Shimmy’s Early Look: Can’t-Miss Sessions at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025

It’s hard to believe, but here we are: CNCF turns 10, Kubernetes is in its teenage years, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 is set to land in Atlanta this November. Over the past decade, these events have gone from niche gatherings of early adopters to must-attend global summits that shape the very fabric of how modern software runs. If you care about cloud native, platform engineering, or AI’s next wave, this is the place to be.

But let’s face it — there are more than 300 sessions, keynotes and co-located events packed into four days. The problem isn’t what to see, it’s what not to miss. With that in mind, here’s my early Shimmy take on sessions and tracks you’ll want to circle on your schedule.

Monday: Co-Located Deep Dives

KubeCon doesn’t ease you in — it throws you into the deep end on day one with its co-located events. These are where the CNCF community incubates tomorrow’s big ideas.

Platform Engineering Day is a natural draw, with platform teams now firmly at the center of enterprise modernization. Cloud Native + Kubernetes AI Day will be buzzing — expect hands-on discussions of how to run and scale AI workloads. Observability Day remains essential as we wrestle telemetry into something actionable, not just noisy dashboards.

Security leaders will want to head straight to Open Source SecurityCon. With supply-chain risk dominating headlines, this is where projects like Sigstore, OPA and SLSA converge with practitioners solving real threats.

And don’t sleep on ArgoCon, BackstageCon, Kubeflow Summit, EnvoyCon, FluxCon, KyvernoCon, OpenTofu Day or WasmCon. Each could easily anchor an entire conference of its own.

If you need a sampler, the Project Lightning Talks offer a quick-fire tour of innovation. Keep an eye out for Lin Sun’s “Istio: Set Sailing Without Sidecars”, Weizhou Lan’s Spiderpool talk on GPU-aware networking for AI, and Chenyu Zhang’s ModelPack: An Open Standard for Packaging and Running LLMs.” You’ll walk away with a notebook full of ideas — and probably a few future CNCF project names to track.

Tuesday: Keynotes and AI Everywhere

Tuesday is when the big tent officially opens. Chris Aniszczyk of the Linux Foundation will kick things off, but the real tone-setter is Stacey Potter from OpenSSF and Adolfo García Veytia with “Supply Chain Reaction: A Cautionary Tale in K8s Security.” In a year of breaches and SBOM drama, that’s a message we can’t ignore.

Then comes one of the most anticipated keynotes: Niantic engineers Yunpeng Liu and Andy Zhang showing how Pokémon Go optimizes global gameplay using Kubernetes and Kubeflow. It’s more than nostalgia — it’s proof that Kubernetes isn’t just for banks and telcos; it’s running the world’s biggest consumer workloads.

Adobe’s Joseph Sandoval will follow with a keynote still under wraps. If history is any guide, expect something bold about platform scale or AI.

After the keynotes, the schedule explodes into parallel tracks. My early picks:

• “Benchmarking GenAI Foundation Model Inference Optimizations” (Capital One + Google) – practical performance insights for anyone deploying LLMs.
• “10 Years of Cilium” – a retrospective that doubles as a roadmap for networking and security in cloud native.
• “CafeGPT: Serving LLMs Like Coffee with Kubernetes” – part metaphor, part architecture, and likely to be a crowd favorite.
• “1000 Clusters, 1 Brain” – Salesforce and AWS on AIOps-driven self-healing at scale.
• Apple’s “Talk to Your Dashboards” – LLMs simplifying observability, turning SRE toil into natural language queries.
• And for those worrying about AI security, “In AI We Trust? Securing Agents One Step at a Time” brings voices from Solo.io, Snowflake, and ControlPlane.

Wednesday: Cloud Native for Good and Helm 4

Wednesday’s keynotes remind us that technology isn’t just about business outcomes. “Cloud Native for Good” features speakers from Ericsson, the UN, and the Child Rescue Coalition—proof this community’s work impacts more than uptime and latency.

Breakout highlights are equally strong:

• Hinge engineers with “Models as Microservices, Platforms as Partners.”
• NetApp and DigitalOcean are showing Kubernetes troubleshooting with MCP, RAG, and K8sgpt.
• Helm 4 unveiled by SUSE — yes, the package manager that powered a generation of cloud apps is back with a major update.
• Netflix shares how it manages dynamic compute capacity at scale.
• Bloomberg and Huawei are demoing multi-cluster AI orchestration with Karmada.

If you want to glimpse the community’s soul, don’t miss the sessions on maintainer life, SIG Auth’s security enhancements, or the Kubernetes Steering Committee’s “Beyond the Code” panel. This is where governance meets grit.

Thursday: Future Shock

By Thursday, you’ll either be exhausted or running on CNCF-fueled adrenaline. Either way, the closing sessions are forward-looking and can’t be missed.

NVIDIA and Omnara’s “Tuning GenAI Workloads on Kubernetes: What Works and What Doesn’t” promises unvarnished lessons from the field. Bytedance, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft will tackle “Navigating the Rapid Evolution of Large Model Inference.” Spotify will share what it means to manage a million infra resources.

For the security-minded, Uber will host “Red vs Blue: A Live Attacker-Defender Kubernetes Showdown.” If you’ve ever wanted to see live hacking inside clusters, that’s your ticket.

And then there’s Microsoft’s “Rage Against the Machine: Fighting AI Complexity with Kubernetes Simplicity.” If ever a session title summed up 2025, that might be it.

Beyond the Sessions: Community and Culture

KubeCon isn’t just about the talks. The Project Pavilion and ContribFests let you roll up your sleeves and contribute — from Istio pull requests to Helm plugin hacking. The KubeCrawl + CloudNativeFest remains the heartbeat of community building, equal parts hallway track and celebration.

These moments matter. In the end, CNCF’s greatest achievement isn’t Kubernetes or Envoy or Prometheus — it’s the global, diverse, open community that shows up year after year.

Shimmy’s Take

This year’s KubeCon is a collision of three tectonic forces: AI everywhere, platform engineering at the core and security as the constant backdrop. My advice? Balance your schedule between visionary keynotes, tactical deep dives and a few hallway conversations you didn’t plan for. That serendipity is often where the real magic happens.

I’ll be in Atlanta in November. Techstrong TV will, as usual, be broadcasting live from the show floor. Save me a seat at CafeGPT, and let’s trade notes on what the next 10 years of cloud native might look like.

Also, if Cloud Native is your thing, be sure to sign up for our Cloud Native Now virtual event just a few weeks before KubeCon to warm up for the big event in Atlanta.