KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America

Michael Amundson

Distinguished Engineer

CVS Health

Michael Amundson is a distinguished engineer in the Developer Experience organization at CVS Health where he leads technical direction for the CAP Application Platform. His near decade of experience in platform engineering started at Target Corporation, where he helped build Target's in-house application platform. Prior to his work on platforms, Michael worked as an application engineer in roles across a number of Fortune 500 companies, daydreaming of platforms that didn't yet exist.

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Conference Sessions

• Beyond End User: CAP and the Evolution of Open Source at CVS Health Nov 10, 2026 • 9:45 AM-9:50 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Two years ago, the DevEx organization at CVS Health set an audacious plan in motion: build a platform capable of running the company’s thousands of existing applications while remaining approachable enough that someone joining the company could ship a new application on their very first day. To make this work, we knew we would need to leverage many of the incredible open source projects across the CNCF landscape. But we also knew that achieving our goal would require software we’d have to build: a meta control plane that could weave these projects together into a single streamlined platform. We call the platform CAP and we’re excited to share its design, show a brief demo, and talk about our transition from end user to open source maintainer and contributor as CAP evolves from an internal platform to a brand new open source project.

Chris Aniszczyk

CTO, Cloud and Infrastructure

The Linux Foundation

building a better world through open collaboration

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Conference Sessions

• Welcome + Opening Remarks Nov 10, 2026 • 9:00 AM-9:30 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

Keith Babo

Chief Product Officer

Solo.io

Keith Babo is the Chief Product Officer at Solo.io, where he leads product strategy and execution, enabling enterprises to build and scale the next generation of cloud-native and agentic infrastructure for AI-driven applications. Prior to Solo.io, Keith held leadership roles in product management and engineering at Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and Intel Corporation.

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Conference Sessions

• Sponsored: The Harness Is the New Runtime Nov 10, 2026 • 10:20 AM-10:25 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Agent harnesses are the dominant pattern for agentic AI on the desktop and will become the dominant runtime for agents on Kubernetes. The hard part is the move: bringing the harness onto your cluster with end user experience intact while adopting Kubernetes primitives for sandboxed execution, checkpoint/restore, scale, and security. Containers made this exact trip from developer machines to shared infrastructure in Kubernetes. In this keynote we'll present harnessed agents as your cluster's next critical workload. We'll show how harnesses combine models with a modular runtime of tools, skills, and plugins, and how leading CNCF ecosystem projects deliver the identity, policy, and observability to run them in production.

Abby Bangser

Principal Engineer

Syntasso

Abby is a Principal Engineer at Syntasso delivering Kratix, the open-source cloud-native framework for providing the execution later for your internal platforms. Her keen interest in supporting internal development comes from over a decade of experience in consulting and product delivery roles across platform, site reliability, and quality engineering. Abby is a CNCF Ambassador, Team Topologies Advocate, emeritus CNCF Platforms Working Group lead, and co-host of the #CoffeeOps London meetup.

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Conference Sessions

• The Flywheel Effect: Why Community Is the Ultimate End-User Advantage Nov 10, 2026 • 10:05 AM-10:15 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Cloud native promises a future without limits, but every end-user organization eventually discovers the same truth: no team becomes limitless alone. Every day, end users push CNCF projects into new industries, at new scales, and with entirely new challenges. They uncover new patterns, expose new edge cases, and find better ways to build. By sharing those experiences back with the community through talks, bug reports, reference architectures, and open collaboration, they create a flywheel where every contribution accelerates the next innovation. The result is a community where shared experience helps everyone solve problems faster, see around corners, and innovate with greater confidence. Together, Phill Morton and Abby Bangser will explore how end-user experience and community leadership fuel that flywheel. Through the upcoming Platform Engineering Community White Paper and a live demonstration of an enterprise AI platform built on those same principles, they’ll show how community ideas translate into real-world impact, enabling thousands of non-engineers to build at the speed of agents. You’ll leave with practical ideas for applying those patterns in your own organization and a new perspective on what “Cloud Native Without Limits” really means: the greatest advantage in cloud native isn’t just the technology we build; it’s the community we build it with.

Jim Beyers

Vice President

CVS Health

Hey there! I'm Jim on the CVS DevEx team, blending my love for tech with making life easier for developers. After stints at Target and Capital One, I've learned to connect tech and business. Originally from Wisconsin, I landed in Minneapolis and collected degrees like Pokémon cards (BA in CS, MS in Software Engineering, MBA from St. Thomas). Off hours, I'm with my wife Nora, kids Amelia and Ben, and our husky Cali Bean. Big on music, concerts, films, and Age of Empires 2.

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Conference Sessions

• Beyond End User: CAP and the Evolution of Open Source at CVS Health Nov 10, 2026 • 9:45 AM-9:50 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Two years ago, the DevEx organization at CVS Health set an audacious plan in motion: build a platform capable of running the company’s thousands of existing applications while remaining approachable enough that someone joining the company could ship a new application on their very first day. To make this work, we knew we would need to leverage many of the incredible open source projects across the CNCF landscape. But we also knew that achieving our goal would require software we’d have to build: a meta control plane that could weave these projects together into a single streamlined platform. We call the platform CAP and we’re excited to share its design, show a brief demo, and talk about our transition from end user to open source maintainer and contributor as CAP evolves from an internal platform to a brand new open source project.

Lorenzo Biava

Staff Infrastructure Engineer

LiveKit

Lorenzo Biava a Staff Infrastructure Engineer at LiveKit, where he operates a global WebRTC network pushing over 10 PB of monthly real-time traffic across dozens of regions. He previously served as Principal Engineer at Microsoft and Nuance, building secure, globally-distributed Kubernetes platforms for Voice AI in strictly regulated environments.

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Conference Sessions

• Sponsored: Production AI on Kubernetes: Built to Scale with Oracle Cloud Nov 11, 2026 • 9:45 AM-9:50 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Kubernetes is the foundation of the next generation of AI. Moving from experimentation to a production requires infrastructure designed for scale, performance and simplicity. In this keynote, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will explore how OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE) enables organization to build and run demanding cloud-native and AI/ML workloads on an open, enterprise-ready platform. Join Jeff Hoffman, VP of Container Services at Oracle, to hear how customers are using OKE to bring AI initiatives into production. Learn how OCI’s Kubernetes platform, high-performance infrastructure, and open-source ecosystem help teams innovate faster while maintaining the control and reliability their critical workloads require.

Jonathan Bryce

Executive Director, Cloud and Infrastructure

The Linux Foundation

Jonathan Bryce is the Executive Director of Cloud & Infrastructure at the Linux Foundation, where he leads both the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the OpenInfra Foundation—two of the largest and most influential open source communities in the world. With over 15 years of open source leadership, Jonathan co-founded the OpenStack project, guiding its evolution into a global ecosystem that supports a multi-billion-dollar market and serves as the de facto standard for open cloud infrastructure. Before his open source career, Jonathan spent over a decade in data center infrastructure and co-founded one of the industry’s earliest cloud computing companies, which grew into a billion-dollar business following its acquisition by Rackspace. Passionate about open collaboration, infrastructure innovation, and empowering users, contributors, and ecosystems worldwide, Jonathan frequently speaks at international conferences on open source strategy, infrastructure modernization, cloud-native technologies, and open source AI initiatives.

Conference Sessions

• Welcome + Opening Remarks Nov 10, 2026 • 9:00 AM-9:30 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

Jessica Forrester

Senior Distinguished Engineer

Red Hat

Jessica Forrester is a Senior Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Architect for AI Catalyst Engineering at Red Hat, working at the intersection of AI and cloud native as new technologies move into the Red Hat AI product portfolio. She was an early contributor to Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes, and their related communities. She has led many cross-functional engineering teams at Red Hat across AI, hybrid cloud services, and Kubernetes / OpenShift Container Platform.

Conference Sessions

• Sponsored: Sandbox Your Agents Nov 10, 2026 • 9:55 AM-10:00 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  AI Agents offer unequalled automation tooling for rapid software development, but with unfettered power comes great headaches, namely how to scope and secure them in cloud native stacks. A problematic agent with too much access, either through choice or a lack of knowledge, can take down entire production stacks and wipe databases. In this talk, we explore how using core community building blocks like Confidential Containers and OpenShell, alongside emerging technology across the cloud native ecosystem, allows anyone to isolate their agentic workloads and software development processes at scale with secure, containerized sandboxes.

Deepak Goel

CTO Cloud Native

Nutanix Inc

Deepak is a technology leader specializing in cloud-native platforms, Kubernetes, distributed systems, and platform engineering. As CTO for Cloud Native at Nutanix, he leads cloud-native strategy, platform architecture, and modern infrastructure initiatives. He has helped drive Kubernetes adoption, scalable data services, and the development of KUDO, later donated to the CNCF, enabling enterprises to modernize applications and operate reliably at scale across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

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Conference Sessions

• GitOps Meltdown: How a Commit Triggered a Cascading Delete of 39 Clusters in Production Nov 10, 2026 • 5:30 PM-6:00 PM Salt Palace | Level 2 | 255 BC

  GitOps assumes cluster state converges to Git.But, what happens when the desired state is wrong? This session examines a real incident where a routine Flux reconciliation turned a small git change into a cascading prune across a Kubernetes management platform managing 39 workload clusters. A missing Kustomization triggered inventory deletion, causing Flux controller to delete itself during reconciliation. Resulting in orphaned resources, stuck finalizers, and loss of critical Git repository storage. Using timelines and incident evidence, we trace the failure chain and explore Flux inventory tracking, pruning, finalizers, StatefulSet PVC ownership, CSI reclaim policies, and deletion ordering. We also cover recovery, restoring resources, rebuilding the GitOps control plane, and safely resuming reconciliation. Attendees will learn practical ways to reduce GitOps blast radius, protect stateful infrastructure, and build platforms that remain recoverable when automation fails.

• Sponsored: Standardized Yet Adaptable: How Nutanix is Evolving Cluster API with CAREN Nov 12, 2026 • 9:10 AM-9:15 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Cloud native innovation has always been driven by the community. From Mesosphere's role as a CNCF founding member to D2iQ's continued Kubernetes leadership and now Nutanix's active contributions across multiple CNCF projects, the mission has remained the same: build together in the open.In this session, we'll revisit that journey and explore how those experiences led to CAREN (Cluster API Runtime Extensions – Nutanix), an extensible framework that enables dynamic cluster configuration and lifecycle management while preserving the simplicity and consistency of Cluster API's declarative model. As we look to the future of Kubernetes fleet management, standardization via Cluster API (CAPI) and the ClusterClass feature has brought immense consistency to cluster provisioning. However, real-world enterprise deployments often hit a wall: they require dynamic customization that strict standardization struggles to accommodate.CAREN bridges the critical gap between strict declarative blueprints and real-world adaptability. By leveraging CAPI's runtime mutation hooks, CAREN dynamically configures and manages Kubernetes clusters without ever needing to fork or touch the base ClusterClass. It empowers platform engineering teams to deliver standardized, yet infinitely adaptable Kubernetes clusters.

Jeff Hoffman

OCI VP of Container Services

Oracle

Jeff Hoffman is a Vice President at Oracle, where he leads the Container, Kubernetes, and Serverless organization for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). His team is responsible for OCI services including Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE), Container Instances, and Functions. Jeff has over 30 years of experience in cloud and engineering leadership, including work prior to Oracle at Amazon, Samsung, HashiCorp, and Dell.

Conference Sessions

• Sponsored: Production AI on Kubernetes: Built to Scale with Oracle Cloud Nov 11, 2026 • 9:45 AM-9:50 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Kubernetes is the foundation of the next generation of AI. Moving from experimentation to a production requires infrastructure designed for scale, performance and simplicity. In this keynote, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will explore how OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE) enables organization to build and run demanding cloud-native and AI/ML workloads on an open, enterprise-ready platform. Join Jeff Hoffman, VP of Container Services at Oracle, to hear how customers are using OKE to bring AI initiatives into production. Learn how OCI’s Kubernetes platform, high-performance infrastructure, and open-source ecosystem help teams innovate faster while maintaining the control and reliability their critical workloads require.

Andjelko Iharos

VP of Architecture

HAProxy Technologies

Andjelko is the VP of Architecture at HAProxy Technologies. He is responsible for designing and overseeing the implementation of solutions and services at all scales—from low-level, microsecond-optimized software to massive automated clusters processing tens of billions of requests per day. Andjelko works with tools such as Python, C, Golang and many more.

Conference Sessions

• Sponsored: Sovereign AI Starts at the Traffic Layer Nov 11, 2026 • 9:35 AM-9:40 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Cloud native teams spent a decade building traffic infrastructure they control: open source, decentralized, observable, and running on Kubernetes. Then AI arrived. Inference, the most sensitive layer in the stack, became a call to a vendor API. Your cluster is sovereign. Your AI isn't. You already run what's needed to reclaim that layer. An inference request is plain HTTP, with the model name in the JSON body. The ingress and Gateway API patterns in the cluster today can route and balance that traffic, and apply policy at the boundary. One data plane, instead of a fragmented traffic stack. This session covers consistent-hashing across GPU backends and model-aware routing from request inspection, with inference staying inside the cluster. Everything runs on HAProxy, the open source, model-agnostic load balancer and ingress controller built for high throughput and low latency. You keep sovereign control of AI traffic with no performance penalty.

Idit Levine

CEO

Solo.io

Idit Levine is the founder and CEO of Solo.io, where she is dedicated to simplifying agentic AI and empowering organizations to embrace cloud-native technologies. With a strong background in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, Idit is passionate about transforming complex challenges into accessible, practical solutions for teams of all sizes by leveraging the power of innovative open-source technologies.

Conference Sessions

• Sponsored: The Harness Is the New Runtime Nov 10, 2026 • 10:20 AM-10:25 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Agent harnesses are the dominant pattern for agentic AI on the desktop and will become the dominant runtime for agents on Kubernetes. The hard part is the move: bringing the harness onto your cluster with end user experience intact while adopting Kubernetes primitives for sandboxed execution, checkpoint/restore, scale, and security. Containers made this exact trip from developer machines to shared infrastructure in Kubernetes. In this keynote we'll present harnessed agents as your cluster's next critical workload. We'll show how harnesses combine models with a modular runtime of tools, skills, and plugins, and how leading CNCF ecosystem projects deliver the identity, policy, and observability to run them in production.

Jago Macleod

Engineering Director, Kubernetes & GKE

Google

Jago Macleod is an Engineering Director at Google, where he leads much of the Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) team, which gives him the opportunity to work with some of Google Cloud’s largest customers. Prior to working at Google, Jago helped make the smart homes that may eventually turn against us at Nest; and before that, he made some of the games that will distract us along the way as VP of Engineering at Disney Interactive Games.

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Conference Sessions

• Sponsored: Kubernetes with Conviction: How Customization is Shaping the OSS AI Ecosystem's Future Nov 12, 2026 • 9:20 AM-9:25 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Just as the Linux ecosystem thrives by separating a universal, low-level kernel from specialized distributions, Kubernetes is evolving beyond a monolithic, "one-size-fits-all" architecture. Forcing a single platform to act as a universal orchestrator for everything from tiny edge devices to hyper-scale AI clusters creates inefficiency and strain. To solve this, the industry is implicitly defining a lean Kubernetes Kernel—the core API machinery, reconciliation loops, and resource abstractions—as a standardized foundation. Simultaneously, agentic engineering is drastically reducing the cost of software creation and democratizing the operational expertise needed to build upon this foundation. Join us to learn how building on the Kubernetes Kernel allows power-users to create vertically integrated, purpose-built custom distros that achieve significant performance gains while still crowd-sourcing defect discovery and reliability.

Phill Morton

Platform Architect

The Access Group

Phill is a dedicated software engineer turned platform engineer, with a strong passion for automating processes and enabling team success. With extensive experience in app modernization, cloud engineering, performance tuning, and observability. Phill brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. Throughout their career, Phill has been committed to demystifying complex processes, making them more accessible for team members, and fostering an environment where innovation and collaboration thrive.

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Conference Sessions

• The Flywheel Effect: Why Community Is the Ultimate End-User Advantage Nov 10, 2026 • 10:05 AM-10:15 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Cloud native promises a future without limits, but every end-user organization eventually discovers the same truth: no team becomes limitless alone. Every day, end users push CNCF projects into new industries, at new scales, and with entirely new challenges. They uncover new patterns, expose new edge cases, and find better ways to build. By sharing those experiences back with the community through talks, bug reports, reference architectures, and open collaboration, they create a flywheel where every contribution accelerates the next innovation. The result is a community where shared experience helps everyone solve problems faster, see around corners, and innovate with greater confidence. Together, Phill Morton and Abby Bangser will explore how end-user experience and community leadership fuel that flywheel. Through the upcoming Platform Engineering Community White Paper and a live demonstration of an enterprise AI platform built on those same principles, they’ll show how community ideas translate into real-world impact, enabling thousands of non-engineers to build at the speed of agents. You’ll leave with practical ideas for applying those patterns in your own organization and a new perspective on what “Cloud Native Without Limits” really means: the greatest advantage in cloud native isn’t just the technology we build; it’s the community we build it with.

Jorge Palma

Principal PDM Manager, Azure Kubernetes Service

Microsoft

Jorge is the Principal PM Lead for AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), a fully managed Kubernetes platform on Azure where he has served thousands of customers as a Product Manager since its early days. Formerly he was the Technical Lead for App Dev and DevOps with the Azure Global Black Belt team and has implemented and architected solutions in Azure since 2012, spanning across different roles from Services, Tech Evangelism and Tech Sales. He holds a MSc in Computer Engineering and has a mix of Dev and Ops background having worked as a full-stack developer before moving to a system administrator and later to a DevOps engineer role prior to joining Microsoft. He has founded two startups with successful exit throughout his career and has a passion for helping organizations and individuals grow and succeed leveraging the cloud and kubernetes.

Conference Sessions

• Sponsored: Agentic AI, Assembled in the Open Nov 12, 2026 • 10:15 AM-10:20 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Agentic AI is moving from experiments to production, and Kubernetes is a natural place to think about how these workloads are run. Let's look at how open source can provide a common platform layer for agentic systems, allowing frameworks, orchestrators, compute substrates, and identity infrastructure to come together behind declarative APIs. The goal is a more consistent way to deploy, schedule, secure, and observe AI agents using the cloud native model teams already know.

Abdel Sghiouar

Senior Cloud Developer Advocate

Google Cloud

Abdel Sghiouar is a senior Cloud Developer Advocate @Google Cloud. A co-host of the Kubernetes Podcast by Google and a CNCF Ambassador. His focused areas are GKE/Kubernetes, Service Mesh and Serverless. Abdel started his career in datacenters and infrastructure in Morocco where he is originally.

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Conference Sessions

• The Identity Crisis: Who is the AI Agent in Your Cluster? Nov 12, 2026 • 10:05 AM-10:15 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Kubernetes was designed for a predictable world. We built it to manage deterministic, stateless microservices with known communication paths, defined resource requirements, and static identity boundaries. The rise of agentic AI completely shatters these assumptions. An AI agent is not just another stateless workload, it is a non-deterministic entity that generates dynamic network calls, triggers external APIs, and executes machine-generated code on the fly. This behavior introduces a security blind spot: when an autonomous agent invokes a local tool or accesses a cloud database, what identity does it present? In this keynote, Abdel Sghiouar unpacks the looming identity and resource crisis of running agents on Kubernetes. He will explore why traditional Authn/Authz and container boundaries fail when software behaves unpredictably, and showcase how emerging open-source standards are trying to redefine multi-tenancy and secure execution for the next decade of cloud-native computing.

Mike Stefaniak

Senior Manager of Product

AWS

Mike Stefaniak is a Senior Manager of Product at AWS, where he leads product strategy for containers. His team focuses on simplifying Kubernetes for platform engineers and application developers at scale, spanning compute elasticity, workload abstraction, and cluster governance.

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Conference Sessions

• Sponsored: Engineering Kubernetes for the Next Era of Compute Nov 10, 2026 • 9:35 AM-9:40 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  Each generation of workload pushes Kubernetes further. AI training scales thousands of GPU nodes in minutes. Inference images hit dozens GB. Agents run untrusted code and vanish in seconds. The plumbing was not built for this. You can fork, work around it, or fix it upstream. We chose upstream. First, we rebuilt containerd's image pull pipeline into disk-backed parallel pull: 60% faster cold starts, 8x less peak memory, merged upstream. The old design OOM-killed the runtime on GPU nodes pulling 30+ GB images. Second, we fixed bottlenecks in core Kubernetes that only surface at 100K nodes, a mutex serializing HPA decisions and a scheduler re-listing every PersistentVolume per pod. Third, come explore the hardest layer still ahead: how untrusted, ephemeral code can earn true VM-grade isolation at the level of a single pod, without giving up the speed that makes containers worth running. Two fixes already upstream, and a look at where the next one is headed.

Lin Sun

Head of Open Source

Solo.io

Lin is the Head of Open Source at Solo.io, contributing full-time to the open-source community. She serves on the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), is a CNCF Ambassador, and is a maintainer for Istio, kgateway, and kagent. An international speaker at tech conferences, Lin frequently blogs about gateways, service meshes, cloud-native connectivity, and AI agents. She is the author of “Sidecar-less Istio Explained” and “AI Agents in Kubernetes”, and holds more than 200 patents.

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Conference Sessions

• Cloud Native Without Limits: What Can AI Agents Do for Us? Nov 11, 2026 • 9:20 AM-9:30 AM Salt Palace | Level 1 | Hall DE

  In Amsterdam, we explored what cloud native could do with AI agents, MCP, and a drone controlled through natural language. Now it's time for Drone 2. What happens when AI agents become a natural part of the cloud native ecosystem? Imagine agents that can debug production issues, analyze token spending, automate routine operations, and even make us laugh, all while interacting with Kubernetes, cloud native tools, and MCP servers through natural language, with humans firmly in control. This keynote explores what's possible when AI agents become trusted collaborators in cloud native. Through live demonstrations with Drone 2, we'll show how natural language and AI agents can transform the way we build, operate, and experience cloud native systems, pushing the boundaries of what's possible while keeping humans in control.

• Agentic + Cloud Native: Getting Started Contributing to Kagent Nov 12, 2026 • 11:00 AM-12:20 PM Salt Palace | Level 2 | 255 A

  Curious how kagent brings agentic AI to the cloud native ecosystem? Interested in contributing to kagent ? Want to explore the codebase and understand what powers the kagent framework? Join the kagent maintainers for a hands-on contributor session where you'll learn how the project is built and how you can become part of its growing open source community. We'll walk through the architecture of kagent, explore how agents and MCP tools work together, show you how to set up a local development environment, explain the project's community and contribution workflow, and help you get started with your first contribution. Whether you're new to the project or looking to become a regular contributor, you'll leave with the knowledge and confidence to make your first PR to kagent.