Cleaned Transcript

Bart Farrell: In this episode of The Landscape, I got a chance to speak with Orlin Vasilev, who is doing amazing cloud-native work in Bulgaria. Orlin is a CNCF Ambassador, very active in the Harbor project, and organizes events in his hometown of Sofia, Bulgaria—including an upcoming KCD event. I hope I get the chance to check it out!

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Now, let’s check out the episode with Orlin.

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Orlin Vasilev: My name is Orlin Vasilev. I’m a CNCF Ambassador and I work at SUSE, specifically in the Rancher engineering group. My official title is Principal Open Source Technology Advocate.

Bart: Very good! Now, what’s your area of focus as a CNCF Ambassador?

Orlin: As a CNCF Ambassador, I focus on the local community in Bulgaria. We’re organizing a KCD (Kubernetes Community Days) in Sofia next year, on September 18th. We’re expecting around 500 attendees. Right now, we’re looking for sponsors and speakers.

Bart: Which three CNCF projects are you most excited about?

Orlin: Harbor, of course! I’m very involved in that project. I’ve also recently been working with K8s Gateway API—it’s an amazing project. I even released a KCD networking course about it recently, so check that out. Lastly, I’m really interested in observability, especially OpenTelemetry. I love how it enables us to collect business-relevant data about applications, beyond just monitoring their technical performance.

Bart: Observability is a hot topic. What excites you the most about it?

Orlin: Observability is more than monitoring; it’s about understanding if your applications are delivering business value. For example, is your app serving the right resources on time? Latency metrics and business-focused telemetry are key. I’m fascinated by how OpenTelemetry lets us focus on these aspects.

Bart: Speaking of Harbor, our very first episode featured your good friend Vadim, who explained Harbor in great detail. From a business perspective, what value does Harbor bring to end users?

Orlin: Harbor gives users full control over their container registries, from building to pushing, scanning, and generating SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials). It’s especially beneficial for enterprises that need to deploy registries on-premises rather than in the cloud. Harbor also simplifies distributing container images across multiple regions, which is crucial for large-scale deployments.

Bart: Are you seeing AI making its way into the cloud-native ecosystem, or is it still early days?

Orlin: AI is definitely stepping in, especially in areas like developer experience and advocacy. Many people use AI to create content, and I use it to help lay out the basics before refining things myself. However, I feel people rely too heavily on AI, which sometimes takes away creativity and individuality. That’s just my personal opinion, though.

Bart: Are you giving any talks at KubeCon, or are there sessions you’re excited to attend?

Orlin: Yes, I’ll be giving a lightning talk about SBOMs and how Harbor can help with generating and managing them. I’m also co-presenting with Tim, one of my co-maintainers on the Harbor project, during the Harbor maintainer track.

Bart: If people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?

Orlin: I’m on Slack all day, so that’s the best way to reach me. I’m also on Twitter (X) and other platforms, but Slack is where I’m most active.

Bart: Great! Thank you very much, Orlin.

Orlin: Thank you! Cheers!