Escape Plan - How We Survived Without EKS and Learned To Love Air-Gapped

Learn how to migrate a production SaaS platform from Amazon EKS to a fully air-gapped Kubernetes environment in this 21-minute conference talk. Discover the challenges and solutions involved in replacing managed cloud services with open source, cloud-native alternatives when running Kubernetes in restricted environments. Explore the complete overhaul required for identity management, observability, networking, secrets management, and storage systems when moving away from AWS dependencies. Gain insights into maintaining developer experience while building more secure, resilient, and portable platforms. Understand the practical lessons learned from rebuilding key platform functions using tools that work in disconnected environments. Examine the wins, regrets, and surprises encountered during this migration process, with honest takeaways about designing systems for freedom rather than vendor lock-in. Perfect for those building platforms for regulated, restricted, or air-gapped environments, or anyone interested in reducing cloud provider dependencies.