Cloud Native London December 2025: stack8s, Cockroach Labs, and Polysemantic
Three speakers from stack8s, Cockroach Labs, and Polysemantic joined us at the December Cloud Native London meetup at Palo Alto Networks, as well as via the YouTube/Twitch livestreams.
We are immensely grateful to Testkube, TechShack, and stack8s for their generous support and sponsorship.
Overview
Kicking off our evening was Dr Jeremy Murray from stack8s talking about Decoupling from the Hyperscalers: A Kubernetes-Based Sovereign AI & Compute Platform(starting at 11:09). He discussed how to:
- Learn how Kubernetes can serve as the foundation for a fully sovereign compute and AI platform - giving organizations complete control over their infrastructure, data locality, and compliance
- Discover design patterns and open source tooling that enable true hybrid and multi-cloud operations - avoiding vendor lock-in while maintaining scalability, security, and performance
- Discover design patterns and open source tooling that enable true hybrid and multi-cloud operations - avoiding vendor lock-in while maintaining scalability, security, and performance
Following this, we had Rob Reid from Cockroach Labs explaining From Chaos to Confidence: How I Learned to Love - And Laugh in the Face Of - Chaos(starting at 50:07). His takeaways were that:
- Databases are just software and they shouldn’t be babied
- True resilience isn’t about avoiding failure, it’s about embracing it until it’s boring
- Legacy systems don’t protect modern workloads
And wrapping up our evening was Radu Sora from Polysemantic exploring Checking Out of Hotel California: The Case for Spark on Kubernetes(starting at 1:33:09). He stated that:
- You’re paying a premium for a solved problem: At scale, Databricks charges a “7-figure” premium for infrastructure orchestration, a problem the CNCF ecosystem has already solved. You can achieve massive cost savings (often over 50%) by switching to an open-source stack
- The “It’s Too Hard” myth is dead: The fear of managing Kubernetes is outdated. A modern, open-source stack (EKS + Spark Operator + Karpenter + Argo Workflows) provides a manageable, declarative, and often more flexible platform than you get from a vendor, without the black-box complexity
- The biggest win isn’t cost, it’s culture: Moving off a “magic” platform forces engineers to re-engage with performance, efficiency, and cost. This “escape” from vendor lock-in fosters a stronger, more inquisitive engineering culture that understands its tools and owns its stack.
And of course, our usual group photo!
Cloud Native London January
Our next meetup will be on Wednesday 7th January, when we’ll be joined by speakers from Flagsmith, Testkube, and Nirmata! RSVP and save the date now!.
Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you in a month!
Cheryl (@oicheryl)
Popular
