Cloud Native Theater

First Time at KubeCon and New to Cloud Native? Start Here.
Maximize Your KubeCon Experience with Cloud Native University
The CNCF ecosystem is massive—and if it’s your first time at KubeCon and your first steps into the cloud native world, it can feel overwhelming. Even seasoned attendees often realize they’ve missed foundational concepts along the way. That’s where Cloud Native University comes in.

This Cloud Native Theater primer is your launchpad into the cloud native universe. You’ll get grounded in the key technologies, core concepts, and welcoming community that make up the CNCF and its ever-growing landscape.
Whether you’re brand new to cloud native, a first-time KubeCon attendee, or both—Cloud Native University will help you build the context, confidence, and connections to make the most of your KubeCon experience and long-term journey in this space.

What to Expect:

• A friendly, approachable introduction to cloud native technologies and the CNCF Landscape.
• Stories and lessons from community members who’ve been exactly where you are
• Tips for navigating your first KubeCon (what not to miss!)

Start strong. Stay grounded. Go cloud native. Join us at Cloud Native University—your essential first step into the community.

Topics to Include:

• Key technologies: Linux, Containers, Kubernetes and the CNCF’s projects
• Key topics: CICD, Security, AI and ML, Cloud Native Architecture, and Business Value
• Community: The CNCF, TAGs, projects, and navigating KubeCon

Join us and celebrate 10 years of Envoy at EnvoyCon, the go-to event for Envoy practitioners of all experience levels. Whether you’re just getting started, refining your expertise, or pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, this community-driven virtual conference offers deep technical content and practical insights from both contributors and users.

This event is all about real-world experience—no product pitches, just meaningful conversations, collaboration, and innovation within the Envoy open-source ecosystem.

What to Expect:

• Discover Envoy Proxy’s powerful capabilities for high-performance proxying and extensibility.
• Explore Envoy Gateway, a Kubernetes-native control plane that simplifies working with Envoy Proxy.
• Learn how Envoy is evolving to handle modern AI traffic and what’s next for the community.
• A CNCF graduated project since 2017, Envoy powers diverse deployment models including edge proxies, service mesh sidecars, and load balancing.

Join us for a day of engaging talks and case studies, and connect directly with maintainers, community leaders, and adopters. Let’s build the future of Envoy—together!

KyvernoCon will expand access to policy-as-code conversations by offering a globally accessible event at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2026. With a mix of thought leadership, hands-on sessions, and success stories, this event will showcase how Kyverno enables teams to scale policy management and AI workloads safely and efficiently, enhance platform security, and improve developer experiences. This community focused setting is ideal for connecting our broader end-user community while encouraging participation from new users and contributors.

Topics to Include:

• Getting Started with Kyverno (CEL-First)
• Security, Compliance & AI Workloads at Scale with Policy as Code
• Developer Enablement & Platform Experience
• Kyverno Integrations and Advanced Use Cases

Join us for KubeVirt Summit Live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, where we showcase all things KubeVirt! We want to hear from our active developers about new features in the pipeline, as well as end users sharing their deployment journeys and use cases at scale.

Topics to Include:

• Building, Scaling & Migrating with KubeVirt – Building your own cloud, running KubeVirt in production at scale, and migrating production workloads.
• AI, GPUs & Advanced Workloads – GPU allocation, supporting AI workloads, Confidential Computing, security, and workload isolation.
• Storage, Networking & Data Protection – Storage and network improvements and considerations, including VM backup and restore.
• KubeVirt Ecosystem & What’s New – Integration with other CNCF projects and demos of new KubeVirt features.

Kubeflow Summit: Data & AI on Kubernetes
As Generative AI moves from experimental notebooks to production clusters, the need for robust orchestration and scalable Data & AI infrastructure has never been greater. This event provides a deep-dive into building end-to-end AI lifecycles using Kubeflow, focusing on the critical bridge between data engineering and model development. We will showcase exciting updates from the Kubeflow community, including AI-assistant development with the Kubeflow MCP Server, new project initiatives such as Kale, deep MLflow integration for experiment tracking, and Kubeflow SDK updates to streamline the Data & AI practitioner experience.

Attendees will transition from data preparation and distributed training to advanced model serving, with a specific focus on Generative AI patterns like RAG and PEFT. Beyond the basics, we will explore ‘Day 2’ essentials: securing ML pipelines, implementing cloud-native observability, and leveraging the broader CNCF landscape to build resilient, scalable Data and AI platforms. Whether you are a Data Scientist or a Platform Engineer, you will leave with the practical skills to deploy real-world AI solutions within a Kubernetes environment.

Topics to Include:

• End-to-end AI lifecycles using Kubeflow
• Kubeflow Gen AI & post-training RL
• Kubeflow Data & AI infrastructure

Join us at IstioDay, the community event for Istio practitioners of all experience levels.

Whether you’re deploying your first workload, operating Istio at scale, exploring Ambient Mesh, or enabling AI-powered applications, IstioDay brings together maintainers, contributors, practitioners, and end users to share technical insights, production lessons, and the latest innovations across the Istio ecosystem.

This event is all about the community. There are no product pitches, just technical discussions, collaboration, and lessons learned from operating Istio at scale.

What to Expect:

• Learn about the latest innovations in Istio, including Ambient Mesh, Gateway API integration, security, observability, and traffic management.
• Discover how organizations are using Istio to support AI workloads, platform engineering, multi-cluster deployments, and modern cloud native networking.
• Hear production case studies and operational best practices from teams running Istio at scale.
• Connect with Istio maintainers and contributors to learn what’s next for the project and how you can get involved.

Since joining the CNCF in 2022, Istio has continued to evolve as a leading service mesh platform, helping organizations build secure, observable, and resilient cloud native applications.

Join us for engaging talks, technical sessions, and community discussions as we explore the future of Istio together.

llm-d: A Well-Lit Path to Inference at Scale, in Production

llm-d is a CNCF Sandbox project that evolves Kubernetes into state-of-the-art AI infrastructure. By treating distributed inference as a first-class cloud native workload, llm-d bridges high-level control planes like KServe and low-level engines like vLLM — delivering inference-aware routing, prefill/decode disaggregation, and hierarchical KV cache management. Founded by Red Hat, Google Cloud, IBM Research, CoreWeave, and NVIDIA, and joined by AMD, Cisco, Hugging Face, Intel, Lambda, and Mistral AI, llm-d provides well-lit paths – validated, production-ready deployment patterns benchmarked end-to-end under realistic load – so that any team can serve at scale, on any accelerator.

This Cloud Native Theater session brings together the llm-d community to showcase the project’s latest features and advances, performance benefits through real-world deployment examples from Tesla, Google, Oracle, AWS, and others, and its integration with the broader CNCF ecosystem – including the Gateway API Inference Extension, KServe, and Prometheus. The session will also cover the project’s forward-looking vision and roadmap as it matures toward production-grade standards for cloud native inference. Attendees will leave understanding how to deploy high-performance LLM inference on Kubernetes, without vendor lock-in.