KubeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam: what I took home

Last week I went to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam, from 24 to 26 March, at the RAI. I spent three days there following my own curiosity. I came home tired from all the information, and at the same time energised and inspired. To my own surprise I also had a clearer idea of where I want to go next. This post is the story of that week.

What KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is #

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is the main conference around Kubernetes, the container orchestrator, and the open source projects that surround it. The CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, runs it. The CNCF is the non-profit home of Kubernetes and a long list of those projects.

The conference brings together adopters and technologists from the open source and cloud native communities: architects, engineers, vendors and IT companies. Everyone comes to connect and to learn what keeps others in this field busy.

The talks that stood out #

I picked a mix of topics. Five themes stayed with me.

AI workloads on Kubernetes #

The keynote set the tone for the week. Its message was that Kubernetes is becoming the orchestrator for AI. It orchestrates the AI workloads that run the LLMs, and vLLM is one of the most promising of them.

This was new territory for me, and it raises questions I had not thought about before. How do you load balance prompts? How do you do caching? A standard network load balancer is a poor fit for this, so people are building AI load balancers that balance on tokens instead of network traffic.

Cilium #

Cilium handles networking and network security in a cluster. I’m very busy with Cilium these days, and the talks gave me insight into new features, use cases and the roadmap for the coming year.

The HTTP Gateway stood out. It is still early, with more coming later this year, which is very promising. Cilium is part of Isovalent, which is part of Cisco, and it stays fully open source.

One of the Cilium talks introduced me to Tetragon, also from Isovalent, which does security observability and runtime enforcement with eBPF. It is Kubernetes-aware and applies policy and filtering directly in the kernel with low overhead. It tracks any process and enforces policies in real time. That is something I want to look into.

Security and hardening #

A second thread ran through the week: how to harden a cluster. In plain words, that means shrinking the ways someone can break in and limiting the damage if they do.

I talked a lot about it with the commercial vendors, such as Wiz, Sysdig and Chainguard. It was useful to hear how each company thinks about the same problem from a different angle. On the open source side, Tetragon and Cilium came up again, together with Kyverno, which lets you write policies for what may run in a cluster and what may not.

Some of the best conversations were about immutable operating systems. That is an operating system that nobody changes by hand on a running machine: you build a new image and swap it in. I’m looking into immutable operating systems for my homelab, so I had plenty to ask and plenty to learn. I saw people building their own, and I also came across Talos Linux, an API-driven operating system made for Kubernetes.

Platform engineering #

Platform engineering is the work of building an internal platform so that other teams can ship software without reinventing the basics each time. It’s what I’ve always done and it still interests me a lot, so these talks hit closest to home.

The one from Saxo Bank interested me most. They are a financial institution, with strict rules and a lot to lose. Seeing how a bank approaches a platform showed me how these ideas work under real pressure. I also went to a talk on getting buy-in from management. It gave me real insight into the people and management side of the job, which decides whether a platform gets built at all.

Sovereignty #

The last theme was sovereignty: staying in control of your own technology, your data and your choices. Open source software helps here, because you can run the same stack on your own hardware and switch vendors without starting over. A lot is going on in this area, and it is not yet fully clear what we need to do to get there. I expect a lot to happen in the rest of this year and the years after. It was good to hear it discussed so openly.

The hallway track #

People call the conversations between sessions the hallway track, and many people say it is the best part. I agree.

I talked to many people. I ran into old colleagues I had not seen in a while, and we caught up over dinner and swapped stories about what each of us had built since we last worked together. I also had dinner with other people I met during the week. I enjoyed meeting new people and hearing their opinion and vision on platform engineering, security and compliance, which matter a lot in my work.

Taking it home #

The week ended on Thursday, and the learning carried on. I came home inspired, and keen to try things out on my homelab and keep learning. A conference gives you a map, and the real work starts when you walk the paths afterwards.

What the week did for me #

Here is the part I did not expect to write.

I felt very good all week. The talks inspired me, and so did the people. I met folks who loved what they do and could explain it with real joy. Every evening I went back to my hotel inspired and energised.

For some time I had been carrying questions about my own career. What do I want to do more of? Where do I want to spend my days? Somewhere between a talk on platforms and a long chat in a hallway, a few of those questions got answers. I won’t go into details yet. What I can say is that the week changed my path. I walked out with more energy and a clearer sense of direction than I had walking in.

Wrapping up #

KubeCon Europe 2026 gave me a head full of AI, Cilium, security, platforms and sovereignty. I’m grateful to everyone who shared their time and their stories.

More posts will follow as I put what I learned to use. If you were there too, or you want to talk about any of this, get in touch. I’d love to hear what stood out for you.