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KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025: 5 Key Takeaways

Kubecon EU 2025 came with many interesting updates across the Kubernetes and Cloud Native ecosystems.

Written by:

Avatar Kenny Vu Kenny Vu

Published on:

Apr 9, 2025

Last updated on:

Apr 17, 2025

This blog is part of our KubeCon EU 2025 series, we recommend reading the rest of the posts in the series:

Helm v4 and Helm Charts v3: Coming Soon

A new major version for the Kubernetes package manager, Helm, is on the way.

At KubeCon Europe 2025, maintainers of Helm provided an update about the progress of Helm v4 which included:

The timeline is an estimate and could change, however, their aim is to release Helm v4 in November 2025, alongside an experimental release of Helm Charts v3 (with a stable version expected to be released before Helm v5)

Helm v4 is still under development with potential changes still being considered, so if you have questions and ideas for Helm v4 and/or Helm Charts v3 it’s probably not too late to check-in with the Helm community.

Crossplane v2 Preview Release: A Namespaced Model?

The maintainers of the CNCF project, Crossplane, used the opportunity of having a session at KubeCon Europe 2025 to introduce more members of the Cloud Native community to Crossplane and the preview version of Crossplane v2, featuring an interesting architectural change: a shift to a namespaced model.

They say Crossplane v2 will make Crossplane more useful, intuitive and better suited for building control planes for applications and infrastructure. However, per the Crossplane documentation.

Don’t use Crossplane v2.0-preview in production.

So we can’t not use it in production to reap the benefits yet, but anyone can experiment with it and begin preparing migration strategies to have a cloud native infrastructure that includes Crossplane v2.

OTel Everywhere: The Observability Community is Shifting to OpenTelemetry

In the cloud native observability space, OpenTelemetry (OTel) appears to be emerging as the default standard for instrumentation and the number of sessions that referenced OTel at KubeCon Europe 2025 made that clear.

During Observability Day, many sessions featured engineers sharing real-world stories, lessons, and growing pains faced when adopting OpenTelemetry. It was clear the OpenTelemetry Community wanted to help ease the pain and learning curve for new OpenTelemetry adopters as they learn the tool and embark on similar journeys early OpenTelemetry adopters have already faced.

Members of the OpenTelemetry Community are also creating tools helpful for new users, like the OTTL Playground, that can be used to create, test and troubleshoot OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL) statements.

Kubernetes Bin-Packing and Node Scaling Optimisation for Cost-Efficient Cloud Usage

There were several sessions at KubeCon Europe 2025 that focused on making a platform more cost-efficient by improving Kubernetes bin-packing and node scaling optimisation; each with different approaches aimed at reducing cloud infrastructure costs by maximising node efficiency.

One angle of attack, presented by software engineers from Datadog, was the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler’s scale-up behavior. When the cluster autoscaler decides to add a new node to a Kubernetes cluster, their team have manipulated the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler’s decision-making process to select the most cost-efficient instance type. Briefly touching the surface of how they did this, they hooked up their own instance analysis tool to the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler using a gRPC expander.

Another angle of attack, presented by a CloudOps Engineer at Mercedes-Benz and an representative from Cast AI, focused on identifying underutilised nodes within the cluster. They developed a solution that identifies underutilised nodes, gracefully re-schedules all pods in underutilised nodes before taking down the underutilised nodes.

CNCF - A Cloud Native Platform Engineering Community

At the start of Platform Engineering Day, the CNCF Platforms Working Group (WG) announced that they have become too large to be a WG and are therefore becoming the Cloud Native Platform Engineering Community that will support platform engineering within the CNCF.

It will be interesting to see how platform engineering principles will be integrated into new and existing CNCF projects.

Conclusion

That wraps up my 5 key takeaways from my experience at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025. As always, the Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystems are simultaneously maturing and evolving at a rapid pace. Looking back at the packed schedule, there were many other sessions I wish I could have attended - unfortunately, I could only attend one session at a time. There’s no doubt in my mind due to the sheer size of the event each attendee had their own unique experience and set of takeaways. But, from my perspective:

  • Thinking about all the open source and in-house projects that will no doubt be updating their Helm Charts and CI/CD pipelines to support Helm v4 and Helm Charts v3. It won’t hurt to monitor the progress of Helm v4 and open source projects migrating to Helm v4 or to an alternative to Helm.
  • Seeing latecomers getting kicked out of a Crossplane Intro and Deep Dive talk due to all the seats and standing space being occupied. It was clear that a growing number of the community are focused on updating their stacks to include Crossplane.
  • Seeing a significant number of Observability Day sessions focused on OpenTelemetry and sessions about other CNCF projects I attended usually having one at least slide mention support for OpenTelemetry integration. The community shift to OpenTelemetry for both Devs and Ops is clear. Vendor locked standards are out.

However, I’m sure there were other exciting news announced at Kubecon EU 2025 that I have missed. While I wait for the videos of all the sessions to be uploaded, we will be seeking out insights from other attendees to find new interesting emerging projects and learn how other parts of the Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystems are growing.

This blog is part of our KubeCon EU 2025 series, we recommend reading the rest of the posts in the series:

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