Three years later, CiliumCon is back where it started—at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam. This will be our seventh time hosting the event, and it comes on the heels of the tenth anniversary of Cilium’s first commit. Over the past decade, the project has evolved from an experimental container networking project to the de facto CNI for the cloud native ecosystem.
This event comes as the project finds its direction for the next decade, positioning itself as the networking data plane for AI workloads, while Tetragon is poised to redefine the runtime security landscape.
Who will get the most out of attending this event?
Platform engineers and infrastructure teams running Kubernetes in production will get the most out of CiliumCon—particularly those managing multi-cluster environments, dealing with security policy at scale, or evaluating Cilium as a replacement for legacy networking hardware or another CNI.
CiliumCon 2026 also has a strong security thread running through it, from Tetragon-based per-workload policy enforcement to hardware-accelerated security policies on DPUs.
What is new and different this year?
The agenda reflects a maturation of the ecosystem, with talks moving beyond “how do we adopt Cilium?” to “how do we run it at scale using advanced features?” Topics include scaling Tetragon policies, multi-cluster networking across hundreds of clusters, and replacing legacy hardware load balancers.
The event also lands shortly after the latest release of Cilium (v1.19), with several sessions touching on its newest features and upgrades. Microsoft will walk through flow aggregation—one of 1.19’s headline observability features—while Roche will discuss expanded DNS policy wildcard support.
What will the day look like?
The Cilium and eBPF community will come together on the afternoon of Monday, March 23, kicking off with opening remarks from co-chairs Mahé Tardy and Hemanth Malla. There will be five technical sessions from project maintainers and end users, along with three lightning talks highlighting new features and advanced setups.
We’ll also hear a keynote from Bill Mulligan highlighting why Cisco is betting big on Cilium and eBPF, and how Tetragon is redefining networking, security, and observability in the multi-cloud world.
Should I do any homework first?
Whether you’re a seasoned practitioner or just getting started, a basic understanding of Kubernetes networking and container orchestration will help you get the most out of the sessions.
If you’re new to eBPF, some great resources include the eBPF documentary for the full backstory on why this technology is a game-changer, the children’s guide to eBPF, Buzzing Across Space, for a fun introduction, and Liz Rice’s Learning eBPF for a comprehensive guide.
For those planning to follow the Tetragon and multi-cluster sessions closely, some familiarity with eBPF-based security tooling and service mesh concepts will be useful—but it shouldn’t be a barrier. If you want to get hands-on before the event, be sure to check out the Cilium labs or read through Cilium: Up and Running.
Find your community!
CiliumCon provides a dedicated space for the Cilium community to come together outside of the broader KubeCon noise, bringing end users, contributors, and maintainers into the same room to share what’s actually working in production.
End-user talks from organizations like Roche, Etraveli Group, Ledger, and SUSE reinforce that this is a real-world, battle-tested project. Talks from contributors and maintainers help community members stay current with fast-moving developments.
Together, the event helps new adopters learn from experienced practitioners and gives contributors direct feedback on what the community needs most.
Don’t forget to register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026.