Johannesburg, 09 Dec 2025
Obsidian Systems has launched The Kernel, a new podcast series designed for the people building, securing, and scaling technology across Africa.
The series brings Obsidian’s engineers, partners, and leaders together with industry guests to explore the real conversations shaping enterprise IT that extend far beyond product talk.
The Kernel sets out to do something different: speak honestly about the challenges facing teams today, from burnout to brittle systems, from cloud confusion to AI hype, and from collaboration breakdowns to the realities of running infrastructure in Africa.
It gives listeners practical insight into open source, collaboration tools, cloud architecture, resilience, and the unpredictable, very human world of modern IT, using Obsidian Systems' favourite tools.
“The Kernel is about cutting through the noise,” says Muggie van Staden, CEO of Obsidian Systems. “Our industry is full of buzzwords, but the real work happens in the trenches.
"We want to bring those conversations to the surface through highlighting the lessons learned, the problems we’re all trying to solve, and the opportunities open source unlocks for Africa. This is a space for people who actually build things.”
A grounded start: Welcome to the Open Edge. Episode one opens with Obsidian leadership unpacking why open source matters right now in a world defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The team reflects on how the community has evolved, why the enterprise narrative has shifted, and what the African tech ecosystem needs from open source in 2025.
Other episodes in the first season include:
Rebooting the enterprise: Innovation, YAML, and the rise of automation. A conversation with Obsidian’s Karl Fischer and Bennie Kahler-Venter examines how organisations can innovate safely, deploy faster, and stay secure by using technologies such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift, and Ansible. The emphasis is not marketing but on value, honesty, and what works in practice.
DevOps collaboration that actually works. Nick Holdstock and Survaren Naidoo join Angela to explore why silos still exist, how visibility changes the way teams deliver, and what Atlassian tools like Jira, Confluence, JSM, Opsgenie, AI features, and Assets bring to the table. The discussion dives into the “why” behind collaboration, not just the tooling.
Cloud pragmatism for African realities. Karl Fischer and Deon Lottering discuss where cloud genuinely delivers, where hybrid wins, and what African teams must consider when balancing resilience, cost, performance, and infrastructure limitations.
Stories from the front lines. Sysadmins, engineers, and consultants share the moments where “everything broke”, what they learned, and why resilience is as much cultural as it is technical.
Africa’s tech edge. Guests unpack what makes African innovation unique, how open source drives entrepreneurship, and why the continent is not waiting for global trends to dictate its path.
Incidents, automation, and learning under fire. Expert responders break down real outages and show how monitoring, automation, and collaboration help teams recover faster.
A future built on open enterprise and AI. The season closes with a wide-open conversation about automation, AI (proprietary and open source), risk, strategy, and what the next five years could look like for African enterprises.
All episodes of The Kernel will be available on Podbean and on your favourite Podcast platform. Listeners are invited to subscribe, send questions, and participate in future discussions as Obsidian continues to bridge global open-source innovation with real-world African realities.
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