What a week! We’re still energized from an amazing KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta. With 9,000 attendees and the celebration of CNCF’s 10-year anniversary, this year’s event was truly special.
For Solo.io, it was a landmark moment. We shared several major announcements, most notably the launch of the agent registry, which drew a lot of excitement across the cloud-native community. Beyond that, Solo.io maintainers and contributors were active across key open source projects in the CNCF ecosystem, including kgateway, kagent, agentgateway, Istio, and more, demonstrating our ongoing commitment to building tools that advance cloud-native AI and infrastructure.There was a lot happening throughout the week, but here are some of my top highlights from the event!
Day Zero:
The Sunday before KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, the CNCF Maintainer Summit brought together the people driving our projects for an exclusive in-person gathering. I’m personally involved in several CNCF projects, serving as the v1.33 Kubernetes release lead, maintaining kgateway, and contributing to other projects like kagent.
The Maintainer Summit is a unique chance for the people behind CNCF projects to collaborate, connect, and celebrate. This year, it was a great opportunity for the Kubernetes release leads of v1.33 (me), v1.34 (Vyom Yadav), and v1.35 (Drew Hagen) to catch up and chat about both past and upcoming release logos. The Maintainer Summit swag included a fun version of “Exploding Clusters” which features my v1.33 Octarine Logo.
Another Solo.io maintainer, Daneyon Hansen, led the Project Meeting for the Gateway API Inference Extensions. Gateway API Inference Extension is an official Kubernetes project that provides optimized routing and load balancing for serving Kubernetes self-hosted generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads. Daneyon is one of the maintainers working on Inference Extensions, and kgateway is one of the projects that already implements Gateway API Inference Extensions for inference routing!
The other news during the Maintainer conference was the Ingress NGINX Retirement. The Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee announced the upcoming retirement of Ingress NGINX. Best-effort maintenance will continue until March 2026, after which there will be no further releases, bug fixes, or security updates. Existing deployments will continue to function, and installation artifacts will remain available, but users are encouraged to migrate to alternatives, with Gateway API recommended as the modern replacement. Check out our blog on what you need to know about the NGINX ingress retirement and migrating to Kubernetes Gateway API to learn more.
Behind the scenes, we were also working to get our Solo.io booth ready for the first official Kubecon + CloudNativeCon day.
Day One:
I spoke at AI Day with Nimisha Mehta from Confluent on “Beyond Chat: Bringing Agents to Kubernetes”, where we demoed using kagent to debug Kubernetes clusters. Nimisha and I also spoke at Cloud Native University Day, where we presented “Agents in Kubernetes 101: A Crash Course on Cloud Native AI Agents”, an intro talk on how AI agents in general work and how kagent can save the day, and fix a broken demo live!
Lin Sun led an amazing panel as part of SecurityCon featuring Eitan Yarmush from Solo.io, Ricardo Aravena, one of the Cloud Native AI Initiative Group leads, Hannah Foxwell, a community advocate from Mindguard.ai, and Andrew Martin, the CEO of ControlPlane.
At Istio Day, several Solo.io Istio maintainers spoke on a variety of topics. John Howard presented “Is Your Service Mesh AI Ready?” covering new problems that AI workloads bring, where Istio fits in, including what Istio can manage today, what is on the roadmap, and what is left out of scope. He also highlighted the new SIG Networking Agentic Networking group he is a part of to define agentic networking policies and governance for agents and tools in Kubernetes.
Lin Sun from Solo.io and Ahmad Al-Masry from Harri LLC presented an end-user talk on Harri’s journey migrating from a legacy ingress and sidecar-based service mesh to a modern Kubernetes Gateway API and sidecar-less architecture, and what considerations they needed to take for zero downtime and across multiple availability zones.
Day Two:
The first official day of Kubecon + CloudNativeCon kicked off with the CNCF Ambassador breakfast. The CNCF Ambassador program is an extension of CNCF, furthering the mission of “making cloud native ubiquitous” through community leadership and mentorship. Solo.io actually has five(!) CNCF ambassadors (Lin Sun, Michael Levan, Leon Nunes, Antonio Berben, and me).
After the ambassador breakfast, it was time for the keynotes! Idit Levine, Founder and CEO of Solo.io, and Keith Babo, the Chief Product Officer at Solo.io presented “From Cloud-Native to Agent-Native: Context Engineering for Kubernetes”. Although Kubernetes is the leading foundation for cloud-native platforms, when it comes to agentic workloads, critical gaps remain that prevent many organizations from getting agents to production.
Idit announced agentregistry a new open source project that introduces a centralized registry to securely curate, discover, deploy, and manage agentic infrastructure from MCP servers, agents to skills.
Check out the full keynote here.
Tuesday was a busy day for Solo-speakers! Michael Levan and James Ilse presented an interactive tutorial, “Intelligent Failure: Using AI To Push Your Cluster To the Brink”, where they showed how to secure agents running in Kubernetes with agentgateway.
At Contribfest, Istio contributors Ian Rudie and Lin Sun from Solo.io, Faseela Kundattil, from Ericsson, and Steven Jin, from Microsoft presented “From Farm Fork to Table Feature: Growing your First Free Range Organic Istio PR”, giving an overview to new folks how to get started contributing to Istio.
John Howard gave an overview of “Lessons Applied: Building a Next Generation AI Proxy” where he highlighted the agentgateway, a Linux Foundation open source proxy optimized for agentic AI connectivity within or across any agent framework or environment. Agentgateway provides drop-in security, observability, and governance for agent-to-agent and agent-to-tool communication and supports leading interoperable protocols, including Agent2Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Finally, Lin Sun ran a panel “In AI We Trust: Securing the Future- One Agent at a Time” as part of the Security Track with Yuval Kohavi from Solo.io, Hannah Foxwell from mindgardai, Andrew Martin, CEO of controlplane, and Ricardo Aravena from the CNCF.
Day Three:
During the keynote, we had several Solo.io engineers recognized for their contributions to open source!
John Howard (howardjohn) was recognized for his outstanding technical contributions and sustained impact across CNCF projects and received the Top Committer / Top Maintainer award. John Howard has had an unmatched impact across the CNCF ecosystem, contributing over 15,000 times across 130 repositories. Beyond his technical leadership, he mentors hundreds of contributors, ensures smooth releases and CI pipelines, and quietly supports the community through GitHub, Slack, and mailing lists!
Daniel Hawton (dhawton) was awarded the Chop Wood Carry Water Award for essential behind-the-scenes work that keeps the cloud native community healthy and thriving. Since joining Istio in 2022, Daniel has served as release manager for multiple Istio versions, co-led the Product Security Working Group, maintained documentation and testing infrastructure, and mentored new contributors!
We officially released the latest book by Christian Posta and Lin Sun, “AI Agents in Kubernetes” and ran out of all 300 copies on the second day. Missed getting a copy? Don’t worry, we have free digital copies available on the Solo.io site.
On Wednesday evening, we hosted the MCP & Agents Community Party at Skyline Park on the rooftop of Ponce City Market. We had 260+ community members in attendance, and even included a community Panel at the start of the event.
Day Four:
Throughout the week, the Solo.io booth was running free five-minute Instruqt labs on a variety of topics, ranging from Istio Ambient, Kubernetes Gateway API, to kagent, writing your own MCP server, and the new Agent Registry project. We had almost 800 attendees complete labs throughout KubeCon + CloudNativeCon at our booth (a new record!).
Missed a chance to try out the labs at the booth? We have all the labs available here on the Solo MCP Academy page.
Daneyon Hansen from Solo.io and Rob Scott from Google presented, “AI Inference Without Boundaries: Dynamic Routing With Multi-Cluster Inference Gateway”. The talk introduced the Multi-Cluster Inference Gateway, which dynamically routes AI workloads across clusters to where GPUs are available, maximizing utilization and minimizing latency. They shared practical strategies for deployment, cost optimization, and ensuring high availability. Check out the issues in kgateway and Istio.
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:
- Join our live workshop on Dec. 3rd, "Rethinking How We Build with AI Agents"
- Get involved with our new open source project, agentregistry on GitHub or join us on Discord
- 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
Thanks for a great KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and hope to see you at the Solo.io booth in Amsterdam!
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