Infrastructure engineers sit at one of the busiest intersections in cloud native.

Kubernetes clusters need to scale. Networks need to connect them. Storage needs to follow workloads. Platforms need to make infrastructure usable. Security needs to be built in. And increasingly, infrastructure teams are also being asked to support GPU-intensive, AI, and agentic workloads.

That means your KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 journey is unlikely to stay inside one track.

Expect to move between Platform Engineering, Operations + Performance, Connectivity, Data Processing + Storage, Security, AI Infrastructure, and Maintainer Track sessions throughout the week. View the tracks + schedule.

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Why infrastructure engineers should attend

Infrastructure teams are being asked to support more types of workloads, more clusters, more automation, and increasingly GPU and AI infrastructure without giving up reliability, security, or cost control. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon brings those challenges together across platform engineering, networking, storage, operations, security, and AI infrastructure.

For infrastructure engineers, the value is the chance to compare architectures and operating models with peers, hear how other organizations are solving production problems at scale, and talk directly with the maintainers building the projects underneath their platforms.

Come with an architecture decision in mind

Infrastructure engineers are rarely evaluating technology in the abstract. There is usually a platform decision, scaling challenge, migration, cost constraint, or new workload driving the conversation. Bring one of those decisions with you and use the week to pressure-test it.

Questions worth bringing include:

• Where is your current platform reaching its limits?
• Which decisions around networking, storage, identity, or multi-cluster operations are becoming harder to manage?
• How will GPU-intensive, inference, or agentic workloads change the infrastructure you already operate?
• What should your platform automate, and what should remain visible to the teams using it?

Use Monday to pick a specialty

If you want to attend Monday’s CNCF-hosted co-located events, choose an All-Access Pass; the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Only Pass does not include them.

Infrastructure engineers have several strong options among Monday’s CNCF-hosted co-located events.

Platform Engineering Day focuses on the real-world challenges of building and scaling internal developer platforms.

CiliumCon goes deeper into cloud native networking, observability, and security using Cilium, Hubble, Tetragon, and eBPF.

OpenTofu Day is a natural destination for infrastructure-as-code practitioners.

And FluxCon provides another path for teams operating GitOps-based infrastructure and continuous delivery environments.

Your challenge may be choosing just one.

Follow the infrastructure lifecycle

During the main conference, look for sessions that connect architecture decisions with the reality of operating infrastructure at scale. Consider adding sessions such as:

• When Infrastructure Breaks in Production: How EarnIn Brought Testing to the Full CNCF Stack
• The New Scaling Matrix: Balancing In-Place Resizing, VPA, HPA and Automation Solutions
• From Pending Pod to Ready Node: Declarative Worker Images for Kubernetes Scale-Out
• Zero Downtime CNI Migration at Scale: Canal to Cilium Across Hundreds of Production Clusters
• Follow the GPUs: How a Regulated Fortune 100 Serves Customers When No Single Cloud Has Enough
• Many Clusters, One GPU Pool: Locality-Aware Scheduling and Data Delivery With Kueue and Dragonfly
• RBAC as a Platform Capability: Applying Platform Engineering to Kubernetes Access

Together they touch scaling, GitOps, networking, GPU infrastructure, multi-cluster environments, access management, platform reliability, and production operations.

Find the projects underneath your platform

Infrastructure engineers may want to make time for communities around projects such as Cilium, Flux, Argo, OpenTofu, SPIFFE/SPIRE, Kueue, Dragonfly, etcd, KubeVirt, and others connected to their stack.

The Project Pavilion is an especially useful stop.

Instead of evaluating a technology through documentation alone, you can talk directly with maintainers about architecture choices, deployment patterns, upcoming features, and the problems you are seeing in production.

Follow AI infrastructure without abandoning the fundamentals

AI infrastructure is increasingly visible throughout this year’s schedule, from GPU scheduling and inference to networking, storage, observability, and security.

For infrastructure engineers, that does not necessarily mean learning an entirely new stack.

Many of the same questions still matter: Where does the workload run? How does it scale? How is it secured? How is it observed? What happens when something fails?

Use the AI-focused sessions to understand how familiar infrastructure principles are being applied to a new generation of workloads.

Don’t schedule every minute

Architecture tradeoffs rarely fit neatly into a 35-minute session. Being at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon gives you the chance to continue those conversations with speakers, maintainers, and engineers who have already made similar decisions in production.

Leave time to visit the Project Pavilion and Solutions Showcase, compare implementation details, and ask the questions that do not fit on a slide: What broke? What did you change? What would you do differently at twice the scale?

What you can take back to your team

The value of the week is the ability to compare architecture choices with people who have already tested them in production, including the maintainers building the underlying projects.

You may leave with:

• Reference points for platform, networking, storage, access, and multi-cluster architecture decisions
• A clearer view of the tradeoffs behind GitOps, autoscaling, infrastructure as code, and platform automation
• Ideas for supporting AI and GPU workloads without abandoning core reliability and security practices
• Project roadmap context and peer connections that can inform your next design review or migration

Where does the infrastructure journey go next?

If reliability and production operations are the biggest part of your role, continue with the SRE Journey.

If you spend your time building platforms specifically to improve how developers work, the Application Developer Journey can help you see your platform from the other side.

And if you want to influence the infrastructure projects your organization depends on, explore the Maintainer Journey.

Join us in Salt Lake City and start planning your path through KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.

Don’t forget to register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026.