Jasjit Singh and Kanika Nayyar
When virtualization licensing costs increased tenfold, a large retail organization rethought how it ran infrastructure across 1,400 edge locations. This session shares how existing store hardware was transformed from a VMWare-based setup into a fully open-source, Kubernetes-powered platform — without adding new hardware or disrupting business operations. Learn how ESXi was replaced with Kubernetes clusters were centrally managed using GitOps with FluxCD, and open-source tools like Dex, Helm, Grafana, and KubeVirt were used to deploy and observe workloads at scale. The talk focuses on practical SRE lessons around automation, resilience at the edge, and cost-efficient modernization that attendees can apply to their own distributed environments.
Jasjit Singh is a Technical Program Manager at Loblaw with over 18 years of experience delivering enterprise-scale solutions across large, distributed environments. His expertise spans monitoring, observability, and Site Reliability Engineering, with a strong focus on building resilient and scalable platforms.
As a Team Lead in Site Reliability Engineering at Loblaw Companies Limited, I specialize in building and scaling resilient, high-performing systems that power critical retail and digital experiences at enterprise scale. With a strong foundation in cloud infrastructure, automation, and observability, I lead cross-functional teams focused on improving system reliability, reducing operational toil, and enabling rapid, confident deployments.
My work sits at the intersection of engineering and operations, where I drive initiatives around incident management, service level objectives (SLOs), and infrastructure as code to ensure consistent, measurable reliability. I hold a Master of Science in Advanced Computing from the University of Nottingham, which shapes my approach to solving complex engineering challenges.
At this SREcon26 event in Seattle, I’m excited to share insights from operating large-scale systems in the retail sector, discuss practical approaches to reliability engineering, and connect with peers who are shaping the future of SRE.
author = {Jasjit Singh and Kanika Nayyar},
title = {From {ESXi} to Kubernetes: Modernizing 1,400 Edge Locations with Open Source},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
