Workshop Intermediate Code samples: MIT License | Slides & documentation: CC BY-SA 4.0

Local Cloud: Build a Mini Kubernetes Cluster on Your Laptop Using Only FOSS

Approved

Session Description

Why rely on expensive cloud credits or centralized clusters? In this talk, we’ll demonstrate how to create a fully functional, cloud-like environment using only open-source tools, right on your laptop. We use k3d / kind, ArgoCD, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, NGINX ingress, and Keycloak to simulate a modern production-grade cluster.

This talk walks through cluster setup, GitOps deployment, monitoring, service mesh options, autoscaling, and debugging: all from a developer machine. Perfect for students, indie hackers, and engineers who want to experiment with cloud-native architectures without paying for AWS/GCP.

Key Takeaways

How to set up a Kubernetes cluster locally in minutes.
Automating deployments with ArgoCD (GitOps).
Adding monitoring, tracing, and ingress the FOSS way.
Local-first workflows that mirror production environments.
How to practice DevOps/SRE skills with zero cloud cost.

References

https://kubernetes.io/

https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Session Categories

Engineering practice - productivity, debugging

Community

Technology architecture

Talk License: Code samples: MIT License | Slides & documentation: CC BY-SA 4.0

Speakers

Sumukh Bhandarkar Sr Engineer | Target

Senior Software Engineer with extensive experience designing and building resilient, scalable backend systems. Skilled across Java, REST, GraphQL, microservices, event-driven architectures, containers, and distributed systems. Passionate about clean architecture, performance optimization, and solving real-world engineering challenges at scale.

A natural teacher with a strong desire to mentor, share knowledge, and contribute to the tech community through talks, workshops, and open-source collaboration.

At the end of the day?
Just yet another engineer, who loves what he does.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumukhbhandarkar