam Levy, CTO at groundcover

Let’s face it, collecting metrics, logs, and traces isn’t enough anymore. Most o11y stacks today are drowning in telemetry, buried in cost overruns, and spread so thin across tools that they’ve become more noise than signal. The classic SaaS-based model is cracking.

This talk lays out 4 foundational principles for building a sustainable observability posture - that scale with infra and budget:

• Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): SaaS o11y is financially unsustainable at scale.
• Consolidate or Bust: DevEx suffers when visibility is fragmented- consolidation isn’t a luxury - it’s a requirement.
• Standardize Everything: Open protocols, pluggable pipelines, and vendor-neutral APIs are the only way forward, or your o11y is a ticking liability.
• Self-Reliance: You can’t rely on app-level instrumentation forever - eBPF enables scalable o11y without complexity

This session pulls from real-world deployments and lessons learned helping engineering teams scale visibility without compromise.

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“What It’s Like to Learn Cloud-Native Today — A Beginner’s Kubernetes Story” by Kelis Hightower

When given the chance to explore cloud-native development, I chose not to avoid the unfamiliar. With no prior Kubernetes experience and only a few weeks to learn, I took a hands-on approach by building a small burnout-aware study tool to ground abstract concepts in something tangible.

This talk shares what it’s like to learn cloud-native technologies today from a beginner’s perspective. Through experimentation with containers, Kubernetes, and cloud services, I’ll reflect on the mental model shifts, early misconceptions, and “aha” moments that emerged from learning by building. Rather than focusing on expertise, this would offer an honest look at what beginners actually take away from a short, modern introduction to cloud-native systems.

Agenda

5:30–6:00 — Check-in, snacks, networking 6:00–6:30 — The Observability Reset (Noam Levy) 6:30–7:00 — Beginner’s Kubernetes Story (Kelis Hightower) 7:00–7:30 — Networking (and games if anyone wants to bring some!)

Who Should Attend

Platform engineers, SREs, DevOps, app/platform teams, OSS maintainers, beginners learning cloud-native, and anyone curious about observability, Kubernetes, modern infra, or developer experience.

Sponsors

Venue Sponsor — Reperio Health F&B Sponsor — groundcover

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/cloud-native-pdx/events/311422780/

OpenSearch - Your Friendly Neighborhood Vector Database by Nathan Boot @ AWS

OpenSearch, aside from being a search, analytics, and observability solution, often gets overlooked as a fully functioning open source vector database. I’d very much like the opportunity to showcase the progress we’ve made here at the OpenSearch project implementing vector database operations and making them accessible to developers of all skill levels.

Let’s learn how to create and query vector embeddings, the basis for semantic search and RAG. You’ll get introduced to embeddings, vectors and semantic search in this “OpenSearch Vector Operations for Dummies” presentation. Hopefully it will bring a user-friendly path on a battle tested, fully open source platform.

Edge Orchestration: Challenges and Solutions by Scott Baker @ Intel

The edge differs from the cloud – rather than consisting of a handful of centralized infinitely-elastic Kubernetes clusters, the edge consists of thousands of geographically distributed edge nodes, often with constrained resources. The talk will begin with a discussion of the edge, how it differs from the cloud, and the unique challenges that this presents. After the overview of the edge, we will discuss Intel’s Open Edge Platform and its Edge Manageability Framework (EMF) that was built to demonstrate orchestration of edge nodes, Kubernetes Clusters, and applications to those clusters. The software is fully open source, actively developed, and readily available on GitHub.

We will discuss how we onboard and lifecycle the nodes, how we bring up Kubernetes clusters with our CAPI-based cluster management layer, and how we deploy and manage applications to those clusters. We will introduce technologies that enable the edge, such as Intel’s vPRO and Edge Microvisor Toolkit (EMT). We will talk about the architecture and design of this open-source project, and if time and connectivity permits, we will do a short demo to get a feel of the user interface.

Agenda

5:30–6:00 — Check-in, snacks, networking 6:00–6:30 — OpenSearch - Your Friendly Neighborhood Vector Database 6:30 - 7:00 — Edge Orchestration: Challenges and Solutions 7:00–8:00 — Networking (and games if anyone wants to bring some!)

Who Should Attend

Platform engineers, SREs, DevOps, app/platform teams, OSS maintainers, and anyone curious about Kubernetes, supply chain security, observability, eBPF/WASM, finops, or AI for infra/devex.

Please RSVP on Meetup if you have an account

Come out and join us to network with local cloud native peers.

Agenda: 5:00pm to 5:30pm – Munchies and Networking! Food sponsored by Red Hat

5:45pm - A conversation (or maybe surprise talk!) with Kelsey Hightower

Kelsey is a renowned software engineer, developer advocate, and speaker—celebrated for his role in shaping Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure, and previously a Distinguished Engineer at Google Cloud

6:15pm - The -ization of Containerization by Eric Ernst, Apple

The recent open sourcing of Apple Containerization framework and Container tooling projects enable developers to create and run Linux container images directly on their Mac in a way that focuses on security and privacy. In this talk we’ll talk about the container CLI tool and how it utilizes Containerization to provide simple yet powerful functionality to build, run and deploy Linux containers on Mac. We’ll talk about the architecture, why we wrote the framework and tool in Swift, what future development looks like, and how the community can get involved.

6:45pm - Kubernetes Operators by Wuxin Zeng, Red Hat

7:30pm – Networking and Board games!

None of this would be possible without our amazing sponsors:

Thanks to Reperio Health for sponsoring the meetup space
Thanks to Red Hat for sponsoring the food