Now that Kubernetes has gained a reputation as the de facto standard for running applications in a scalable and secure way, organizations are struggling to decide where to get Kubernetes from and how to run it. Most take the seemingly easiest route and go to one of the hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, or Azure. This works for most companies, but it comes with additional costs and loss of control over their data. For this reason, we will show you how to build, run, and operate Kubernetes on your own hardware in your own data center without losing the performance and elegance your developers are used to from the hyperscalers. metal-stack.io is a fully open source Metal as a Service API that can be used either by gardener.cloud or our Cluster API driver to create clusters in minutes, but on bare metal. We believe that strengthening the independence of European industry is more necessary than ever. With metal-stack.io, which is developed in Germany, we hope to contribute to this goal. It was designed with the financial industry in mind, but is also well suited for any application that requires performance, high levels of tenant separation, best-in-class networking and high availability. It has been in production for over 5 years in many different data centers. There is also a public offering at metalstack.cloud where customers can try and see how Kubernetes feels when not running on VMs. We will give a deep dive into all aspects of this Open Source project. Relevant Open Source Projects we are talking about: - metal-stack website - metal-stack github repos - gardener kubernetes orchestration - kubernetes