What do a glider, drones, CERN and Uber have in common? They all shared the keynote stage at KubeCon 2026 in Amsterdam last week. As a Silver Member of the CNCF, NWS was once again on site with part of the team.
Find out what Sebastian, Achim, Justin, Dominik, Martin and Daniel experienced during the conference, what’s new in the cloud-native world and which contributions they found particularly exciting in our review of KubeCon 2026!
Keynotes: Cloud-native everywhere, NVIDIA and Uber as new CNCF members and open source as a driver of AI innovation
KubeCon 2026 in Amsterdam was once again a huge event: with around 13,000 visitors, it was probably the largest open source event in the world. The 40% of first-time attendees indicate that cloud-native continues to grow, and the keynotes that opened each day of the conference made this clear.
Two large corporations, NVIDIA and Uber, were welcomed as new CNCF members. Microsoft, Amazon and other companies emphasized their commitment to open source for AI and presented various projects, some developed in collaboration, including smarter routing of network requests in the context of LLMs, ML and other applications of AI.
From all the news, you could get the impression that the CNCF and the cloud-native ecosystem is just “taking off” – which was also illustrated by live demos with camera drones and a glider on the keynote stage. And the talks over the three days of the conference reinforced this assumption once again.
The NWS picks: Our favorite talks
With several hundred talks to choose from, creating a personal schedule for KubeCon 2026 was already a challenge. We will certainly be watching some of the presentations on YouTube over the next few weeks. From the contributions we were able to experience live, we have compiled a list of our favorites that you should definitely not miss.
Demystifying the Kubernetes Network Stack (from Pod to Pod)
Dominik’s favorite article was all about the network behavior in Kubernetes and the question of what actually happens under the hood when two pods (want to) communicate with each other.
For Dominik, it was particularly interesting that the network features in Kubernetes are consistently based on Linux on-board features – why reinvent the wheel? Network namespaces, veth pairs and routing with iptables or nftables will also be sufficient for Kubernetes in 2026.
Another exciting aspect were the connections to eBPF-based network solutions such as Cilium, which by and large do not behave much differently.
Bridging Islands: EVPN-Overlays for Multi-Cluster KubeVirt
Our Kubernetes expert Justin heard about many real-world problems and solutions when it comes to virtualization on Kubernetes in his favorite KubeCon 2026 talk. He was particularly interested in the ever-increasing possibilities for managing applications and VMs and integrating them into existing Kubernetes environments.
Freedom through Boundaries: Building Configurations that age well
For Achim, as manager of our cloud team, a talk about clear documentation and definition of (customer) environments was of course a real find.
The duality of the focus was particularly interesting for him: while not every possible use case needs to be officially supported and should be based more on the feasibility of the platform, good usability must be ensured above all for the configurations offered. The article mentioned, for example, intuitive naming of parameters and clear, early feedback for unsupported combinations of features.
From cloud-native apps to cloud-native platforms
Sebastian found the most valuable thoughts for him in one of the keynotes at KubeCon 2026: In a world where the speed of development will continue to increase due to AI and automation, the infrastructure must also be able to keep up.
The key to success in this undertaking lies in good platform engineering with clear responsibilities, guidelines for usage and processes for the provision of (internal) products – a topic that also concerns us in relation to the NETWAYS Cloud where we are always trying to improve.
Day-2 Reality Check: Taming wasteful telemetry
Daniel found his highlight at the very end of KubeCon 2026: Shortly before the end of the third day, he got new ideas for stemming the flood of telemetry that occurs more or less automatically in large environments.
The presentation posed the uncomfortable question of whether you should really collect traces that you might need in 5 years’ time, and also addressed other often erroneous assumptions about observability in production. In the end, there were enough suggestions to do some spring cleaning in Grafana and Co. again.
Tot Ziens Amsterdam, Vamos a Barcelona!
After a busy few days at KubeCon 2026 in Amsterdam, we’re now looking forward to Barcelona, where KubeCon will be held next year. By then, we will hopefully have digested the new impressions around AI, Gateway API and all the other news, and recovered from recent developments in the Kubernetes ecosystem such as the archiving of the ingress-nginx project.
And who knows – maybe next year, colleagues from NETWAYS Web Services will also be on stage to talk about our experiences with Kubernetes, the cloud and everything else that drives us. In the meantime, you can of course follow our impressions on our blog and stay up to date.
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