KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2026 in Salt Lake City will bring the cloud native community together with projects, vendors and end users in what is one of the largest open source events.
In this post, we highlight content specifically targeted at end users and session recommendations from members of the CNCF End User Technical Advisory Board (TAB), along with practical tips for making the most of the event.
Birds of Feather (BoF)
Newly introduced at Kubecon EU in Amsterdam back in March, we will again have a series of BoF sessions in Salt Lake City. Last time we had packed rooms discussing and brainstorming around AI infrastructure and platforms, AI observability and optimized infrastructure for training, inference and GPU efficiency.
This time around we’ll open the floor to our newly formed end user groups, the TAB recently approved end user groups covering Platform Engineering, Public Sector, Telecom and Research.
And in another session we will give ourselves a challenge: get end users in one room and try to build live a reference architecture for Agentic AI deployments. It’s not clear how far we will get given how fast things are moving and how different use cases can be… but it should be a good learning session and it will definitely be fun!
Town Hall
In Amsterdam we chose to move the End User TAB Town Hall to the project pavilion and that was well received. So we’re keeping it this way and you can come and ask us questions right next to where the projects are located.
Poster sessions
Did you know Kubecon has a poster session? It’s an ideal setting to have more in-depth discussions with the authors and there are several end user focused presentations this time around.
And as always, see below for recommendations on interesting content for end users from the members of the TAB.
Joseph Sandoval
- Surviving the Churn: Read Replicas and Controllers for Busy Kubernetes Clusters (Nov 10, 12:20 PM, Salt Palace, Grand Ballroom ACE). Your apiserver is one ordered log with everyone yelling at it, and when watchers fall behind, they get 410 Gone and relist, which makes it worse. Anthropic’s war story: one innocent LIST sent a cluster of tens of thousands of nodes into a doom spiral, twice in two weeks. Some of us have the scars.
- N Clusters, One kubectl: Multi-Cluster That Just Works (Nov 10, 3:40 PM, Hyatt Regency, Salt Lake Ballroom C). OCM-style multi-cluster fixes the fleet problem and creates a developer problem: the hub template is the source of truth, so the kubectl scale you just ran quietly gets reverted. Salesforce and NVIDIA built a proxy that makes the fleet feel like one cluster again, kubectl edit included. Every platform fix sends a bill to somebody else, and this talk shows what it took to pay that one down.
- Anatomy of an Outage: When Bursty ML Workloads Break the Kubernetes Scheduler (Nov 11, 11:00 AM, Salt Palace, Grand Ballroom H). Pending workloads timed out webhooks and took down a control plane, which probably looked fine in the design review. Isomorphic Labs and Google walk through how they stabilized it with decoupled queues and Kueue tuning. I’m looking forward to reviewing the receipts.
- Hardening Kubernetes for GovCloud: A 3-Year Journey to FedRAMP Moderate Authorization (Nov 11, 11:50 AM, Salt Palace, Grand Ballroom ACE). Three years to an ATO sounds about right to anyone who has argued with an auditor over a deploy pipeline. Kudos to the Verkada team for building their own deployment system to meet the isolation rules, then taking on FedRAMP’s patching mandates. If you work in a regulated environment or are working on it, be front and center for the lessons learned.
Juliano Martinez
- Zero Downtime CNI Migration at Scale: Canal to Cilium Across Hundreds of Production Clusters (Nov 10, 4:40 PM, Salt Palace, Level 1, 151). Migrating a CNI plugin in production is one of the most high-risk operations in Kubernetes infra. At Walmart running hundreds of clusters across cloud and on-premises environments, the team faced route-drop failures in Flannel beyond 300 nodes, iptables rule explosion as services grew and etcd v2 incompatibility blocking upgrades. No published playbook existed for zero-downtime CNI replacement at that scale.
- Saturated by Design – Maximizing Cluster Allocation in On-Premises Kubernetes (Nov 10, 11:30 AM). On-premises compute is inelastic, and the costs are mostly up-front. Yet workload demands and hardware health can change at any time. How do you make the most of your on-premises investments without risking capacity overruns and potential outages?
- Running Secure Agents at Scale (Nov 11, 5:00 PM, Salt Palace, Level 1, Grand Ballroom GI). Building secure and scalable agents at scale is hard. From multi-tenancy and noisy-neighbor risk to tool access and data boundaries, teams need more than a prompt and a container image; they need a deliberate execution model.
- From Packets to Paychecks: eBPF-Based Network Cost Attribution at Scale (Nov 12, 11:50 AM, Salt Palace, Level 1, Grand Ballroom BDF). Cloud provider bills show egress costs as a single line item-they don’t say which tenant caused them. At Adobe, we answer that across 400K pods in 31K namespaces spanning 85+ multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters using Retina eBPF agents to capture pod-level flows at the kernel. Prometheus enriches them with node topology, and a CIDR-based classifier maps each destination IP to a cost category (Local, Internet, Peering, Transit Gateway, VPC Endpoint) with cross-AZ and cross-region modifiers that align to cloud provider billing.
Kenta Tada
- Lessons Learned Sandboxing Agents with kagent
- AI agents may look like ordinary Kubernetes workloads, but their long-lived, stateful, and highly privileged behavior makes sandboxing a fundamentally different challenge. This session shares lessons from building agent sandboxing with kagent, covering filesystem and tool access, credentials, networking, identity, and cleanup, along with how NVIDIA’s OpenShell, Kubernetes’ agent-sandbox, and Google’s substrate support shape the design.
- GPU Observability with eBPF: From Kernel Hooks to Kubernetes Metrics
- GPUs are becoming a critical resource in Kubernetes, yet understanding what is happening on them remains a black box. This session shows how to build production-grade GPU observability with eBPF, from hooking into GPU interfaces and enriching telemetry with Kubernetes context to packaging programs as OCI images and integrating metrics with Prometheus and OpenTelemetry.
Chad Beaudin – Boeing
- Birds of a Feather: Public Sector user Group
- The Public Sector user group recently went through the new process to be recognized as an official CNCF user group. They have been a healthy user group for a few years and I’m excited to sit in on their BoF session and hear the latest challenges (and solutions!) that leaders in that industry face.
- Hallway Track
- It’s cliche for a reason. I get so much value from talking to fellow practitioners at Kubecon. This is where I get to really find out what their pain points are, what worked for them, what their recommendations are for MY problems.
- Project Pavillion
- I love hitting the project pavilion to talk to the newer projects in the sandbox and incubation tiers. KubeCon is the one place I can talk directly to maintainers about where their project is headed, what adoption looks like in the wild, and where the technical gaps are.
Ricardo Rocha
- Why We Bet the Data Platform on Kubernetes – And How AI Is Changing How We Operate It
- A talk for end users… by end users. Day 2 operations is one area where automation and AI start having a very significant impact. Whether you already integrated agents in your ops stack, have them reporting and recommending actions, or are thinking about it, come and listen how others are doing it
- Anatomy of an Outage: When Bursty ML Workloads Break the Kubernetes Scheduler
- An advanced topic but if you’re running ML training workloads on Kubernetes, this talk is something you should pay attention to. From end users and the people building the tools, there will be something for everyone
- Beyond the Cluster Boundary: Sharing GPUs at Scale
- Not a new topic but something we all struggle with when dealing with GPUs. In this case an integration of the virtual kubelet with Kueue, that is close to the solutions we’ve tried back where I work.
- Quota Isn’t Enough: Topology Aware Scheduling on Modern GPU Clusters
- Not all of us have a GB200 or GB300 lying around, but even if not the age of the GPU is here to bring back all the topology aware scheduling needs that take us back to the mainframe era. Looking forward to this one.