Speaking at Cloud Native Rejekts Europe 2026 in Amsterdam was not just another conference stop for me it was a very different kind of experience.
A True Community Event
One thing that makes Cloud Native Rejekts special and very different from many other conferences is that it is a pure community-driven event.
There are:
- No big marketing machines
- No overly polished vendor messaging
- No pressure to “sell” anything
Instead, it’s built by and for:
- Engineers
- Practitioners
- Builders
You can feel it everywhere:
- In the openness of the discussions
- In the willingness to challenge ideas
- In the absence of ego
This creates a unique environment where people share:
- What works
- What doesn’t
- What they are still struggling with
And for a speaker, that changes everything.
- You’re not presenting to impress.
- You’re contributing to a conversation.
Bringing an “Uncomfortable” Topic
My talk, Sherlock Pods: Investigating a Compromised Kubernetes Cluster, is not a comfortable topic. (Starting at 4:40)
Not because it’s complex but because it exposes a gap most teams don’t want to talk about:
We are not ready to investigate incidents in Kubernetes.
When I submitted the talk, I already knew:
- This is not a “best practices” session
- This is not a “how-to secure your cluster in 10 steps”
- This is a “we have a problem” talk
And Cloud Native Rejekts turned out to be the perfect place for that.
Sharing What Actually Works (and What Doesn’t)
I made a deliberate choice in my talk:
No hype. No polished architecture. Only reality.
I shared:
- My experiments with container checkpointing (CRIU)
- The limitations across managed Kubernetes (AKS, EKS, GKE)
- The friction of node-level access
- The operational complexity nobody talks about
And interestingly, people didn’t push back.
They added to it.
That’s when you know you’re in the right room.
Where the Conversation Naturally Went: Automation & Agents
Another interesting pattern:
Almost every deep discussion ended up here: “How do we automate this?”
We talked about:
- Capturing evidence automatically
- Triggering actions from detection events
- Building systems that preserve context before it disappears
And naturally, the conversation shifted toward:
- AI
- Agents
- Autonomous response
This aligns perfectly with what I’ve been working on lately:
Moving from alerts to actionable, automated security workflows.
Final Thought
Cloud Native Rejekts reminded me why I enjoy speaking in the first place.
It’s not about the stage.
It’s about:
- Testing ideas
- Getting real feedback
- Connecting with people facing the same challenges
And most importantly: Realizing that the problems you’re working on are not yours alone.
Maxime.
