KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 wrapped up, and what a packed week it was! From keynotes and sessions to hands-on workshops, booth chats, swag hunting, and the inevitable last-minute live demo prep, the week flew by.
For Solo.io, this year’s conference made one thing clear: the industry is rapidly evolving from cloud-native to AI-native. We shared several exciting announcements, including the launch of the open source agentevals project and the donation of agentregistry to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Beyond the announcements, Solo.io maintainers and contributors were active across a range of CNCF projects—like kgateway, kagent, agentgateway, Istio, and more—continuing to build and support the ecosystem powering cloud-native AI and modern infrastructure.
There was a lot going on throughout the week, but here are a few of my personal highlights from the event!
Sunday, March 22nd: Day Zero
Before KubeCon + CloudNativeCon officially kicks off, there’s a not-so-secret Day Zero event just for Cloud Native project maintainers called the maintainer summit.
I’m involved in several CNCF efforts—serving as the v1.33 Kubernetes release lead, maintaining kgateway, and contributing to projects like kagent—so it’s always a meaningful way to connect with others doing similar work.
What started as an event focused solely on Kubernetes contributors has since expanded to include maintainers from across the Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem. It’s a great opportunity to meet fellow maintainers, share experiences, and collaborate on common challenges across projects.
Monday, March 23rd: Day One
On Monday, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon kicked off with the co-located event days, providing a focused way to dive into specific communities and technologies before the main conference.
Aaron Ray and I presented on robots and cloud native at Edge Day. I did a live demo, turning off the WiFi and showing how agentgateway can provide model failover to local models during outages.
Across the convention hall, Keith and Idit spoke at the Agentics Day. While many organizations have seen initial success deploying LLM-integrated chatbots and agentic IDEs into internal or external production, the vast majority of agentic projects are still stuck in day 1 pilots with no clear path to production. This talk will share best practice patterns and architectures for agentic infrastructure in use across the agentgateway, kagent, and agentregistry communities to help you bring your agentic pilots to day 2 and beyond.
Later in the day, Eitan Yarmush spoke on a panel about a key GAIE design choice: external processing vs. a service in the traffic path. Drawing on experience building agentgateway, he highlighted the trade-offs of the external processing approach, alongside fellow panelists Nili Guy, Dan Sun, Abdullah Gharaibeh, and Morgan Foster.
That evening, I joined a group—Aaron Ray, Mars Toktonaliev (who was the program committee co-chair for Kubernetes on Edge Day), Tabitha Sable, and Ian Coldwater—for a visit to Keukenhof. It was a perfect way to unwind after a full day of talks, surrounded by fields of spring blooms.That evening, I joined a group—Aaron Ray, Mars (who organized Edge Day), Tabitha Sable, and Ian Coldwater—for a visit to Keukenhof. It was a perfect way to unwind after a full day of talks, surrounded by fields of spring blooms.
Back at the conference, Tabitha was planning on handing out adorable goose stickers at the SIG Security booth to anyone who had migrated off ingress-nginx. The goose, of course, is a nod to the long-running Kubernetes “honk” meme—a playful mascot representing cloud-native mischief that started as an inside joke in 2019 with the Untitled Goose Game.
If you haven’t migrated yet, check out the different Kubernetes Gateway API implementations (including agentgateway and kgateway)—there’s even an ingress2gateway tool to help with the transition!
Tuesday, March 24th, Day 2: First Day of Kubecon + CloudNativeCon
Every KubeCon + CloudNativeCon starts with a CNCF Ambassador breakfast before the keynote. The CNCF Ambassador program extends CNCF’s mission of “making cloud native ubiquitous” through community leadership and mentorship. Solo.io proudly has five CNCF ambassadors—Lin Sun, Michael Levan, Leon Nunes, Antonio Berben, and me.
After the keynote, Luc and I presented a session on how Kyverno policies can evaluate MCP traffic to prevent privilege escalation, enforce namespace and tenant isolation, and link Kubernetes actions to real user identities. We also demonstrated a live setup where agentgateway integrates with Cursor and Kyverno to enforce that only authorized MCP calls are allowed.
On Tuesday, Solo engineers hosted two parallel Contribfests—one for kgateway and one for kagent. These 90-minute sessions gave participants the chance to tackle good first issues, hunt bugs, discuss improvements, and pair program directly with project maintainers, contributing hands-on to CNCF projects.
I helped run the kgateway Contribfest alongside David Jumani, Steven Thwaites, and kgateway’s LFX mentee, Mayowa Fajobi. The kagent Contribfest was led by Eitan Yarmush, Lin Sun, Peter Jausovec, and Dmytro Rashko.
I moderated an Istio Day panel in the Cloud Native Theater, where Istio end users shared their experiences running Istio in production over the years. It was fascinating to hear stories from users who have been using Istio for over five years, including their favorite “horror stories”. The panel featured Agustín F. Gómez Lamela from CaixaBank, Alex Williams from Skyscanner, Uladzimir Babrou from TomTom, and Roland Kool from bol.com.
Antonio and Felipe presented a talk on Intelligent Routing for Optimized Inference, showing how simple queries that don’t need GPUs can be routed efficiently to CPUs. Their three-layer architecture uses Istio and agentgateway for secure communication, LLM-D for inference, and kagent for orchestration, enabling real-time routing to Small Language Models (SLMs) with fewer than 8 billion parameters.
Meanwhile, at the Solo.io booth, the team was hard at work running labs and engaging attendees—scanning over 600 visitors on the first day alone. The Solo labs covered hot topics like “Discover kagent” and “LLM Consumption with agentgateway on Kubernetes,” as well as foundational sessions such as “Basics of Kubernetes Gateway API.” Over 1,000 Credly badges were issued to participants, recognizing hands-on learning and active engagement with the labs.
Kgateway and kagent had open-source booths where maintainers could connect with real users and contributors. During the Kubecrawl, David Jumani and I spent time at the kgateway booth chatting with end users. My favorite question was about our favorite kgateway features—David highlighted ListenerSets, crucial for multi-tenancy and a feature he helped get into Gateway API v1.5, while I chose policy inheritance and Route delegation, which allow flexible policy definition across different levels.
Wednesday, March 25th, Day 3: More Keynotes
The second official day of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon kicked off with more Solo keynotes. This morning, our CEO, Idit Levine, and Chief Product Officer, Keith Babo, spoke about productionizing AI agent workloads and highlighted open-source projects like agentgateway and kagent that make this possible. They also announced the donation of agentregistry to the CNCF and introduced a new open-source project, agentevals, aimed at standardizing agent evaluation and benchmarking.
After the keynote, I participated in a roundtable on operationalizing AI at scale alongside Jorge (AKS), Allan (Google), and Ellis Tarn (AWS), discussing how cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, service meshes, and container runtimes help run AI workloads reliably and securely. We covered challenges from model versioning and GPU scheduling to observability for inference pipelines, sharing insights on what’s working, what’s missing, and how infrastructure is evolving to support production AI.
Lin Sun and Christian Posta did another book signing of their book “AI Agents in Kubernetes” at the Solo booth, and once again, we ran out of all our physical copies! Missed getting a copy? Don’t worry, we have free digital copies available on the Solo.io site.
After the book signing, Christian gave a talk on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which defines how MCP servers expose tools, data, and workflows to agents. Originally designed for single-tenant, desktop-based use cases, enterprises need to evolve MCP into secure, multi-tenant, remotely accessible services that safely expose sensitive business capabilities to AI agents. The talk included live demos covering real-world scenarios, including calling across domain MCP servers, exposing public APIs via OpenAPI-to-MCP translation, understanding cross-application access, and agentgateway elicitations.
Meanwhile, in the sponsor hall, I helped Mitch Connors run a live demo at the Microsoft Booth, showing how to keep AI spend in check with Istio and agentgateway. It was awesome to see Istio in action with agentgateway, enabling AI use cases like tracking costs per app, preventing budget blowouts, and growing AI usage responsibly. This demo highlighted one of the exciting new announcements from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon: Istio’s integration with agentgateway.
Thursday, March 26th, Day 4: Last Day
The final day of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon was still packed with activity for Solo.io! The morning kicked off with the CNCF Book Club, where attendees grabbed fresh copies of their favorite cloud-native titles!
Idit spoke on a panel about AI agents in platform engineering, highlighting how to scale AI responsibly, measure effectiveness, and build trust in nondeterministic systems.
By the final day, we’d run out of t-shirts, but the excitement didn’t stop. Attendees kept coming by to try our labs—even without free swag—and you can still try them from the comfort of home on the Solo.io site.
Post-KubeCon Reflections:
Catching up after KubeCon is a full-time job—scrolling through social media, reading blogs, reviewing agentgateway PRs I missed, and experimenting even more with kagent. I’m especially excited to dive into the talk recordings as they’re released!
Curious to explore the projects featured in this recap? Here are some great ways to get involved:
Get involved with our new open source project, agentevals:
Grab a digital copy of Lin Sun and Christian Posta’s book, “AI Agents in Kubernetes”
Explore Solo.io’s on-demand hands-on labs
Watch our on-demand webinar to learn about agent skills, controlling AI costs, simplifying service mesh operations, and more.
Thanks for a great KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and hope to see you at the Solo.io booth in Salt Lake City!
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