Public cloud providers offer convenience — but at the cost of control, transparency, and increasingly, budget. What if you could have the same self-service Kubernetes experience, on your own hardware, built entirely on open source technology? This talk walks through the full stack of building your own cloud platform to offer Kubernetes — layer by layer. We start at the bottom with Networking and Compute. From there, we move up to Metal-as-a-Service with metal-stack.io, which turns bare-metal servers into programmable, API-driven cloud infrastructure — with on-demand provisioning, physical tenant isolation, and no hypervisor overhead. On top of that, we explore how Gardener and ClusterAPI handle Kubernetes cluster orchestration at scale: self-service cluster provisioning, automated lifecycle management — delivering the public cloud feeling, without the public cloud dependency. We will also touch on what owning the complete stack means for SRE teams: from observability across every layer, to the ability to see exactly what happens during debugging — because there are no black boxes, only open source code you can read, trace, and understand.
Simon Mayer is working as a Cloud Native Engineer at x-cellent technologies GmbH. The company is focused on building sovereign cloud and Kubernetes platforms built entirely on open source technology — for organisations with the highest demands on security, compliance, and control.
