Blood, Sweat & Kubernetes at LaraFest
I brought the Blood, Sweat & Kubernetes talk to LaraFest in the Netherlands. A proper conference stage, a packed room, and the Dutch Laravel community asking hard questions about how Laravel Cloud actually works.
The "Blood, Sweat & Kubernetes" tour continued. After Copenhagen in January and Aarhus in April, I took the talk to LaraFest in the Netherlands. This was the first time I gave it at a proper conference rather than a meetup.
A different stage
Meetups are intimate. You know the room, you can read individual faces, and the questions come naturally over beer afterwards. A conference is different. Bigger room, more people, a stage with proper AV. The talk is the same, but the energy changes. You get one shot before they move on to the next talk.
The Dutch Laravel community showed up prepared. The questions were specific and technical: how do we handle pod scheduling for PHP-FPM, what happens to long-running queue jobs during a deployment, how do we manage database connections across regions. These are the questions that tell you the audience actually builds things in production.
The talk
The content is the same story I've been telling at every stop: how Laravel Cloud uses Kubernetes under the hood, what breaks when you run PHP workloads in containers at scale, and what we built to solve it. No slides full of marketing diagrams. Real architecture, real problems, real solutions.
Each time I give this talk, the questions push me to sharpen different parts. The Dutch audience pushed on networking and multi-region failover. Copenhagen pushed on scaling decisions. Aarhus pushed on observability. Budapest would later push on container orchestration details. Every stop makes the talk better.
Netherlands
LaraFest is well run. Good conversations over lunch, and a hallway track that rivaled the main stage.