Mauro Morales
Mauro Morales is a Guatemalan software developer and speaker. He’s currently a Staff Engineer at Spectro Cloud, where he’s part of the team building Kairos — an open-source Linux distribution for running Kubernetes at the edge. Mauro regularly speaks at conferences like KubeCon, FOSDEM, and the Open Source Summit, and co-hosts the Cloud Native Community Belgium.
Sessions
Abstract
Immutability at the OS level is gaining traction as a way to simplify, secure, and scale Kubernetes operations — without the fragility of hand-crafted node configurations or the false sense of control offered by traditional configuration management systems, which often still result in drift and snowflakes. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to build Kubernetes clusters that are easier to deploy, upgrade, and recover — and do it all step-by-step, without needing to become an OS expert.
You’ll learn how to:
- Understand what an immutable OS is and why it matters
- Deploy Kubernetes on top of an immutable system
- Add and manage read-only worker nodes
- Upgrade nodes manually or via Kubernetes-native workflows
- Create your own tailored, immutable OS image
- Integrating OS builds into your CI/CD pipelines
If time allows, we’ll also explore:
- Air-gapped and hybrid-cloud deployments
- PXE/netboot cluster bootstrapping
- Trusted Boot with TPM/UEFI
- High-availability setups on immutable infrastructure
- Raspberry Pi and edge use cases with mesh networking
All examples will be built using Kairos, an open-source Linux toolkit designed to make immutability practical and flexible — but the patterns you’ll learn are applicable beyond any single tool.
Audience
This workshop is designed for platform engineers, SREs, and solution architects who need more flexibility than fully managed Kubernetes solutions typically allow — but who also want to avoid taking on the burden of maintaining yet another complex system. If you’re comfortable with Linux, familiar with Kubernetes basics, and can spin up a VM or cloud instance, you’ll leave with real-world skills you can apply immediately.
How do you take the best of cloud-native beyond the data center, to empower farmers in the field?
Aurea Imaging powers precision agriculture by running AI inference directly on devices mounted on tractors. Using onboard sensors, cameras, and GPUs, these devices analyze trees in real time to optimize spraying and reduce waste. But getting cloud-native workloads to run reliably on the far edge, in environments that are often air-gapped, disconnected, and physically demanding, requires more than just containerizing code.
Together with the CNCF Sandbox project Kairos, Aurea Imaging built a production platform where devices boot from container images: an immutable, reproducible system running K3s and managing its lifecycle “as code.” This approach replaces traditional embedded provisioning with declarative configuration, image-based deployment, and seamless OTA updates, bringing the power of cloud-native and AI beyond the data center.