KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026: What to expect? AI...Expect AI in Amsterdam

KubeCon is back in Amsterdam

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe is back in Amsterdam, and if the schedule is anything to go by then this year’s edition is shaping up to be the most consequential yet. With 224 sessions across 10+ tracks, a packed day of co-located events, and AI woven into practically every corner of the agenda, there’s a real sense that the cloud native community is stepping into a new phase of maturity.

The big themes

AI meets cloud-native, for real this time

The AI conversation has been growing at every KubeCon, but 2026 is the year it graduates from “buzzword for the sake of buzz” to “finally a production reality.” According to CNCF’s Q4 2025 Technology Landscape Radar, 41% of AI developers are now working cloud native, and that number is only heading in an upward direction. There’s a dedicated AI + Machine Learning track covering everything from running LLM inference on Kubernetes to building open-source AI reference stacks from scratch.

One of the standout sessions to catch: “SIG Network: The State of Networking for AI on Kubernetes” with contributors from Red Hat, Google, NVIDIA, and IBM. Getting networking right for AI workloads is genuinely hard, and this is the room where those trade-offs get worked out.

Also worth flagging is the brand-new Agentics Day: MCP + Agents co-located event on Monday 23 March, a half-day deep dive into the MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystem and agentic workflows.

Platform engineering under the spotlight

The platform engineering track addresses one of the industry’s most pressing talent problems, as CNCF’s 2025 State of Tech Talent report found that 56% of organisations report being understaffed in platform engineering roles. The sessions here focus on building self-service developer platforms, automating infrastructure operations, and scaling internal platforms without burning out the team behind them. The Two sessions in this track that we are most looking forward to are:

• “Enterprise-Scale Migrations Using Agentic Workflows with Human-in-the-loop” from engineers at Adobe, a practical look at how agentic AI is being applied to the unglamorous but critical work of large-scale migrations.

• “Bringing Cloud Native PaaS To Space: Onboard Edge Computing for Satellites” from Thales Alenia Space, because apparently Kubernetes is now going to orbit.

Security gets serious about AI

The Security track covers the usual ground (multi-tenancy, credential management, confidential computing, threat modelling) but this year it’s also grappling with a new set of questions about AI-assisted operations. The stat that frames this well is that 65% of organisations in the same CNCF talent report say they’re short on cybersecurity and compliance specialists.

The talk everyone in security will want to see is “What LLMs Do, and Don’t, Know About Securing Kubernetes” by Rory McCune (Datadog), on Tuesday 24 March. This session promises an evidence-based look at where AI assistance genuinely helps versus where it hallucinates its way into dangerous misconfigurations.

Another interesting talk to attend on our list is “Securing the AI/ML Lifecycle With MLSecOps: Open Source Best Practices” from Dell and Ericsson.

Observability grows up

The Observability track is anchored by OpenTelemetry, which is clearly now the standard rather than the challenger. One session that tells the story well is “We Deleted Our Observability Stack and Rebuilt It With OTel: 12 Engineers to 4 at 20K+ Clusters” from DigitalOcean. This promises to be a raw case study in what it actually takes to standardise telemetry at scale, and the headcount savings that come with it.

Observability Day on Monday kicks off with project updates from the OTel, Prometheus, and related communities, and there are sessions on schema inference, OTTL debugging, and the evolving relationship between Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. If you’re doing anything with metrics or traces in production then be sure to check this out on Monday.

Multi-cluster & networking evolution

The networking sessions reflect how much the Kubernetes deployment model has grown. “Building the Next Generation of Multi-Cluster with Gateway API” from Microsoft and Google is worth attending if you’re running multi-cluster deployments. Meanwhile, “Demystifying the Kubernetes Network Stack (From Pod to Pod)” promises to be an interesting listen.

Co-located events to know about

As alluded to above, Monday 23 March is co-located events day. There is plenty on offer, so if nothing above takes your fancy, then there are alternate track below that might:

• CiliumCon: deep dives into eBPF-based networking and security
• OpenTofu Day: the Terraform fork that’s been moving fast, with sessions on IaC best practices and a talk on debugging slow infrastructure runs with OpenTelemetry baked in
• Platform Engineering Day: a community-led deep dive for people actually building internal platforms
• WasmCon: WebAssembly for the cloud native world is further along than you might think

Note: All require an All-Access Pass ticket.

A keynote to watch

The keynote “Riding the Waves: Around the World in an Electric Glider – Powered by Nature, Data, and Open Science” by Ricardo Rocha sits in that classic KubeCon tradition of a talk that sounds completely off-topic and turns out to be one of the most memorable of the week. This one is about using open source tooling and cloud infrastructure to navigate a solo circumnavigation by electric glider. Expect a genuinely different perspective on what “cloud-native” infrastructure makes possible.

Final Thoughts

The broader context for this event is worth mentioning. Cloud native adoption has now reached 15.6 million developers globally, with 77% of backend developers using at least one cloud native technology. The ecosystem is infrastructure; it’s the substrate that everything else runs on. The conversation has moved to “how do we make Kubernetes-based infrastructure genuinely resilient, cost-efficient, observable, and secure at scale.”

We’re looking forward to seeing you there, and please reach out if you’re attending and we’ll find time for a coffee.