Plural x Kubernetes September Meetup, with speakers Neil Carpenter (Rethinking container security) & Zlatko Lakisic (AI agents as k8s jobs)

Our first guest speaker is Neil Carpenter, Field CTO at large. He will be exploring the question: What if we just stopped patching our container images?

Session Abstract: The security team wants to shift left, which sounds a lot like moving additional work into your day. In this presentation, Neil will dive into what security teams are actually hoping to accomplish, address why initial implementations tend to cause more pain and worse outcomes, and sketch out strategies for fixing that.

Speaker Bio: Neil helps organizations identify and contain security risks in their cloud estates. His passion for getting ahead of security problems comes from over a decade of leading customer-facing security incident response teams at Microsoft and seeing what happens when attackers win. Neil also helped build the future of cloud-native security at Twistlock, StackRox, Torq, Orca Security, and Minimus. When he's not in front of a computer, Neil is an avid NYC-based street photographer.

Our second speaker is Zlatko Lakisic, Senior Architect, Emerging Technology & AI, at New York Power Authority. He will be demo-ing running AI agents as Kubernetes jobs.

Session Abstract: Agentic Orchestration is an open source engine I built that turns a goal into a plan and runs each step as an agent. On Kubernetes, every step runs as a Job in its own pod, and the coordinator only plans and dispatches. I run it on a single node k3s cluster at the edge, and we will cover what pod per step actually costs. For the demo, I will connect voice assistant COMSTAR which has its own agents and tools. The infrastructure is created when it connects and we will watch the jobs appear and finish in kubectl. Voice in, pods out.

Schedule:


6:00pm - door opens


6:30pm - intros (please arrive by this time!)


6:40pm - speaker programming


7:20pm - networking 


8:00pm - event ends

We will have food and drinks during this event. Please arrive no later than 6:30pm so we can get started promptly. Invites are non-transferable.

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About the host: Plural manages the entire software development lifecycle for Kubernetes and and delivers AI-native Kubernetes management at enterprise scale. Bring AI into day-2 operations, automate complex upgrades, and manage Kubernetes fleets across any cloud, data center, or edge all fully under your control. Learn more at https://www.plural.sh/