The Safety Net: A Network Engineer’s First 90 Days as a Kubernetes Backup

This talk is for the infrastructure engineer who feels like a novice in the K8s world. I’ll share my "Zero to Backup" roadmap. What happens to an on-prem Rancher cluster when the lead engineer is offline? In many teams, the "Bus Factor" is dangerously low. As a network engineer, I was tasked with becoming the official backup for our Kubernetes infrastructure in just three months.

This talk is a "from the trenches" report on that transition. I’ll share the mental mapping I used to translate my knowledge of VLANs and Firewalls into Kubernetes primitives, the specific dashboards I rely on to verify cluster health, and the "Minimum Viable Knowledge" needed to stabilize a system during an incident. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for cross-training traditional infrastructure teams to support and protect cloud-native environments.