KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025#

Monday, November 10, 2025#

Total Sessions: 85

Badge Pick-Up #

Time: 7:00am EST - 5:00pm EST

Venue: Building B | Level 4 | Registration Hall B, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: REGISTRATION

Coat + Bag Check #

Time: 7:00am EST - 7:00pm EST

Venue: Building A | Level 4 | A412, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: REGISTRATION

Description: Please note we are unable to store any items overnight and cameras, laptop equipment or any other electronic devices cannot be stored at any time.

OpenShift Commons Gathering Hosted by Red Hat | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 7:00am EST - 2:30pm EST

Venue: Courtland Grand Hotel, Level 1, 165 Courtland St NE, Atlanta, GA 30303

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Red Hat OpenShift Commons Gathering is where users, partners, customers, contributors and upstream project leads come together to collaborate and work together across the OpenShift Cloud Native ecosystem. This event will include talks from Cloud Native practitioners and production deployment demonstrations sharing their use cases, insights into their workloads and lessons learned along the way. Additional Red Hat event registration will be required. Please expect a follow up email. Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For more information, please visit: https://commons.openshift.org/gatherings/kubecon-25-nov-10/ For questions regarding this event, please contact: openshiftcommons@redhat.com

ArgoCon Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Full Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 3 | B312-313a + B313b-314, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: ArgoCon schedule is now LIVE! ArgoCon is designed to foster collaboration, discussion, and knowledge sharing on the Argo Project, which consists of four projects: Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Argo Rollouts and Argo Events. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

BackstageCon Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Full Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 4 | B405-406a, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: BackstageCon schedule is now LIVE! BackstageCon is a one-day conference focused on all things Backstage: an open framework for building developer portals. At BackstageCon, we’ll provide a vendor-neutral space for collaboration and learning centered on improving developer experience and effectiveness through open source technologies. The event is vendor-neutral and organized by members of the Backstage community. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

CiliumCon Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 12:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 3 | B309, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: CiliumCon schedule is now LIVE! Cilium is an open source, widely-used, and highly scalable cloud native networking, observability, and security solution based on the kernel technology eBPF, that connects workloads in Kubernetes and beyond, with powerful built-in observability and security capabilities. CiliumCon focuses on how Cilium and its sub-projects Hubble and Tetragon are being developed, deployed, and used across the cloud native landscape to revolutionize cloud native platforms. At CiliumCon you’ll hear from end users sharing how Cilium, Hubble, and Tetragon unlocked levels of scalability, performance, and security that weren’t possible before and from contributors who will teach you how Cilium is leveraging eBPF to gain these benefits. From Cilium and eBPF internals to how Cilium, Hubble, and Tetragon are helping businesses achieve their goals, you’ll hear it all at CiliumCon. Dive deep into the world of high-performance networking, transparent security, and scalable observability at CiliumCon! To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Cloud Native Kubernetes + AI Day Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Full Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 4 | B401-402, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: Cloud Native + Kubernetes AI Day schedule is now LIVE! As we step into the era of rapid AI advancements, organizations are grappling with an unprecedented array of challenges. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), the development of Graph RAGs (retrieval-augmented generation), and the growing importance of Ethical Considerations in AI are reshaping how businesses innovate, scale, and move from development to production. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Cloud Native University Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 12:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 2 | B213-214, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: Cloud Native University schedule is now LIVE! First Time at KubeCon and New to Cloud Native? Start Here. Maximize Your KubeCon Experience with Cloud Native University The CNCF ecosystem is massive—and if it’s your first time at KubeCon and your first steps into the cloud native world, it can feel overwhelming. Even seasoned attendees often realize they’ve missed foundational concepts along the way. That’s where Cloud Native University comes in. This half-day primer is your launchpad into the cloud native universe. You’ll get grounded in the key technologies, core concepts, and welcoming community that make up the CNCF and its ever-growing landscape. Whether you’re brand new to cloud native, a first-time KubeCon attendee, or both—Cloud Native University will help you build the context, confidence, and connections to make the most of your KubeCon experience and long-term journey in this space. What to Expect: A friendly, approachable introduction to cloud native technologies and the CNCF Landscape.Stories and lessons from community members who’ve been exactly where you are Tips for navigating your first KubeCon (what not to miss!) Time to meet peers, mentors, and future collaborators.Start strong. Stay grounded. Go cloud native. Join us at Cloud Native University—your essential first step into the community. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

EnvoyCon Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 12:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 4 | B406b-407, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: EnvoyCon schedule is now LIVE! The Envoy maintainers and community are excited to announce the 10th EnvoyCon. This is a practitioner-driven, community conference emphasizing end-user case studies, and technical talks from contributors to Envoy. We do not have product pitches, but are happy to hear about solutions which build on top of Envoy. So join us for an exciting day of technical content, knowledge sharing, and engagement with project maintainers. Envoy is a cloud-native proxy boasting high-performance, multiple extension points, API-driven configuration, and more. It has been a CNCF graduate project since 2017. Thanks to the open source community, Envoy has been widely adopted across industries in a variety of different deployment scenarios including edge proxy, service mesh sidecar, and middle-proxy load balancer, to name a few. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Kubeflow Summit Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 12:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 2 | B211-212, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: Kubeflow Summit schedule is now LIVE! Kubeflow is an AI/ML composable cloud-native ecosystem used globally by data scientists, machine learning, and AI Engineers to develop and deploy models. It is a collection of Cloud Native tools to run AI and ML at scale. Kubeflow Summit NA 2025 brings together end users, MLOPs & AI Engineers, enthusiasts, contributors, professionals, and the Kubeflow community. We will foster collaboration, discussion, and knowledge sharing during the event about Kubeflow and its applications. This event is intended for audiences new to AI applications and seasoned practitioners. Kubeflow Summit NA 2025 will enable you to spend time peeking under the hood of major Cloud Native Computing Foundation Kubeflow projects and broadening your knowledge. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Kubernetes on Edge Day Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 12:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 2 | B203, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: Kubernetes on Edge Day schedule is now LIVE! According to a forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Edge Spending Guide, combined enterprise and service provider spending across hardware, software, professional services, and provisioned services for edge solutions will sustain strong growth through 2027 when spending will reach nearly $350 billion. With hardware and software dispersed across hundreds or even thousands of locations, the simple paradigms around observability, loosely coupled systems, declarative APIs, and strong automation that have propelled the success of cloud native technologies in the cloud are the only feasible way to manage these distributed systems. Kubernetes is already a significant component of the edge ecosystem, driving integrations and operations. Join us at Kubernetes on the Edge Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and take part in defining the future intersection of cloud native and edge computing! To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

KyvernoCon Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 12:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 5 | Thomas Murphy Ballroom 4, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: KyvernoCon schedule is now LIVE! KyvernoCon is a half-day co-located event focused on advancing knowledge, adoption, and collaboration around the Kyverno project and Cloud Native Policy as Code. As policy as code becomes central to securing, optimizing, automating, and scaling cloud-native infrastructure, KyvernoCon will bring together platform engineers, security and compliance professionals, DevOps practitioners, open-source maintainers, and ecosystem partners to share real-world insights and explore the evolving role of policy as code. This event will feature deep dives into production use cases, policy-writing best practices, automation techniques, developer experience, and integration patterns with other CNCF and security-focused projects. KyvernoCon aims to empower attendees with actionable knowledge and cultivate a stronger, more connected policy-as-code community. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Observability Day Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Full Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 2 | B206 + B207/208, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: Observability Day schedule is now LIVE! Observability Day fosters collaboration, discussion, and knowledge sharing of cloud-native observability projects (including but not necessarily limited to Prometheus, Fluentd, Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry, and OpenMetrics), as well as vendor-neutral best practices for addressing observability challenges. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Open Source SecurityCon Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Full Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 3 | B302-303 + B304-305 + B308, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: Open Source SecurityCon schedule is now LIVE! A new event that fosters collaboration and shares innovation in cloud native security and open source software security. Sessions will cover architecture and policy, secure software development, supply chain security, identity and access, and open source public policy. The 1-day event will gather a diverse community of professionals to include software developers, security engineers, public sector experts, CISOs, CIOs and tech pioneers to address challenges and opportunities in modern security. Join us to collaborate and discover tools, knowledge and strategies to ensure a safer, more secure tomorrow. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Platform Engineering Day Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 9:00am EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Full Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 5 | Thomas Murphy Ballroom 1 + Thomas Murphy Ballroom 2-3, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: Platform Engineering Day schedule is now LIVE! Platform Engineering Day is dedicated to exploring the real-world challenges and advanced practices behind building and scaling Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). IDPs provide curated capabilities, frameworks, and developer-centric experiences to accelerate internal teams such as application developers. The process and techniques described in the CNCF Platforms White Paper and Platform Engineering Maturity Model highlight how achieving a high-impact Developer Experience (DevEx) requires more than tools; it demands a holistic, socio-technical investment. We invite proposals that include deep dives into platform engineering case studies, practical strategies for measuring and maturing platform capabilities, and innovative approaches to improving golden paths. Join Platform Engineers, Product Managers, Solutions Architects, and cloud-native stakeholders as we share lessons learned in building and managing internal platforms. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Azure Day with Kubernetes Hosted by Microsoft | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 9:00am EST - 4:30pm EST

Venue: Microsoft Atlanta, 200 17th Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30363

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Join our team of Microsoft experts in-person to learn best practices for building cloud-native and AI apps with Kubernetes on Azure. Azure Day with Kubernetes is tailored for developers, IT professionals, and decision-makers eager to harness the power of AKS for their cloud-native applications. Whether you’re starting with Kubernetes or seeking to refine your AKS deployments, this session will provide valuable insights and actionable knowledge for your cloud journey. There is no cost to attend, but pre-registration is required: https://aksday.eventbuilder.com/events/11f07c83286b3540b57dd505ca610323 For questions, please contact: aksday@microsoft.com Please note this is an off-site, Sponsor-hosted Co-located Event.

Hands-On Workshop to Build Production-Ready Kubernetes Applications Hosted by Amazon Web Services #

Time: 9:00am EST - 1:00pm EST

Speakers: AM SESSION | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Venue: Georgia World Congress Center | Building A | Level 4 | A410, 285 Andrew Young International Blvd NW, Atlanta, GA 30303

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Are you looking to deploy your applications quickly without managing the complexity of Kubernetes? Look no further, Amazon EKS Auto Mode is the next evolution in Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) that simplifies cluster operations and management through intelligent automation and built-in best practices! Join this hands-on workshop to learn how to use EKS Auto Mode to deploy a full-stack retail store application with a single command, while mastering intelligent, cost-optimized infrastructure management techniques. Basic familiarity with containerization and Kubernetes concepts is required. The workshop will include: Quick setup of production-ready EKS clusters with Amazon EKS Auto ModeSimplified management of compute resources, storage, and networkingStreamlined plugin and add-on managementAutomated upgrade processes and version managementMigration strategies from existing EKS deploymentsAttend this workshop to quickly gain hands-on experience with deploying, managing, and scaling your Kubernetes clusters, all while simplifying your infrastructure and saving valuable time. Important: Personal laptop is required for this hands-on workshopKubeCon+CloudNativeCon attendee registration not requiredLight refreshments will be providedPlease register for the morning workshop session using the link here: https://kubernetessimplifiedamazoneksa.splashthat.com/?preview (limited seats available)If the session is sold out, please contact Sabari Sawant, sabsawan@amazon.com Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For questions regarding this event, please contact: Sabari Sawant, sabsawan@amazon.com

Kong AI Gateway & Insomnia Workshop: AI Success Through API Heroics Hosted by Kong | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 9:00am EST - 12:00pm EST

Venue: Embassy Suites by Hilton Atlanta at Centennial Olympic Park, 267 Marietta Street, Atlanta, Georgia, 30313

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Become the API hero of your organization’s AI story. Learn how to manage, secure, and govern AI traffic through a top-notch “AI as APIs” strategy. You’ll learn how to combine the security and governance powers of the Kong AI Gateway with Insomnia’s best-in-class API design and testing capabilities to deploy, optimize, and secure AI applications. This hands-on session is crafted for developers and organizations that want to push the boundaries of AI integration and API development, accelerate GenAI innovation, and make sure their AI strategies work for the long haul. Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For questions regarding this event, please contact: shira.genauer@konghq.com

Project Lightning Talk: Opening/ Intro #

Time: 10:00am EST - 10:05am EST

Speakers: Jorge Castro (Developer Relations, CNCF)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Distributed SQL Summit Hosted By YugabyteDB | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 10:00am EST - 5:30pm EST

Venue: Omni Hotel at Centennial Park, Atrium Terrace, 190 Marietta St NW, Atlanta, GA 30303

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Distributed SQL Summit brings together developers, architects, and technologists to discuss data-driven mission-critical applications and AI-related advancements, ideas, and best practices. As AI impacts architectural choices across the enterprise, this year’s summit will be invaluable, allowing participants to dive into the challenges and opportunities AI presents. Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. To view the agenda and find out more, visit the event. For questions regarding this event, please contact: events@yugabyte.com

Learn How to Get a Kubernetes® Platform Up and Running in 90 minutes Hosted by Portainer.io #

Time: 10:00am EST - 11:30am EST

Speakers: AM Event | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Venue: Georgia World Conference Centre | Building A | Level 4 | Room A402, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Registration Required. Be sure to select either the morning OR afternoon session. Come meet the Portainer team in person and see just how fast setting up a Kubernetes platform can be. In this workshop, we’ll start with a whiteboard session to walk you through how Portainer and Talos Linux + Omni work together to streamline app deployment and cluster management. Then we’ll show you exactly how it’s done. In this detailed workshop (optional hands-on - bring your laptop!), we’ll guide you through: - Bootstrapping a production-grade Kubernetes cluster using Talos Linux + Omni - Integrating with Portainer for simple, scalable app management - Best practices for secure, declarative infrastructure No fluff. Just real-world guidance and practical skills you can use immediately. If you want Kubernetes without the chaos - this is for you. **Registration Required. Spots are limited, sign up today! To register: https://www.portainer.io/resources/discover/events/kubeops-workshop-kubecon-2025 For questions regarding this event, please contact: team-marketing@portainer.io Please note that this is a Sponsor-hosted Co-located event.

Project Lightning Talk: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the CNCF Landscape #

Time: 10:07am EST - 10:22am EST

Speakers: Katherine Druckman (Open Source Evangelist, Intel); Gerald Venzl (Vice President Developer & AI Initiatives, Oracle); Lori Lorusso (Director of Outreach, Rust Foundation)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Put on your lab coats and bust out the microscopes because we are about to uncover the not so mad (we promise) science of the CNCF Landscape. Why you ask? We currently have over 190 projects, and finding information about them can be a challenge. “Just go to the website” isn’t enough, sometimes you need a guide to show you the ropes. In these introductory sessions we will go over some of the diverse set of projects inside the CNCF so that you’re well equipped to find what you’re looking for at KubeCon.

Project Lightning Talk: Kubewarden: The Universal Policy Engine For Kubernetes #

Time: 10:24am EST - 10:29am EST

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: This lightning talk will demonstrate Kubewarden’s capabilities as a “universal dynamic admission controller” for Kubernetes. We will showcase how Kubewarden seamlessly integrates various policy types – including policy groups, Rego policies, CEL policies, and ordinary policies – along with the application of cluster and namespace-scoped policies. Through a live demonstration, we will illustrate how all these features work in unison, leveraging the kwctl run command for effective testing and validation. Attendees will gain insight into how Kubewarden provides a flexible and powerful solution for comprehensive policy enforcement across their Kubernetes environments.

Project Lightning Talk: WasmEdge: What’s New In WasmEdge?#

Time: 10:31am EST - 10:36am EST

Speakers: Michael Yuan (Founder, Second State)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: WasmEdge is a lightweight, high-performance, and extensible WebAssembly runtime. In this session, we’ll talk about the latest releases and most exciting features from WasmEdge. Highlights include: - A new WasmEdge installer - Component model - WASI Preview 2 - WASI-NN proposal - Android support

Project Lightning Talk: Spiderpool: Dynamic Topology-Aware RDMA Allocation For GPU-Based AI Workloads #

Time: 10:38am EST - 10:43am EST

Speakers: Weizhou Lan (Senior Tech Lead, Daocloud)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: With the rise of small AI models and the increasing computational power of GPUs, a new requirement is emerging in AI distributed inference workloads: a single AI container does not need all 8 GPUs on a node, but data parallelism still relies on RDMA networks for distributed communication. In such cases, only a matching number of PCIe-affined RDMA NICs is needed to enable GPUDirect RDMA. However, the GPU device plugin, RDMA device plugin, and CNI operate independently. This prevents administrators from configuring workload YAMLs to ensure that PCIe-affined RDMA NICs are correctly assigned. Consequently, in practice, Pods often have to be attached to all network interfaces and RDMA devices. Recently, based on DRA and NRI, Spiderpool can dynamically detect the assigned GPU devices at Pod creation time and allocate PCIe-affined RDMA NICs and Ethernet interfaces accordingly. This approach minimizes network resource overhead while ensuring optimal RDMA communication performance.

Project Lightning Talk: OVN-Kubernetes: Scalable, Production-Grade Networking For Kubernetes #

Time: 10:45am EST - 10:50am EST

Speakers: Surya Seetharaman (Principle Software Engineer, Red Hat)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: OVN-Kubernetes is a CNCF sandbox project delivering a scalable, production-ready networking platform for Kubernetes clusters. Built on Open Virtual Networking (OVN) and Open vSwitch (OVS), it implements the CNI (Container Network Interface) specification and offers a Kubernetes networking conformant, feature-rich solution for modern cloud-native and traditional on-prem environments. In this lightning talk, you’ll get a fast-paced introduction to: 1) What OVN-Kubernetes is and how it fits into the Kubernetes networking ecosystem 2) What sets us apart in the broader CNCF landscape 3) Key features and improvements from our most recent releases 4) A sneak peek at our roadmap, including some of the innovative capabilities we’re working on We’ll wrap up with ways you can get involved in the project, contribute to its growth, and become part of our evolving community.

Project Lightning Talk: Metal3.io Project Updates #

Time: 10:52am EST - 10:57am EST

Speakers: Kashif Khan (Maintainer, metal3.io)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: This talk is a short format summary of the progress achieved by the Metal3 project and its community, particularly in last couple of years, aspiring for incubation. We will do a quick walkthrough of the latest and greatest features of the project and an overview of the road-map of the project.

Project Lightning Talk: The Kyverno Five: New Policy Types And What You Can Do With Them #

Time: 10:59am EST - 11:04am EST

Speakers: Cortney Nickerson (Head of Community, Nirmata)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: As Kubernetes has evolved, so has Kyverno! This talk provides a tour of the five new Kyverno policy types, ValidatingPolicy, ImageValidatingPolicy, MutatingPolicy, GeneratingPolicy, DeletingPolicy, with real-world examples of how you can use them to solve complex security, automation, and governance issues. The talk will end by showcasing how you can combine the usage of these policy types, for advanced platform engineering solutions.

Platform Engineering CTF: Build Your Own Kubernetes IDP Hosted by Akamai Technologies | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 11:00am EST - 3:00pm EST

Venue: Terminus 330, 330 Marietta St NW, Atlanta, GA 30313

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Join Akamai and LearnKube for an intense, hands-on Capture The Flag competition where you’ll race against other teams to implement a real Internal Developer Platform on raw Kubernetes. You’ll start with an empty cluster and attempt to build what most platform teams spend months creating: namespace provisioning, RBAC, deployment templates, service networking, and governance policies. Your team of four will divide and conquer across three parallel tracks, earning points for each challenge you complete. The competition format Work in teams of four to tackle platform engineering challenges Compete for points across three parallel tracksRace against other teams on a live leaderboardWin prizes for top-scoring teams What you’ll learn The real complexity of building an IDP from scratchHidden costs of “just using Kubernetes” for platform engineeringTime-to-value comparison: build vs. buyHow modern platforms abstract infrastructure complexityWhy platform teams are drowning in YAML Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. Please Register for the event: https://web.cvent.com/event/e775a12d-5e13-45a7-96d2-c343581100cf/summary For questions regarding this event, please contact: Mario Portillo, mportill@akamai.com

Project Lightning Talk: The Same Great OPA, Only Faster!#

Time: 11:06am EST - 11:11am EST

Speakers: Sebastian Spaink (Software Engineer, Apple)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Your OPA instances better be up-to-date because we’ve been busy since 1.0 – your policies are running faster than ever! Join OPA maintainer Sebastian for a rapid-fire overview of our latest performance improvements, what’s been cooking under the hood, and a sneak peek at what’s coming for OPA at KubeCon.

Project Lightning Talk: K3s Project Update #

Time: 11:13am EST - 11:18am EST

Speakers: Orlin Vasilev (Principal Open Source Technology Advocate, SUSE)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Join Orlin for a quick update on K3s, the lightweight Kubernetes that’s super popular for running on small devices and edge setups. Orlin will share the latest cool features, improvements, and what the community’s been up to. Plus, a sneak peek at what’s coming next to help you get the most out of K3s!

Project Lightning Talk: Let’s Have Harbor Everywhere!#

Time: 11:20am EST - 11:25am EST

Speakers: Orlin Vasilev (Principal Open Source Technology Advocate, SUSE)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Containers go everywhere — your registry should too. Harbor is the open-source cloud-native registry trusted for secure, compliant image storage. But now it’s breaking free of the data center! In this lightning-fast talk, I’ll show you how: - Harbor CLI puts full registry power at your fingertips — automate, manage, and repeat. - Satellite brings Harbor to the edge — sync and replicate images to remote sites with flaky networks. - Harbor on ARM runs your trusted registry on Raspberry Pis, edge nodes, and tiny clusters. - One registry. Any architecture. Any location. Secure supply chain, anywhere containers run. - 5 minutes. Zero excuses. Let’s push Harbor everywhere.

Project Lightning Talk: OpenFGA: Google Zanzibar Style Authorization Made Developer-Friendly #

Time: 11:27am EST - 11:32am EST

Speakers: Tyler Nix (Product Manager)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Inspired by Google Zanzibar, the system behind permissions at Google scale, OpenFGA brings the same fine-grained, relationship-based access control to cloud-native systems. In this 5-minute lightning talk, we’ll highlight the latest advancements that make OpenFGA simpler to adopt and easier to integrate: Native multi-tenancy support Improved policy validation with static checks TypeScript SDKs and VS Code integration for local-first workflows A redesigned playground to experiment with auth models interactively Whether you’re building internal developer platforms, securing microservices, or managing access control in a multi-tenant SaaS, OpenFGA gives you Zanzibar-grade power without the infrastructure overhead.

Project Lightning Talk: What’s New In Kairos, 2025 Edition #

Time: 11:34am EST - 11:39am EST

Speakers: Mauro Morales (Staff Engineer, Spectro Cloud)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Kairos is an immutable Linux OS built to simplify Kubernetes operations at the edge, in the cloud, and on-prem. After last year’s Trusted Boot demo at the Project Pavilion, the community has shipped major updates, including: - kairos-init for easier bootstrap - System extensions for runtime flexibility - Cloud images for major providers - K0s support - Netboot via UKI - The Kairos Operator for cluster management - Kairos Factory, a web-based OS image builder This lightning talk highlights what’s new, what’s improved, and what’s next for Kairos.

Project Lightning Talk: When Falco Spots Trouble, The Shark Swims In #

Time: 11:41am EST - 11:46am EST

Speakers: Gerald Combs (Creator and lead developer, Wireshark, Wireshark Foundation)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: What if Falco could not only detect suspicious activity, but also capture the system call trail behind it? Enter StratoShark—a powerful new integration that lets Falco trigger targeted runtime captures for deep, Wireshark-style analysis. In this lightning-fast talk, Gerald will show how Falco and StratoShark work together to bridge detection and investigation, giving you forensic-level visibility when and where it matters most.

Project Lightning Talk: Bringing Agentic AI To Cloud Native With Kagent #

Time: 11:48am EST - 11:53am EST

Speakers: Eitan Yarmush (Lead Maintainer)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Modern cloud-native engineers face operational challenges like troubleshooting connectivity issues, generating alerts from Prometheus, managing progressive rollouts with Argo, and enforcing zero-trust security across clusters. As cloud networking, security, and reliability scale, how can AI agents help with these tasks? Kagent is an open-source framework for running AI agents in Kubernetes, purpose-built for DevOps and platform engineers. Kagent enables teams to simply build AI agents declaratively in Kubernetes to solve cloud native operation challenges. Attendees will also learn what is kagent and how to get started with building their own AI agents with kagent easily.

Project Lightning Talk: Lunch #

Time: 11:53am EST - 12:57pm EST

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Build Multi-Architecture Cloud-Native Applications and AI Inference on Google Axion Co-hosted by Arm & Google | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 12:00pm EST - 5:00pm EST

Venue: Georgia World Congress Center | Building A | Level 4 | Room A407, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Abstract: As cloud workloads and AI scale globally, developers need the flexibility to build once and deploy anywhere, across diverse architectures and performance profiles. In this hands-on workshop, engineers from Arm and Google Cloud will walk you through deploying and scaling containerized workloads on Google Axion, powered by the Arm Neoverse V2 platform. You’ll learn how to: • Build and deploy multi-architecture containers using open-source tools • Run real workloads across Arm-based nodes • Optimize for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency • Integrate Arm-based instances into your Kubernetes or CI/CD pipelines Deploy an AI inferencing workload running entirely on Axion based computeBring your laptop and leave with working code, example repos, and practical insights for building portable, high-performance cloud applications. Duration: ~4.5 hours total, including a 1-hour lunch and a 15-minute break. The session begins with lunch, followed by Part 1: cloud-native app migration and deployment, and Part 2: scalable AI inference on Arm-based infrastructure. Please register here: https://events.arm.com/kubecon25northamerica Please note that this is a Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For questions regarding this event, please contact: ziva.danneker@arm.com

Google Container Day Hosted by Google Cloud #

Time: 12:00pm EST - 6:00pm EST

Speakers: SOLD OUT | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Venue: Google Atlanta, 1105 W Peachtree St NW, Atlanta, GA 30309

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: We’re looking forward to seeing you at Google Atlanta for a deep dive into Google Cloud’s vision for the future of application development. This event is your chance to: Gain insights from Google experts on the latest container and AI/ML advancements. Learn how to build and deploy applications faster and more efficiently. Discover how Google Cloud can empower you to achieve breakthrough results. Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For more information, please visit: http://goo.gle/container-day For questions regarding this event, please contact: container-day@google.com

SUSE Rancher Day Hosted by SUSE | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 12:00pm EST - 7:00pm EST

Venue: Hilton Garden Inn Atlanta Downtown | Oceanic Ballroom | 4th Floor, 275 Baker St NW, Atlanta, GA 30313

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Get inspired by SUSE industry experts! Join us for hands-on demos of SUSE solutions and fantastic networking opportunities. We’ll be taking a deep dive into SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Observability, SUSE Application Collection and many more cutting-edge cloud-native technologies. And what’s SUSE Rancher Prime Day without a little excitement? We’ll be hosting a raffle at the end of the day! Come experience what SUSE has to offer and connect with your peers during an evening reception at Dos Bocas restaurant. Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For questions regarding this event, please contact: alexander.hampshire@suse.com

VM on Kubernetes Day: Bridging the gap between VMs and Containers Hosted by Portworx by Pure Storage | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 12:30pm EST - 5:00pm EST

Venue: Georgia Aquarium | Ocean Ballroom VIP Entrance (not main entrance), 357 Luckie Street, NW Atlanta, GA 30313

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: As organizations embrace Kubernetes® for modern, stateful applications, the need to integrate and manage virtual machines (VMs) alongside containerized workloads has become increasingly essential. VM on Kubernetes® Day explores how Kubernetes® has evolved to support VMs through technologies like KubeVirt, enabling seamless coexistence of legacy applications with modern cloud-native architectures. Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For questions regarding this event, please contact: ttung@purestorage.com

Project Lightning Talk: 5 Key Lessons From 8 Years of Building Kgateway #

Time: 12:57pm EST - 1:02pm EST

Speakers: Yuval Kohavi (Lead Maintainer)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: At first glance, all Envoy-based gateways that implement the Kubernetes Gateway API may appear similar. In practice, the key differences lie in their control plane architecture, API extensions, and implementation choices. In this lightning talk, we’ll share five critical lessons we’ve learned over the past eight years while building and evolving kgateway (formerly known as Gloo). From scaling challenges to user experience improvements, we’ll explorewhat worked, what didn’t, and what we might do differently—like whether we should have donated to the CNCF earlier or avoided using the Istio control plane altogether. Join us to explore the real-world insights behind kgateway’s journey.

CalicoCon Hosted by Tigera | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 1:00pm EST - 5:00pm EST

Venue: The Westin Peachtree Plaza | Chastain E, 210 Peachtree St NW, Atlanta, GA 30303

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Join industry experts and fellow practitioners at CalicoCon, where we tackle the evolving challenges of cloud-native network security. Engage in deep-dive discussions, hands-on sessions, and expert insights to navigate the complexities of securing dynamic, ephemeral cloud environments. This edition focuses on Calico 3.30, Calico eBPF, and Calico Whisker: open source observability for Kubernetes. By analyzing real-time traffic, identifying risky connections, and implementing targeted restrictions, Whisker helps secure workloads without disrupting functionality. Integrating Calico Whisker empowers organizations to proactively manage Kubernetes security, reducing attack surfaces and enforcing strict network controls effectively. We’ll end with a happy hour where you can meet other Calico users on their Kubernetes journeys and those behind Calico. Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For more information, please visit: https://www.tigera.io/lp/calicocon-2025/ For questions regarding this event, please contact: eunice@tigera.io

Project Lightning Talk: Linkerd, mTLS, and Bungled Bundles #

Time: 1:04pm EST - 1:09pm EST

Speakers: Flynn (Tech Evangelist, Buoyant)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Like every other mTLS-based system out there (mesh or otherwise!), Linkerd lives and dies by the certificates it uses as its basis of identity for authorization decisions: mishandled certificates are one of the most common reasons for real-world issues in Linkerd installations. In this lightning talk, we’ll take a look at one such failure from the real world, with special attention to how it happened and what Linkerd is doing to improve things. Join us to, hopefully, avoid having to go through this yourself!

Project Lightning Talk: Copacetic: Directly Patch Container Image Vulnerabilities #

Time: 1:11pm EST - 1:16pm EST

Speakers: Jeremy Rickard (Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Maintaining secure container images and addressing new vulnerabilities quickly is a major challenge. To patch images, end users face two options: wait for third-party authors to release updates, which can take weeks, or perform a full image rebuild, a time and resource-intensive process. Project Copacetic (Copa) enhances the image patching process, reducing turnaround time and complexity. It integrates easily into existing build infrastructure, giving users greater control over their patching timeline and reducing costs. Copa scans container images using tools like Trivy to generate a vulnerability report and parses the report for necessary OS-level package updates. It applies these updates to the target image using Buildkit (Docker’s default builder) to create a new patch layer on the original image. Copa can even patch distroless images by leveraging external tooling. The talk will overview Copa, highlighting new features and future improvements.

Project Lightning Talk: k0s: CNCF Sandbox Distro Updates #

Time: 1:18pm EST - 1:23pm EST

Speakers: Jussi Nummelin (Senior Principal Engineer, Mirantis Inc - USA)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Join us for a lightning‐fast tour of k0s, the CNCF Sandbox distro that turns Kubernetes complexity into “one-click” magic. We’ll give a quick intro to k0s, the current state of things, and plans for the near future.

Project Lightning Talk: Multi-Cluster Configuration Management With KubeStellar #

Time: 1:25pm EST - 1:30pm EST

Speakers: Andy Anderson (Software Architect, IBM Research)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: KubeStellar is a flexible solution for challenges associated with multi-cluster configuration management for edge, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud

Data on Kubernetes Day Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 1:30pm EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 2 | B211-212, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: Data on Kubernetes Day schedule is now LIVE! Data on Kubernetes is the operational default in a world where data and AI/ML applications are expected to grow. Scalability, flexibility, resilience, openness, and costs are among the reasons — and DoK has a transformative impact on organizations who benefit from increased productivity, revenue growth, market share and margin. Data on Kubernetes Day is where the industry convenes to share best practices and use cases, forge critical relationships, and learn about advancements in using Kubernetes for data and groundbreaking exploration into the cutting edge of Database as a Service. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

FluxCon Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 1:30pm EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 3 | B309, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: FluxCon schedule is now LIVE! FluxCon is the official community gathering for Flux users, contributors, and adopters, such as end-user organizations and service providers. As GitOps and continuous delivery continue to evolve as a core operating model for cloud native infrastructure, FluxCon provides a dedicated space to share best practices, real-world success stories, and deep technical knowledge around continuous delivery with Flux. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Istio Day Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 1:30pm EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 4 | B406b-407, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: Istio Day schedule is now LIVE! Istio Day community event for the industry’s most popular service mesh, where you will find lessons learned from running Istio in production, hands-on experiences, and featuring maintainers from across the Istio ecosystem. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

OpenFeature Summit Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 1:30pm EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 2 | B213-214, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: OpenFeature Summit schedule is now LIVE! The OpenFeature Summit is the premier event for everyone interested in feature flagging, feature management, and experimentation. Whether you’re using OpenFeature or any other feature flagging or experimentation solution, this summit is a platform to share insights, best practices, and success stories. Join us to network, engage in discussions, and explore how feature flags are shaping the future of software delivery and product development. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

OpenTofu Day Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 1:30pm EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 2 | B203, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: OpenTofu Day schedule is now LIVE! Join us for OpenTofu Day 2025, a dedicated day for the infrastructure-as-a-code community. We’ll share a day all about OpenTofu, including migrations, technical details, panels, and new use cases. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn, contribute, and join the OpenTofu community. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

WasmCon Hosted by CNCF #

Time: 1:30pm EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: Half Day Event | ALL ACCESS PASS REQUIRED

Venue: Building B | Level 5 | Thomas Murphy Ballroom 4, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: CNCF-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENTS

Description: WasmCon schedule is now LIVE! WasmCon is the premier conference for technical developers and users interested in exploring the potential of WebAssembly. This half day event will bring together leading experts, developers, and users from across the Wasm community. WasmCon will feature a diverse range of sessions, workshops, and keynote speakers, all focused on providing attendees with the latest insights and best practices for working with Wasm. Whether attendees are interested in performance optimization, security considerations, or integrating Wasm into existing applications, there will be content for everyone. In addition to the technical sessions, WasmCon provides attendees with numerous opportunities to network with peers and build relationships with other developers and users in the Wasm community. To learn more please visit the event’s website. For questions regarding this event, please reach out to cncfcolocatedevents@linuxfoundation.org.

Hands-On Workshop to Build Production-Ready Kubernetes Applications Hosted by Amazon Web Services #

Time: 1:30pm EST - 5:30pm EST

Speakers: PM SESSION | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Venue: Georgia World Congress Center | Building A | Level 4 | A410, 285 Andrew Young International Blvd NW, Atlanta, GA 30303

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Are you looking to deploy your applications quickly without managing the complexity of Kubernetes? Look no further, Amazon EKS Auto Mode is the next evolution in Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) that simplifies cluster operations and management through intelligent automation and built-in best practices! Join this hands-on workshop to learn how to use EKS Auto Mode to deploy a full-stack retail store application with a single command, while mastering intelligent, cost-optimized infrastructure management techniques. Basic familiarity with containerization and Kubernetes concepts is required. The workshop will include: Quick setup of production-ready EKS clusters with Amazon EKS Auto ModeSimplified management of compute resources, storage, and networkingStreamlined plugin and add-on managementAutomated upgrade processes and version managementMigration strategies from existing EKS deploymentsAttend this workshop to quickly gain hands-on experience with deploying, managing, and scaling your Kubernetes clusters, all while simplifying your infrastructure and saving valuable time. Important: Personal laptop is required for this hands-on workshopKubeCon+CloudNativeCon attendee registration not requiredLight refreshments will be providedPlease register for the morning workshop session using the link here: https://kubernetessimplifiedamazoneksb.splashthat.com/?preview (limited seats available)If the session is sold out, please contact Sabari Sawant, sabsawan@amazon.com Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For questions regarding this event, please contact: Sabari Sawant, sabsawan@amazon.com

Observability at Scale with ClickStack Training Hosted by ClickHouse | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 1:30pm EST - 5:30pm EST

Venue: 756 W Peachtree St NW, Atlanta, GA 30308, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: In this hands-on training, you’ll get a guided introduction to ClickStack, the open-source observability platform built on top of ClickHouse. Designed for high-performance ingestion and analysis of logs, metrics, traces, and session data, ClickStack combines the flexibility of OpenTelemetry with the power of ClickHouse’s analytics engine, delivering blazing-fast observability without breaking your budget. For more information please visit our website. For questions regarding this event, please contact: zoe.steinkamp@clickhouse.com Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event.

Project Lightning Talk: KubeEdge Updates and Use Cases In Multiple Scenarios #

Time: 1:32pm EST - 1:37pm EST

Speakers: Hongbing Zhang (KubeEdge TSC Member, DaoCloud)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: KubeEdge, the industry’s first cloud-native open-source edge computing project, has achieved CNCF graduation last year. In this session, we will share the new features and advancements in community governance since graduation. As a graduated project, KubeEdge has been widely used in intelligent transportation, smart city, smart park, smart energy, smart factory, smart bank, smart site, CDN and other industries to provide users with integrated edge cloud collaborative solutions. This session will also share the KubeEdge use cases in various industries, to help users understand the practical experience of cloud-native edge computing and edge AI.

Project Lightning Talk: Beyond YAML: Visualising Kubernetes Ontologies With Meshery #

Time: 1:39pm EST - 1:44pm EST

Speakers: Yash Sharma (Developer Advocate, DigitalOcean)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Kubernetes landscape is expansive yet intricate, requiring engineers to navigate sophisticated configurations spanning numerous components and custom resources. This intricacy can become daunting, particularly when dealing with repetitive configuration management duties such as handling YAML files, network setups, and RBAC policies. Meshery, an open-source cloud-native manager, addresses this by leveraging human-computer interaction principles to simplify Kubernetes. Through Kanvas, an intuitive visual interface, Meshery reduces cognitive load, aligns with users mental models, and streamlines infrastructure design backed by OPA policies. Join this lighting talk to see how Meshery makes Kubernetes more accessible, empowering you to visualize and manage complex relationships across CNCF projects with ease and precision.

Project Lightning Talk: Invisible FinOps and Compliance: Shift Left With Cloud Custodian #

Time: 1:46pm EST - 1:51pm EST

Speakers: Sonny Shi (Head of Product, Stacklet)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Learn how platform teams use Cloud Custodian to automate cloud governance early in the lifecycle—making FinOps, security, and compliance feel invisible, but always enforced.

Project Lightning Talk: Introducing k8gb: Kubernetes Native Global Load Balancing Made Simple #

Time: 1:53pm EST - 1:58pm EST

Speakers: Yury Tsarev (Principal Solutions Architect, Upbound)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: k8gb is a Kubernetes-native Global Server Load Balancer designed to provide intelligent, geo-aware DNS-based traffic routing across multiple Kubernetes clusters. It enables global failover and high availability without vendor lock-in or complex external infrastructure. By leveraging Kubernetes Custom Resources and DNS zone delegation, k8gb makes multi-cluster traffic management seamless and cloud-native. This lightning talk will introduce the project’s architecture, core features, and use cases, and share how k8gb empowers teams to build resilient global applications. Whether you’re running workloads across regions or managing disaster recovery, learn how k8gb simplifies global traffic routing for Kubernetes. Join us to discover how k8gb fits into the cloud-native ecosystem and why it’s gaining momentum in the CNCF community.

Project Lightning Talk: Istio: Set Sailing With Istio Without Sidecars #

Time: 2:00pm EST - 2:05pm EST

Speakers: Lin Sun (Head of Open Source & CNCF TOC, Solo.io)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: This lightning talk will cover highlights from Istio’s recent releases, updates, features, and other project related news for our fellow maintainers, contributors and users. Learn how our latest releases signals ambient mode – service mesh without sidecars – is ready for everyone, while we continue to support sidecars as first-class citizens too.

Capture the Flag Challenge: Defend the Pipeline Hosted by Cloudsmith | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 2:00pm EST - 6:00pm EST

Venue: Hilton Garden Inn Atlanta Downtown | Atlantic Room - 2nd Floor, 275 Baker St NW, Atlanta, GA 30313, USA

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Supply chain attacks are on the rise. In this hands-on Capture the Flag challenge, you’ll use Trivy and Open Policy Agent (OPA) to battle real-world threats. Scan images and packages for vulnerabilities, generate SBOMs, and write Rego policies to enforce controls. Along the way, you’ll learn how EPSS helps separate real risks from noise and how to quarantine unsafe artifacts before they spread. Complete all challenges by the end of the event to build practical skills for securing pipelines and earn your shot at prizes. Please Register for the event: https://luma.com/atl-ctf Then, after two full days of learning, it’s time to shift gears and unwind with smoky BBQ, local brews, and the sweet sound of live blues. Join us at our ApresKube party on Wednesday! Request to join: https://luma.com/apreskube-atl Please note that these are off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located events. For questions regarding these events, please contact: Brooke Eder, beder@cloudsmith.io

Hands-On Cloud Native Security Workshop Hosted by Sysdig | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 2:00pm EST - 6:00pm EST

Speakers: SOLD OUT

Venue: Omni Hotel, The Pine Room, 190 Marietta St NW, Atlanta, GA

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: This hands-on workshop is perfect for anyone looking to deepen their expertise with Kubernetes and cloud-native security. Whether you’re new to the field or an experienced Kubernetes threat detection engineer, you’ll learn how to leverage Falco™ to craft detection rules that extend MITRE ATT&CK® coverage. By the end of the session, you’ll have a clear understanding of managing threat detection in Kubernetes and the challenges of validating complex rule sets. After the session, enjoy a happy hour with the open source community. Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For more information about this event, please visit: https://sysdig.pathfactory.com/sysdig-workshop-at-kcna25 For questions regarding this event, please contact: globalevents@sysdig.com

Learn How to Get a Kubernetes® Platform Up and Running in 90 minutes Hosted by Portainer.io #

Time: 2:00pm EST - 3:30pm EST

Speakers: PM Session | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Venue: Georgia World Conference Centre | Building A | Level 4 | Room A402, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Project Lightning Talk: What’s New In Kubernetes Storage #

Time: 2:07pm EST - 2:12pm EST

Speakers: Xing Yang (Tech Lead, VMware by Broadcom)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: The Kubernetes SIG Storage team is dedicated to making sure various types of file and block storage are available wherever containers are scheduled. This includes the Container Storage Interface (CSI), which enables storage providers to develop CSI drivers for block and file storage. Additionally, SIG Storage is actively designing the Container Object Storage Interface (COSI) to bring object storage support to Kubernetes. This lightning talk will showcase some of the exciting projects currently underway within SIG Storage.

Project Lightning Talk: Break #

Time: 2:12pm EST - 2:27pm EST

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Project Lightning Talk: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the CNCF Landscape #

Time: 2:29pm EST - 2:44pm EST

Speakers: Katherine Druckman (Open Source Evangelist, Intel); Gerald Venzl (Vice President Developer & AI Initiatives, Oracle); Lori Lorusso (Director of Outreach, Rust Foundation)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Peer Group Mentoring #

Time: 2:30pm EST - 3:30pm EST

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | C301, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: INCLUSION + ACCESSIBILITY

Description: Peer Group Mentoring allows participants to meet with experienced open source veterans across many CNCF projects. Mentees are paired with 2 – 10 other people in a pod-like setting to explore technical, community, career, and certification questions together.

Project Lightning Talk: Cozystack: Build Your Own Open Source AWS On Bare Metal #

Time: 2:46pm EST - 2:51pm EST

Speakers: Andrei Kvapil (Maintainer)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Hi! I’m Andrei, maintainer of Cozystack. Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure are the de facto standard. Many teams default to public clouds (AWS/GCP/Azure)—convenient, but not for everyone. Vendor lock-in, data control, and compliance push workloads to bare metal. i’ll explain in a five minutes how Cozystack enables businesses to build open-source bare-metal infrastructure with cloud-like ease and zero vendor lock-in, while empowering service and hosting providers to compete with hyperscalers.

Project Lightning Talk: Learn Kubernetes Best Practices With OpenCost #

Time: 2:53pm EST - 2:58pm EST

Speakers: Matt Bolt (Maintainer)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: OpenCost is an incubated project that gives you granular insights into costs that can be incurred by your Kubernetes usage. More importantly, whether you’re new or seasoned with Kubernetes, it will lead you to best practices in general not just for cost savings, but also for performance and scale. This talk will give an overview of the OpenCost project, what types of best practices you’ll learn, and how to get started.

Project Lightning Talk: Fluent Bit #

Time: 3:00pm EST - 3:05pm EST

Speakers: Eduardo Silva (Engineering Manager, Chronosphere)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Fluent Bit is more than just a telemetry forwarder, it’s a high-performance, OpenTelemetry-compatible processor that handles logs, metrics, and traces with ease. In this lightning talk, you’ll see how Fluent Bit helps you build flexible observability pipelines. We’ll cover its new routing capabilities, including content-aware filtering and multi-signal processing, enabling you to reduce costs, simplify architecture, and gain fine-grained control over your telemetry flow. Whether you’re building cloud-native apps or managing large-scale infrastructure, Fluent Bit makes real-time observability efficient and programmable.

Project Lightning Talk: Perses: Update #

Time: 3:07pm EST - 3:12pm EST

Speakers: Augustin Husson (Principal Engineer, Amadeus)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Update about the Perses project since last KubeCon (2025). Status about the community growing and last features implemented

Project Lightning Talk: Making Kubescape Storage Scale From Small and Mid-Size To Huge Deployments #

Time: 3:14pm EST - 3:19pm EST

Speakers: Ben Hirschberg (Co-founder & CTO, ARMO)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Kubescape’s storage component serves as the core data store for security findings, vulnerability reports, and application behavior insights, accessible via Kubernetes API. While the current architecture worked for clusters of up to 100 nodes, scaling to 1000+ node clusters presented significant challenges. In this lightning talk, we’ll share how we redesigned the storage architecture to address scaling issues, including database choices, memory optimization, and key engineering solutions for large-scale deployments. Audience will get: - Insights into scaling a critical data component within a Kubernetes security tool - Practical advice on choosing the right database and optimizing memory for large clusters when building aggregated API service Join us to learn how we made Kubescape’s storage ready for the future of Kubernetes security.

Project Lightning Talk: ModelPack: An Open Standard for Packaging, Distributing, and Running LLMs In Cloud-Native Ecosystems #

Time: 3:21pm EST - 3:26pm EST

Speakers: Tao Peng (Staff Engineer, Ant Group)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: We are at a pivotal moment as the focus of infrastructure shifts from containers to models. The container ecosystem flourished on the foundation of the OCI specification; the coming era of AI-native infrastructure will be built upon a new standard for models. Introducing ModelPack, an open standard designed specifically for packaging, distributing, and running AI artifacts in cloud-native environments. By standardizing AI/LLM models as OCI-compliant artifacts, ModelPack seamlessly connects them to the rich cloud-native ecosystem, bridging the final mile between AI workloads and the infrastructure you already use. In this session, we will dive into the core concepts of ModelPack and share its latest community progress. More importantly, we will feature a live demonstration based on real-world use cases at Ant Group. You’ll see how familiar tools like Kubernetes, Dragonfly, Harbor, and CRI-O can be used for agile management and efficient operation of LLMs.

Project Lightning Talk: Dapr: Start Building Distributed Applications With Ease Using Building Block APIs #

Time: 3:28pm EST - 3:33pm EST

Speakers: Marc Duiker (Sr Developer Advocate, Diagrid)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Are you interested in building distributed applications or microservices, but don’t know where to start? Join this session and learn how the Dapr building block APIs can make your life easier! Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, provides a set of common APIs that makes building microservices a breeze. As a graduated CNCF project, Dapr is used in production by companies like Grafana, IBM, Alibaba Cloud & Microsoft and is a trusted OSS technology backed by a vibrant developer community. In this lightning talk, I’ll cover the most popular Dapr building block APIs and show how you can get started with it today!

Project Lightning Talk: Container Builds At Scale With Buildpacks #

Time: 3:35pm EST - 3:40pm EST

Speakers: Joe Kutner (Architect, Salesforce)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Cloud Native Buildpacks transform your application source code into images that can run on any cloud. They enable advanced caching mechanisms that improve performance at scale. They also allow for modularity and reuse, which ensure developers across your organization aren’t wasting cycles repeating what other teams have already done. After this short talk, you’ll be able to run buildpacks with the Pack CLI and find off-the-shelf buildpacks in the Buildpack Registry, including those from Google, Heroku, and Paketo. Finally, you’ll learn how operators of large platforms use buildpacks to make their container builds as scalable as possible.

Project Lightning Talk: Catch Up With Crossplane v2 #

Time: 3:42pm EST - 3:47pm EST

Speakers: Scott Rosenberg (Lead Architect, CTO Office, TeraSky)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Crossplane recently released its first major version bump in years with v2, incorporating valuable lessons learned from years of production usage and community feedback. This session will provide a high-level overview of what these improvements are and why they matter to you and your control planes. Crossplane v2 marks a significant leap forward for the project, and we invite you to learn about how to integrate this major new version into your control planes today.

Project Lightning Talk: Keptn: Supercharge Your Deployments!#

Time: 3:42pm EST - 3:47pm EST

Speakers: Rakshit Gondwal (Software Engineer, Chainguard)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Discover how Keptn automates your deployment checks, improves observability, and reduces the complexity in your Application Lifecycle workflows. This talk will introduce the Keptn project, highlighting its core features such as pre/post-deployment tasks/checks, DORA metrics for GitOps tooling, metrics collection from different observability platforms, and much more! Learn some real-world use cases of Keptn as well!

Project Lightning Talk: From Tokens To Partitions: Rethinking Data Distribution In Cortex #

Time: 3:49pm EST - 3:54pm EST

Speakers: Daniel Blando (SDE, Cortex Maintainer, AWS)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Cortex is an open-source, horizontally scalable system for storing and querying metrics. To distribute incoming data, Cortex assigns unique numbers (tokens) to each server, creating a balanced but interconnected system. While tokens provide excellent data distribution, they make the system surprisingly fragile to server failures. This talk introduces a new partition-based architecture that groups servers together, improving system reliability without sacrificing scalability. We’ll explore the benefits and trade-offs of this design using real-world scenarios and clear examples.

Project Lightning Talk: Vitess: Unlimited Database Scalability #

Time: 3:56pm EST - 4:01pm EST

Speakers: Matt Lord (Vitess Maintainer, PlanetScale)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: Vitess is a massively scalable horizontal distributed database system built for MySQL. This session will provide a brief overview of the project followed by what makes Vitess so scalable. It will conclude with data and charts to demonstrate these scalability claims.

Workload Identity Day Zero Hosted by CyberArk #

Time: 4:00pm EST - 8:00pm EST

Speakers: SOLD OUT | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Venue: 5Church Midtown, 1197 Peachtree St NE #528, Atlanta, GA 30361

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Before KubeCon + CloudNativeCon chaos begins, get your head—and your cluster—right. Join CyberArk for a Day Zero event made for platform engineers, cloud security architects, and CTOs. This focused, single-track experience brings together top shelf content, conversation and cocktails to explore the latest strategies for tackling identity challenges and advancing zero trust security. It’s an evening of sharp insights and tactical identity strategies. Please confirm your registration by signing up on our website. Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event.For more information please visit our website. For questions regarding this event, please contact: nora.smith@cyberark.com

Project Lightning Talk: CloudNativePG: Running Postgres The Kubernetes Way #

Time: 4:03pm EST - 4:08pm EST

Speakers: Gabriele Bartolini (VP, Chief Architect, Kubernetes, EDB)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: CloudNativePG is the only CNCF project dedicated to Postgres, bringing production-grade, cloud-native Postgres to Kubernetes. In this lightning talk, you will learn why CloudNativePG exists, what problems it solves, and the key features that make it a reliable choice for Postgres workloads on Kubernetes. I will share what the community has been working on recently, highlight how adopters are using it in production, and give you a glimpse into our roadmap towards 2026. If you care about Postgres on Kubernetes, this is your chance to see where the ecosystem is heading and be part of it.

Project Lightning Talk: GitOps With Or Without Git Using Flux #

Time: 4:10pm EST - 4:15pm EST

Speakers: Tamao Nakahara (Flux Community Maintainer, Helix.ml)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: GitOps has been an industry term since its inception from the Flux project. We’ll give an overview of how to do it with or without Git, follow best practices, and be successful with the latest developments with Flux.

Project Lightning Talk: Konveyor: Mining Developer Wisdom to Modernize Legacy Apps with Kai #

Time: 4:17pm EST - 4:22pm EST

Speakers: Jonah Sussman (Developer / Approver)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

Description: At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025, we introduced Konveyor AI (Kai), a tool that pairs static analysis with LLM-powered agents to refactor legacy workloads for Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. Six months on, Kai has evolved into a self-improving, app modernization tool. Kai now captures anonymized diagnostics, agent actions, and developer confirmations during real-world modernization work. Successful fixes are mined into hints that feed into future runs. Additionally, a growing roster of specialized agents collaborates through an orchestrated workflow to apply fixes and leverage generated hints. The same insights surface directly in the IDE, giving teams contextual recommendations the moment they need them. The result is a virtuous learning loop: every migration feeds a growing knowledge base that accelerates the next one: securely, at scale, and cloud native. Come see how Kai can super-charge your journey from legacy to cloud-native in record time.

Project Lightning Talk: Closing #

Time: 4:22pm EST - 4:25pm EST

Speakers: Jeffrey Sica (Head of Projects, Cloud Native Computing Foundation)

Venue: Building C | Level 3 | Georgia Ballroom 2, Atlanta, GA, USA

Type: PROJECT OPPORTUNITIES

House of Kube Hosted by PlatCo, Google Cloud and Tailscale | SEPARATE REGISTRATION REQUIRED #

Time: 7:00pm EST - 8:00pm EST

Venue: Ventanas Venue (Hilton Garden Inn Atlanta Downtown), 275 Baker St, Atlanta, GA 30313

Type: SPONSOR-HOSTED CO-LOCATED EVENT

Description: Get ready for the party everyone’s been whispering about. This time, right here in Atlanta! You bring you, we take care of the rest. Build real connections, enjoy best food tracks, cocktails 🍸 & dance to the funkiest house and techno beats. Pssst… if you didn’t know, the Platform Engineering community also has the best techno DJs Please note that this is an off-site Sponsor-hosted Co-located event. For more information, please visit: https://houseofkube.com/ For questions regarding this event, please contact: sofia@platformengineering.org