#130 What If You Never Had to Patch CVEs Again?

In this episode, Ronald and Jan are joined by Hannah Hawken, partner sales at Chainguard,  who brings a fresh perspective on something every Kubernetes team struggles with: security.

What starts as a conversation about career paths quickly turns into a deeper discussion about how we’ve been approaching security all wrong for years. Coming from a background in development and later moving into security, she reflects on what it feels like to build software without truly understanding the risks—and why so many teams are still in that exact position today.

Instead of reacting to vulnerabilities after they appear, the conversation explores a different mindset. One where security isn’t something you bolt on later, but something you start with. Not “shift left”… but start left.

From there, the discussion moves into the reality many teams face: thousands of CVEs, endless patching cycles, and security teams constantly playing catch-up. What if that entire model could be flipped? What if the software you build on is already secure by design?

That idea opens the door to a broader conversation about trust in open source, the hidden complexity of dependencies, and the trade-offs between speed and security. Along the way, Ronald and Jan challenge what this means in practice. How do you actually adopt a different approach? What changes for developers? And where does this fit in real-world environments?

The episode also touches on the future. Not just of Kubernetes, but of the infrastructure powering AI and modern applications. Because if workloads are becoming more complex and critical, the foundation they run on needs to evolve as well.

By the end, one thing becomes clear:
security isn’t just a step in the process anymore… it’s becoming the starting point

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