We đź’ś KCD Helsinki

Posted on 15.5.2025

Last week we attended Helsinki’s first Kubernetes Community Day – one of a global series of locally-defined events that help grow and sustain Kubernetes and other Cloud Native communities.

When capacity had to be increased from 200 to more than 300 attendees due to overwhelming demand, we knew Helsinki’s inaugural KCD was going to be phenomenal. 

TL;DR KCD Helsinki was an absolute hit, and we can’t wait for the next one. 

Here’s some of our highlights from the day:

Our favourite talks

  • Juho Syrjänen and Svitlana Chaplinska gave a great talk, Secure by Design: Golden Paths for Internal Developer Platforms , about how Metacore integrated security practices into their internal developer platform. Most importantly, how security is not a single team’s responsibility but everyones input is needed.
  • Jakub Ciolek’s talk Fuzzing for Stability: Uncovering and Mitigating Helm’s CVE , gave a glimpse into fuzzing and how you can utilize it with the Go standard library. Alongside practical example through a Helm package manager CVE, which Jakub found and reported, the Q&A covered things like why should you fuzz if you already have unit tests. A good reminder to start fuzzing your convoluted input parsers!
  • Esko Vähämäki’s talk, Building and Scaling LLM Inference on Kubernetes with NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, was an insightful overview of the inference stack components, the challenges of scaling and observability it introduces, and some possible solutions.

Private Cloud is growing

There’s definitely a growing momentum around migrating workloads to private cloud (at least, that’s what the majority of our conversations were about). With heightened geopolitical dynamics and renewed scrutiny around the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, more and more organizations are interested in the comparisons between European Cloud Service Providers and what features and benefits are on offer. If you want to know more about UpCloud’s private cloud, have a look at our private cloud features. Or if you’re still deciding what setup is right for you. We’ve compiled a handy Public Vs Private Vs Hybrid Cloud guide. 

Community is everything

There’s a saying in cloud native: “After the age of 30, you make friends through Kubernetes.” So it was wonderful to catch up, in person, with so many old friends and to finally put faces to GitHub handles.

Woohoo Open Source 🎉

We’re passionate open source enthusiasts at UpCloud and sponsoring KCD Helsinki is one way that we support the cloud native community and continue growing the open source ecosystem. 

If you’re interested in joining us at events like KCD Helsinki and working on cloud native projects, check out our open roles. Or if you’d like to know where to meet the team next, have a look at our upcoming events

Finland icons created by Smashicons – Flaticon

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