CNCF Belgian Meetup Leuven Edition

📅 September 18, 2025
📍 Tiensestraat 111, 3000 Leuven, Belgium (ITQ Office)
🎟️ ⚡ Only 10 seats left — RSVP now!

After a well-deserved summer break, we’re thrilled to bring the Cloud Native community back together for another CNCF Belgian Meetup—this time in the beautiful city of Leuven, hosted at the ITQ.

Join us for an evening of inspiring talks, great conversations, delicious food and drinks—and most importantly, amazing people to connect with.

🎤 “But Can It Run Doom? An App-Centric Approach to a Kubernetes Platform”

A successful Kubernetes platform begins and ends with the application running on top of it. In this fun and insightful session, Michaël van de Gaer and Jan Ebrard will share real-life customer stories and lessons learned about designing platforms that actually serve developer needs—and yes, they’ll also show you what 1993’s most iconic FPS has to do with modern infrastructure.

About the speakers

🔹 Michaël van de Gaer: Michaël is a Cloud Native Consultant with a strong focus on helping organizations adopt Kubernetes and its broader ecosystem. He specializes in on-premises environments, guiding teams through the full journey—from setting up Kubernetes runtimes to implementing developer pipelines and integrating Continuous Delivery practices. With a keen interest in bridging the gap between infrastructure and development, Michaël empowers teams to deliver faster and more reliably. Outside of his professional role, he enjoys working on home automation projects and spending time outdoors with his family.

🔹 Jan Ebrard: Jan’s passion for technology began in the nineties, experimenting with bootdisks and editing config.sys files to run DOS games. Today, he thrives on bridging the gap between people and technology—be it between IT managers and users, developers and platform owners, or business needs and technical solutions. He finds energy in solving complex challenges in a rapidly evolving IT landscape. The main goal: real-world impact through technology that serves both people and purpose.eteran since the DOS days, Jan specializes in translating technical complexity into business value and making tech work for people.

🎤 Talk "I Bet You’re Not Managing Your Kubernetes Nodes Well"

In his talk, JP will demystify the usual gotchas he met while managing his own k8s clusters' nodes. Everyone who thinks they are managing their nodes correctly (presenter included) or believes node management cannot be improved will have some food for thought.

About the speaker

🔹 Jean-Philippe Evrard: JP is an engineer, designer of solutions, and a problem solver. Excelling in research, he is focused on helping the decision-making or strategy in companies. You can see him as a problem fixer, whether it’s organisational or technical. He can help enterprise architecture in a deeply practical way (without the fancy buzzwords). He is (and has been) leader in multiple Open Source projects, and have a strong experience in Open Source strategy for companies. JP is also one of the co-hosts at Cloud Native Community Belgium.

⸻

✅ CNCF Code of Conduct

We are committed to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all attendees. This event follows the CNCF Code of Conduct.

⸻

🔗 Reserve Your Spot Now

⚡ Only 10 seats remain!

If you’ve already RSVP’d but can’t make it, please update your response. This helps us reduce food waste and gives your spot to someone else who wants to join.

Let’s keep growing the Cloud Native community in Belgium, one great meetup at a time.