Michael Forrester

Principal Training Architect

Accenture

Michael Forrester is a student, explorer, and educator working at the boundary between humanity and technology. Over 25+ years he's moved from CTO to individual contributor across operations, AI, machine learning, cloud infrastructure, and platform engineering, including time at AWS, ThoughtWorks, Red Hat, and Honeywell. Today he helps organizations adopt generative AI in ways that are sustainable, secure, and cost-effective, building on training programs that have reached over a million engineers across AWS, Kubernetes, and AI-driven operations. He speaks regularly at KubeCon and CNCF events and co-hosts podcasts on how AI is reshaping the engineering discipline. His work spans Claude Code and MCP integrations, AI safety frameworks for platform engineers, and courses ranging from AWS certifications to K8sGPT. His read on the 2020s: engineering is evolving, not disappearing. Systems thinking, design thinking, and architecture matter more than ever, even as the tools change. Tools don't transform organizations. People do.

Sessions (1)

Build a Platform, Unleash an Agent on it.... and Watch it Burn!

1:15 PM·Track 5 · Room 2005

You get a Kubernetes cluster with an Internal Developer Platform already running: ArgoCD for GitOps, Kyverno for admission control, Falco for runtime detection, Prometheus for observability. Everything is instrumented. Everything is enforced. You also get an AI agent with cluster access. Your job is to get the agent to break something. Deploy a non-compliant workload. Escalate privileges. Modify infrastructure outside Git. Exfiltrate data through an agent response. Some of you will fail because the governance stack catches it. Some of you will succeed because it doesn't. Afterward we regroup and map what got blocked, what slipped through, and why. The 80% that existing CNCF tools already govern becomes obvious. The 20% gap where agent-specific tooling is missing becomes undeniable. You leave with a concrete governance map and the exact list of failure modes your own platform probably isn't covering yet.

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