The Cloud Native Belgium meetup

Why this conversation

Every cloud native community runs on a few people’s spare time. Pieter Lewyllie is a Solutions Architect at Red Hat and one of the people behind Cloud Native Belgium. The host recorded with him on 30 October 2026 at the community booth of Dutch Cloud Native Day, at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht.

From Docker meetups to Cloud Native Belgium

He has been around since the Docker days, when a few containers ran on a laptop, and he joined the Docker meetups to learn more. A few years ago somebody at Microsoft who is also in the community reached out, and he said yes. At the time he worked for Cisco on the networking side, in the depths of VXLAN, and “these two worlds kind of collide in the data center”. “I really always loved community, learning from people, meeting people.”

IPv6, from one community to another

Before this one he ran a separate community, the IPv6 Council in Belgium, a completely different world. That day he saw an Isovalent talk promoting IPv6 within Kubernetes: “I think it makes a lot of sense, so I give them props to try and push this.” He sees everyday struggles with it in the Kubernetes community, and it is great, he said, to see the two worlds coming together.

Once a quarter

As he put it, “we are the Cloud Native Belgium group on meetup.com”, and anyone can join there and reach out: “Actually, we are always looking for speakers as well.” “We try to do it once a quarter”, because “It takes, you know, energy and time and on top of our day jobs, of course, to do this kind of thing.” In Belgium they have had “between 50 and I think our max was around 120 people”, and Dutch Cloud Native Day inspired him to involve more people and look a little bigger.

Next: Ghent, 26 November

The next meetup is on 26 November, hosted by Aikido in Ghent, and it will be “a mix of security and networking”. AI brings all the security issues to light, he said, and on the networking side he had seen a little issue in a TCP implementation that same day: “it’s going crazy fast”.

When it comes out

The episode is edited and in the release order. Like every episode it goes out on YouTube first, then on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.