Posted on September 22, 2026 by Shreyas Mocherl, CNCF Kubestronaut and Software Engineer at Nirmata There is something surreal about your first KubeCon being one where you walk onto the stage as a speaker. Most people ease into this community by attending a few conferences, lurking in hallway tracks, and working up the courage to submit a CFP. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026 in Mumbai was my very first KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event, and I experienced it from both sides of the podium.

I co-presented "Run Your Own AI Cluster on a DGX Spark: Kubernetes, GPUs, and DRA" with my co-speaker, who is also my dad, Janakiram MSV . Presenting alongside him made this special on a level that goes beyond the conference itself. I grew up watching him speak at technology events. Standing next to him at the same podium, in front of the KubeCon audience, felt like a full-circle moment. The talk itself covered how we turned NVIDIA's DGX Spark into a self-hosted AI cluster.

We walked through building a Kubernetes cluster on the hardware, exposing GPUs to workloads, and using Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) to schedule them properly, ending with serving models on infrastructure you fully own and control. If you missed it, the recording is up on YouTube: Run Your Own AI Cluster on a DGX Spark Speaking at a conference of this scale for the first time taught me a few things quickly. And no amount of preparation fully prepares you for looking out at a hall that size.

But once we got going, the nerves faded, and it just became a conversation about technology we genuinely love working with. Somewhere between the sessions and the hallway conversations, I picked up two small pins: the blue Kubestronaut pin and its golden counterpart. The Golden Kubestronaut title means completing every CNCF certification there is. For me, that was less a trophy hunt and more a long, unglamorous grind of labs, practice environments, and a lot of weekends. I started it because I wanted my fundamentals to be real, not resume-deep. As it happens, I am the youngest person in India to complete it.