AI Inference in the Real World: From Kubernetes to the Far Edge
Tue, 27 Oct 2026, 17:00
AWS Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Registration on meetup.com
Originally organized by AI Native Netherlands. AI workloads don’t all belong on the same model, hardware, or infrastructure. For our 13th AI Native Netherlands meetup, Christian Melendez from [AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/) will look at when smaller models and CPUs make more sense than defaulting to large GPU-backed LLMs. William Rizzo from Mirantis will take that question to the far edge: running LLM inference on immutable, disconnected clusters where connectivity is unreliable and remote access can’t be assumed. Together, the talks explore one practical question: What should run where, on what hardware, and how do you keep it reliable in production? A huge thank you to our friends at AWS for hosting us at their Amsterdam office. Food and drinks will be provided! We'll cover: When AI workloads actually need GPUs — and when CPUs and smaller models are the better fit. How to combine Small Language Models and larger LLMs without sending every task to the most expensive model. What changes when inference moves from the datacenter to factories, vehicles, retail sites, and other edge environments. How immutable, image-based infrastructure can support updates, rollbacks, and reliability across disconnected fleets. The real-world trade-offs, failure modes, and production lessons behind both approaches. Speaker 1: [Christian Melendez (AWS)](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianmldz/)[ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianmldz/) Christian Melendez is a Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He helps the region's largest enterprises build efficient, resilient AI and cloud-native workloads on Kubernetes, with a focus on compute efficiency, cost optimisation, and autoscaling at scale. Author of Kubernetes Autoscaling and creator of Karpenter Blueprints, a best-practices repository that grew Karpenter adoption 16.5x across EMEA, he also built Slemify, an open-source framework for fine-tuning and serving Small Language Models on Kubernetes. A regular speaker at AWS re:Invent, KCDs / CNDs, ContainerDays, and others, Christian focuses on making infrastructure simple, observable, and cost-effective at scale. Talk: The Right Tool for the Right Token: When to Reach for a CPU or a GPU … Venue: AWS Amsterdam, Mr.Treublaan 7, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Registration is handled by the original organizer. Original event and organizer: https://www.meetup.com/ai-native-amsterdam/events/315395408/