2025-03-30 –, The Nash
Kubernetes has become the backbone of distributed systems, but running low-latency, high-throughput workloads on it requires careful tuning and a deep understanding of its features. In this session, Frederic Branczyk (Polar Signals) and Jimmy Zelinskie (Authzed) bring years of experience contributing to Kubernetes and operating it at scale to explore the challenges and solutions for latency-sensitive applications.
We’ll dive into practical strategies, including Kubernetes 1.31 traffic distribution, optimal pod placement and QoS tuning, node-local optimizations, and debugging performance bottlenecks in real-world clusters. This talk is ideal for anyone looking to harness Kubernetes' full potential for high-performance workloads.
Jimmy Zelinskie is a software engineer and product leader with the goal of empowering the world through the democratization of software through open source development. He's currently the CPO and cofounder of authzed where he's focused on bringing hyperscaler best-practices in authorization software to the industry at large.
At CoreOS, he helped pioneer the cloud-native ecosystem by starting and contributing to many of its foundational open source projects. After being acquired by Red Hat, his focus shifted to the enablement and adoption of cloud-native technologies by mature enterprise stakeholders. To this day, he still contributes to cloud-native ecosystem by building the future on top of these technologies and maintaining standards such as Open Container Initiative (OCI).
Frederic is the founder of Polar Signals. Before founding Polar Signals he was a senior principal engineer and main architect for all things Observability at Red Hat, joining through the CoreOS acquisition. Frederic is a Prometheus & Thanos maintainer and tenured as a tech lead for SIG instrumentation in Kubernetes for 4 years. In his previous life, he was a security researcher and when not working on software Frederic enjoys obsessing over brewing a perfect cup of coffee.