This session explores how Happening completely revamped their edge Kubernetes infrastructure by implementing EKS Hybrid to centrally manage all their on-premise clusters across different markets. Faced with regulatory requirements to store data locally at the edge while maintaining operational efficiency, we designed a sophisticated hybrid architecture with a centralized AWS control plane to manage edge data planes. We'll dive deep into our technical implementation including our mixed-mode CNI setup with VPC-CNI and Cilium, multi-pool IPAM to handle cross-cloud networking, and how we leverage Kyverno policies to ensure workload placement across markets. Learn how we established seamless connectivity between AWS and on-premise environments through Wireguard VPN tunnels, coupled with BGP routing policies to efficiently route edge workloads. By centralizing management of geographically distributed Kubernetes clusters, we've reduced our on-premise management burden by 40%, resulting in substantial cost savings and dramatically decreased the team operational toil. Cluster upgrades which we were always tedious is now done in just a few hours across all environments simultaneously, significantly improving our maintenance windows and capacity management.

Laurent Godet is a seasoned Site Reliability Engineer with nearly a decade of experience building and scaling cloud-native infrastructure for high-growth companies. Currently at Happening, he focuses on reliability, automation, and scalable systems design.

Previously, Laurent led SRE initiatives at LiveRamp, where he managed the company’s largest Kubernetes cluster on GKE, introduced GitOps best practices, and built the award-winning Tenant Factory service that reduced onboarding time from a full day to just one hour.

His career spans pivotal DevOps and SRE roles at Earnd (Greensill), iov42, and Babylon Health, where he drove cloud migrations, built high-availability platforms, and implemented modern observability and CI/CD pipelines. Laurent’s expertise lies in Kubernetes, AWS, serverless architectures, and data-intensive systems, always with a focus on reliability, scalability, and developer productivity.