Rejekts '26

I attended my first Cloud Native Rejekts in 2023 right before my first KubeCon. I was coming all alone acting on the recommendation of a friend I found on X - or better said he found me. I came with an open mind, no expectations. It was a two day event full of talks - some of them made little sense to me back then - being only familiar with my own corner of cloud-native computing. I remember talking to many people, having way too much energy, and making a fool of myself many times - but returning home motivated to build stuff.

In contrast, nowadays I am aiming to make a fool of myself and ask stupid questions from as many people as I can. I also already know what to expect from Rejekts - and I especially love coming alone and learning about the experiences of other people. Both through the talks and the chats. This year it also felt extra cozy as it was community-driven.

They selected some awesome technical talks. The ones I attended were:

• Type 1 Fun with Type 1 Hypervisors: The Comeback of Hardware-Backed Isolation
• For a topic that is not of relevance for me, I liked hearing about how challenging it is to emulate hardware-level isolation. And I enjoyed the jokes about working for months on things that are unimaginable to most people in this space.
• Beyond Tool Sprawl: An Event-Driven Approach to Dynamic Multi-Cloud Operations
• Basically an intro to Sveltos (https://github.com/projectsveltos). From what I have understood it's a CLI tool that is especially good for managing deployments in environments with multi-tenancy via Cluster API.
• Beyond Argo Events: Leveraging NATS for Scalable Webhook Management in Dynamic Environments
• I'll be honest, I went to this talk expecting to see what events Argo CD emits. I did end up learning that Argo Events is actually ingesting events coming from other tools and can notify via different tools. I was also impressed of how aware this team was of their existing numbers and how they used benchmarks to define what tool fits their use case. And I got an answer to my original question from an attendee: Argo CD actually has notifications built in (https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/operator-manual/notifications/).
• The Self-Improving Platform: Closing the Loop Between Telemetry and Tuning
• Good talk, I especially liked hearing about the different numbers from the surveys. The refresher on the different layers that need to be considered when rightsizing a workload is very welcome. I also found it interesting to use OPA in the context of Kubernetes resource requests, so far I have used it in the context of security. And the explanation on "dependabot for optimization" was also fascinating. (https://github.com/graz-dev/automatic-reosurce-optimization-loop)
• Unleashing the Tides of Kubernetes Networking by Removing kube-proxy
• Really good explanation on how packets flow in kube-proxy vs an eBPF-based solution. Networking is definitely not my strongest, but I like Cilium products and their talks are usually packed with some solid knowledge.
• How Chaos Engineering Works: Implementing Failure Injection on Kubernetes with Rust
• I only followed this talk with half an ear - I actually ended up looking into Litmus, and ways to do chaos engineering on APIs. But this talk had some good examples for chaos engineering on Kubernetes-level.
• Push the boundaries of Kubernetes multi tenancy with container runtimeclasses
• I have heard from friends that this is a topic of interest when migrating legacy workloads onto Kubernetes-based environments. The area is definitely a special case and not something that will speak to everyone. The concept is interesting, and the depth of levels of virtualization we can reach is impressive.
• Achieving Platform Engineering Multi-Tenancy with kcp and Crossplane
• Really good intro on using kcp with Crossplane for mult-tenancy. I was already familiar with the topic from work, so it was a good refresher of the concepts and the way things work.

The only complaint I have is that Room #2 had no proper sound separation from the break area and there was always this white noise during the talks. If I was a speaker this could've thrown me off - but as a listener it was only a minor inconvenience.

All in all, I enjoyed Rejekts this year as well. I think the organizers did a great job, and to me it did not feel different than the previous ones - it was well-organized, the schedule was good, the talks were informative and enjoyable, and the people were open, friendly and ready to discuss things.