Psst. Coming to KubeCon? I organize an IRL meetup in my Discord Server #conference channel.
My AI Agenda at KubeCon
My plan: When not catching up with friends, recording podcasts, or fulfilling sponsorship duties, I'll probably be searching for insights, patterns, and stories around implementing Agentic DevOps. I expect this conference, especially in late 2025, to start taking a hard turn into AI-for-building-platforms and automation-with-AI, which was all but missing from KubeCon London in April 2025 (it was a bit early in the agentic AI wave, especially since talks are submitted 6 months prior).
But first, I've got a job to do. Turns out the "job" this time is to be a game show host...
The fun part: What do open source vulnerabilities have to do with a 50-year-running game show?
When you build your apps and prepare them for deployment, there's a moment where you (hopefully) scan the container image to see if any new CVEs crept in. Or maybe you're rebuilding in hopes of removing a CVE by updating a dependency. It's a game of whack-a-mole, and it sometimes feels like you're rolling the dice and hoping you build with no high or critical CVEs found... which led me to an idea of a (hopefully) fun game to play at KubeCon:
I recently talked about that with Eric Smalling of Chainguard in a live event, and we showed off examples of CI automation to update your images as soon as upstream vulnerabilities are patched or base images are rebuilt.
Chainguard has been a great sponsor lately, and I've been promoting their hardened images ever since I first tried them years ago, so it was a quick yes when they asked:
"What could we do at KubeCon with Bret around the topic of image security..."
NOTE: I heard this as...
"How could Bret get paid to have fun and be silly, while people learn something..."
I'm always looking to make content/events I do fun, and I knew the Chainguard team would give me the freedom to do something different. I wouldn't say I do "stunts" per se, as I want people to get real value out of what I create while also not putting them to sleep.
So we set out to create an image-security related gameshow for KubeCon
The inspiration: Did you see the Kubernetes-themed Family Feud during the keynotes at KubeCon Salt Lake City? OMG, it was one of my favorite all-time keynote moments. I wasn't involved, but I was sitting up front, so I got to enjoy the sillyness unfold before 10,000 people. It was peak cloud native nerd-dom, and I left wanting more.
At some point, we thought up other great, timeless game shows that we could tie in with Chainguard's hardened images theme, and I realized that there was one that might be perfect.
Did you ever watch the game show The Price is Right? There are versions of it in the UK, France, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Spain. Well, what if we played a variant of the idea where we guessed CVE counts of popular open source images rather than the cost of consumer goods? Then, what if we had a bunch of prices, sound effects, costumes, and the full Price is Right experience, right in the Chainguard booth?
Your wait is over. During KubeCon Day 1 KubeCrawl, we'll be playing The CVE Price is Right
I've worked with a team of wonderful people for weeks, creating a game app, scanning a bunch of open source images for CVEs, picking prizes, and literally practicing the game flow in our living room with theme music and sound effects galore. I hope to see you there!