We sold out the August edition of the Regional Kubernetes & Cloud Native Berlin meetup: 45 seats, gone. Rick took the initiative to reboot the meetup, and Schwarz Digits opened its office on Karl-Liebknecht-Straße to us. The room was full from doors at 17:00 to the last conversation winding down around 21:00.
Two talks, one break, no filler. Here’s what happened.
From Von Neumann to Transformers
Dr. Stefan Schimanski (NVIDIA) and Sergiusz Urbaniak (Defense Unicorns) opened with “From Von Neumann to Transformers: An Engineer’s Guide to What’s Actually Inside an LLM.” The title mentions the IAS machine, but this was not a talk about hardware. It was a two-hour walkthrough of how LLMs actually work: tokenization, embeddings, attention, feed-forward layers, and how information flows through the model as a new kind of compute architecture.
A personal note: Sergiusz and I worked together in the CoreOS office back in the day. I miss being in that environment.
A Cluster API Provider with Agentic AI
After a break with plenty of food, Christoph Voigt took the stage with “Building a Kubernetes Cluster API Provider with Agentic AI: What Actually Changed?” He walked through what it takes to build a Cluster API provider and where agentic AI shifts the work: the boring scaffolding, the deep domain logic, and the parts where a model’s suggestions have to be verified against real cluster behavior.
Full House
Forty-five people, every seat accounted for. I’m glad people came out for the reboot, and there were familiar faces in the room, which made the evening feel like the old days.
Thanks and What’s Next
None of this happens without the people who put it together. Thanks to Rick for kicking off the reboot, to Stefan, Sergiusz, and Christoph for the talks, and to Schwarz Digits for hosting us.
We’re looking for companies to host the next edition (venue is the main thing we need). The Cloud Native Berlin group has 365 members now, and if August is any indication, the next one will fill up too. Join the group and we’ll see you there.