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.

Reviews

I'm not sure all of this can be covered within the time constraints imposed by this format.

Reviewer #1 Not Sure