Kyverno is a Kubernetes-native policy engine that manages the complete resource lifecycle without requiring a new language or complex learning curve. In this hands-on session, Cortney Nickerson, Head of Community at Nirmata (creators of Kyverno) and Linkerd Evangelist Flynn will explore how Kyverno can strengthen and automate Linkerd deployments to give platform teams peace of mind that application developers aren’t accidentally breaking the mesh.
We’ll start with a Kyverno 101 primer—what it is, how it works, and why it’s a natural fit alongside Linkerd. From there, we’ll dive into real-world service mesh use cases: Are all workloads for an application actually meshed? Has anyone been tampering with mesh authorization policies? Have the mesh’s certificates been altered? Are signed artifacts still valid through image verification?
By the end, you’ll see how Kyverno policies can proactively detect and prevent misconfigurations that would otherwise erode service mesh security and reliability—ensuring your platform stays consistent, compliant, and resilient.
This is a hands-on workshop, so it's important that you arrive prepared with a Kubernetes cluster (pretty much any kind will do!) and the Linkerd CLI installed on your machine! We'll use BEL 2.18, but edge releases starting with edge-25.4.4. will work just fine, too. Check out the BEL Getting Started Guide for specific instructions on how to set that up. (If you don't want to do the hands-on portion, you are welcome to just listen in. But it won't be as fun!)
Cortney Nickerson
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Head of Community, Nirmata
A dynamic leader with a knack for turning complex challenges into meaningful successes, Cortney Nickerson is the Head of Community at Nirmata and a CNCF Ambassador. She thrives in fast-paced startup environments that demand strategic thinking, hands-on problem-solving, and a touch of fun. Her career is defined by a consistent ability to break down problems and guide teams toward their goals, driven by a strong belief in the power of teamwork and mutual support.
Flynn
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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.
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