A story to tell

As part of my career at ING with my previous team, MLP (Machine Learning Platform). I spent over 2 years leading the team through a journey to migrate the platform to Kubernetes. What started of as a mission against all the odds, followed by resistance, numerous pitfalls and no dedicated time to move to Kubernetes, through perseverance (among other things) resulted in a successful migration.

While I thought this was a great story to tell at KubeCon, aiming to potentially answer some of the questions I had through the process, as well to provide guidance to those in same or similar situation at their companies. Considering KubeCon talk proposal acceptance rate range of 11%, while I hoped for the best, I wasn’t putting a lot of expectation that my talk proposal would be accepted, and kept adding it as one of my ING’s “stretch ambitions” goals. Which in loose terms can be translated to as “something I’m working towards, but will probably never happen“.

But I went for it regardless, and hence why I was ecstatic when my talk proposal got accepted to both KCD (Kubernetes Community Days) Amsterdam 2023 and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam!

“Kubernetes, Resistance is Futile” talk video (update)

For all those who missed it but are interested in watching the talk on KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, video is available is available on CNCF Youtube channel

“Kubernetes, Resistance is Futile” talk description & slides

Talk description @sched.com:

This talk covers ING’s MLP (Machine Learning Platform) 2+ year migration journey to Kubernetes. ING being the biggest bank in the Netherlands and one of the biggest world banks entails we work in a highly regulated environment and are subjected to rigorous policies in terms of control with IT process lifecycle. Being a data scientist in one such environment, who would like to deploy pre-trained machine learning models to Production, without much or any underlying SRE/deployment knowledge complicates things. That’s where MLP (Machine Learning Platform) steps in, as it takes care of all the above mentioned problems by serving as a model hosting platform. As an SRE Adnan will cover problems and limitations of the existing platform setup in the VM (Virtual Machine) world and the inception of an idea to migrate to Kubernetes. Which steps it took to start the realization of one such idea and its migration plan. Followed by resistance, inability to choose the ideal target destination, platform’s growth and challenge in supporting the current setup in its growing capacity and ultimately leading to scalability issues. All these factors lead to a perfect storm, which led to the inevitable. Migration to Kubernetes and how that process came to be.

Talk slides (presentation):

Slides are available for download on following link: Kubernetes, Resistance is Futile.pdf

Invite to attend the talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

For in person attendees, talk will take place on first day of KubeCon:

If you want to talk to me on this or any other topic I will also be available at ING booth (S75):

  • Meet today’s ING Speakers, ask any remaining questions to Adnan, Diana or Thijs (Wed: 18:30 – 19:30)
  • Meet the ING Speaker: “Kubernetes, Resistance is Futile” Adnan Hodzic (Thu: 15:30 – 16:30)

However, considering in-person tickets are already sold out, I hope you’ll have a chance to attend the talk virtually!

Hope to see you there!