Keynote Speaker Guide

Thank you for speaking as a keynote at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, taking place 1-4 April at Excel London in London, United Kingdom.

This is the official event speaker guide for Keynote Speakers. Please bookmark this page for easy reference and if you have any questions, please email Cody Galloway.

• Travel Fund Request Deadline: Monday, 27 January
• Speaker Registration Deadline: Friday, 31 January
• Additional AV Requests Due: Friday, 7 March
• Meeting with Co-Chairs Deadline: Friday, 14 March
• Draft of Presentation Slides Due*: Wednesday, 26 March
• Onsite Keynote Tech Check + Final Draft of Slides*: Tuesday, 1 April

*Please carefully read our Keynote PowerPoint Deck Guidelines section for important changes

Registration

Your Speaker Registration is the confirmation of your participation in the event, and the deadline is Friday, 31 January.

• Registration details were included in your acceptance email. If you require this information again, reach out to Cody Galloway.
• All keynote speakers receive complimentary registration. If you previously registered, please email Cody Galloway to have your registration updated and a refund processed.
• If you’re attending the event in person, please review our Health + Safety page. Remember to check for updates as the event approaches.

Visa Requests

If you require a visa letter, please register for the event, and then complete the visa letter request form.

Speaker Travel Funding

If you are not being assisted or sponsored by a company or organization, and would be otherwise unable to attend for financial reasons, you may apply for travel funding. Please note that by applying, funding is not guaranteed. If awarded, certain conditions will apply.

The deadline for travel funding applications is Monday, 27 January. You will receive notification from our travel fund team no later than end of day Friday, 7 February.

Note: Talk acceptance does not guarantee travel funding.

VENUE

This year’s event will take place at Excel London located at Royal Victoria Dock, 1 Western Gateway, London E16 1XL, United Kingdom.

HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS

We have several discounted room blocks that we invite you to view on our Venue + Travel page. Rooms may sell out in advance of the room block close date, so we encourage you to book early to secure a room at the conference rate.

The schedule will be announced on Wednesday, 15 January, and will be posted on our website using Sched.com.

Note: Check the schedule for your assigned keynote time and duration. Sponsored keynotes are always 5-minutes maximum. Keynote sessions occur each morning, 2-4 April starting at 9:00AM British Summer Time. If you have a conflict with the timing of your talk or any issues uploading your bio and photo, please contact Cody Galloway.

We designed an optional PowerPoint template for our speakers. Use of these templates are not required but we do welcome you to use them for your convenience. Please see the CNCF style guide which covers things like abbreviating Kubernetes as K8s not K8 or K8S.

Any additional AV requests are due by Friday, 7 March. 

The keynote room will include:

• Screen(s)
• Projector(s)
• Handheld + Lavalier Microphones
• Countdown Timer
• Wireless Slide Advancer
• Lectern
• PowerPoint Slide Monitors
• Separate PowerPoint Notes Monitors

Note: After emailing your presentation to us, we will upload it to the show computers to play from backstage. CNCF will make every effort to accommodate additional AV needs; however, final approval for these requests will be made on a case-by-case basis.

We strictly enforce a no-pitch, non-advertorial policy for all of our presentations, especially on the keynote stage. Leading up to the event, we will send you a link to schedule a meeting with one of our co-chairs to review your presentation and ensure the messaging resonates with our audience. You must have an initial draft of your presentation at the time of the meeting.

Helpful Notes on Presentation Design

Obsolete, low-resolution (i.e. pixelated), and malformatted logos are an epidemic among conference presentations. High-resolution logos of over 1,000 cloud native projects, products, and companies are available in the cloud native landscapes. Note that all of these logos are stacked, not horizontal, and include the name. The logos should be current, otherwise you can open a pull request if they are not. Also note that the text below the logo shows the proper capitalization of projects like gRPC and containerd. In particular, Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure have all changed their logos in the last couple years; please use their current logo.

Please also review the CNCF Style Guide, which covers important things like abbreviating Kubernetes as K8s not K8 or K8S.

Important: Final PowerPoint Slide Deck Guidelines

In conjunction with recent equipment and process enhancements, The Linux Foundation and our onsite production team have updated our keynote presentation deck submission process to ensure a smooth and reliable event experience:

• Draft Submission: All keynote speakers must submit a draft of their presentation deck in PowerPoint format one week prior to the event for a technical review to confirm compatibility and address any potential issues.
• Final Deck Submission: The final version of the PowerPoint deck must be provided on a USB drive either during the scheduled tech check or e-mailed at least 12 hours before the keynote, whichever comes first. This version will be considered final, and no changes to slides or notes will be allowed after submission.

If your presentation includes custom fonts, please use these instructions for saving using a Mac or saving using a PC to ensure the fonts are properly embedded in your deck.

Once your final deck is saved and submitted at your tech check, it’s locked into our system. This allows our team to create backups, integrate with show systems, and test for smooth transitions. Failure to adhere to this policy means that any changes made past the final submission at rehearsal will not be incorporated into the show—once again, the version submitted is final, and no exceptions can be made onsite the morning of your keynote.

Keynote WalkThrough

All keynote presenters are required to attend a tech check and slide run-through on the keynote stage on Tuesday, 1 April. You’ll receive the exact time slot in your keynote pre-event email, sent the week before the event. If you anticipate any attendance issues, please inform Cody Galloway promptly.

The purpose of this exercise is not to conduct a complete run-through of your presentation from beginning to end. Instead, the goal is to achieve the following:

• Make you acquainted with the stage and provide a glimpse of what you can expect on the actual show-day.
• Test and adjust your microphone audio levels.
• Address any specific AV requirements you might have, such as playing a video or conducting a live demo.*
• Review your finalized slides to verify accuracy and observe how your PowerPoint notes will be displayed.

*Please let us know well in advance if you plan to give a demo on stage as there are additional steps we must take to ensure your success.

The Linux Foundation, in collaboration with the National Center for Women in Technology (NCWIT), has created an online course designed to teach the viewer about inclusion, diversity and unconscious bias. It is strongly encouraged by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that all our speakers watch the course to learn tips/tools to use when speaking to encourage inclusivity in presentations and messaging.

Please read and abide by our Code of Conduct, which is strictly enforced. We ask that speakers especially review and are careful to be inclusive in the words and images used during their presentation.

If you have any other venue, platform, speaker, or schedule-related questions, please contact Cody Galloway.