Free Tokens for Everyone

Thursday, November 19, 2026

9 am PT | 12 pm ET | 6 pm CET

Open-weight models are rapidly approaching (and in some cases even eclipsing) the quality of frontier models. And running them on Kubernetes is easier than you think. In this demo, Sarah and Flynn will showcase Buoyant's latest open source project and how it can help you build a cost-efficient, SLO-focused LLM deployment as part of your Kubernetes platform using open-weight models and commonly available cloud hardware, all without breaking a sweat. They’ll cover metrics to monitor, inference types, the benefits of KV cache-aware routing, and how to evaluate the economics of your LLM deployment— and make your CFO happy.

What to expect

Runbook LIVE is where Buoyant talks with project maintainers, engineers running open source in production, or shows off new feature demos. Every month, depending on what's worth talking about, we host a fireside chat with a guest, a live demo, an AMA, or a war story from someone's real incident. There are no slides or fixed curriculum. It's a 30-minute live conversation, and you help shape it: drop in questions, vote in polls, and steer where the discussion goes. Whatever we cover, you'll walk away with something you can actually use, not just something you sat through.

Speakers

Sarah Christoff

Tech Evangelist

Sarah is a tech evangelist at Buoyant who loves making complex concepts more digestible. She is the self-proclaimed founder of the Leslie Lamport fan club. When she's not writing or streaming, she is running her animal rescue and competing in triathlons. She believes code should be like cats: intelligent, fluffy, and easy to take care of.

Flynn

Linkerd Evangelist, Buoyant

Flynn is a tech evangelist at Buoyant, where he works on spreading the good word about Linkerd — the graduated CNCF service mesh that makes the fundamental tools for software security and reliability freely available to every engineer — and about Kubernetes and cloud-native development in general. Flynn is also the original author and a maintainer of the Emissary-ingress API gateway, also a CNCF project. Flynn's career in computing spans nearly forty years and runs the gamut from bringup on bare metal to distributed applications, with a common thread of communications and security throughout. He has spoken about Linkerd, Emissary-ingress, and other cloud native technologies at several conferences, including KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, DevOps Days, and the NYC Kubernetes meetup.