No Shame, Just Pain: How We Migrated Away From Kubernete... Jannis Relakis & Michael Seiwald-McCarty

This talk, presented by Jannis Relakis and Michael Seiwald-McCarty from Celonis, details their journey of migrating from Kubernetes 1.16 during 2025. It explores the challenges faced while managing over fifty clusters across multiple cloud providers, emphasizing the importance of addressing technical debt and aligning teams. The speakers discuss their approach to achieving a zero-downtime migration for hundreds of workloads, overcoming messy dependencies, and implementing an Envoy-based cross-cluster bridge dubbed "the wormhole." This session offers valuable insights into real-world challenges and solutions in cloud native computing, sharing lessons learned from a complex migration journey.