KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025

The Rook project will be introduced to attendees of all levels and experience. Rook is an open source cloud-native storage operator for Kubernetes, providing the platform, framework, and support for Ceph to natively integrate with Kubernetes. The panel will discuss various scenarios to show how Rook configures Ceph to provide stable block, shared file system, and object storage for your production data. Rook was accepted as a graduated project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in October 2020.

KEDA continues to evolve, introducing powerful new capabilities that make event-driven scaling in Kubernetes more flexible, secure, and insightful. In this session, we’ll delve into the latest enhancements launched over the past year, including:
- OpenTelemetry Integration: Gain richer observability of autoscaling behavior and system performance.
- Admission Webhooks: Achieve finer-grained control and streamlined validation of scaling actions.
- Security Improvements: Protect your production environments with strengthened, built-in security measures.
- Expanded Scalers & HTTP Scaling: Scale from an even broader range of event sources and natively handle HTTP-based scaling.
- Additional Fixes & Improvements: Benefit from smaller adjustments and refinements that further enhance performance and usability.
- Future?!

Join us to learn how these innovations can reshape your approach to dynamic autoscaling in event-driven workloads, helping you maximize resource efficiency and reliability.

CoreDNS is a highly flexible and extensible DNS server widely recognized as the default DNS solution in Kubernetes. With its strong focus on service discovery, CoreDNS has gained popularity in various cloud-native environments. Its adaptability is largely driven by a plugin-based architecture, allowing developers to easily introduce new features and optimize performance at various levels. In this session, we will dive deep into CoreDNS’s extensive plugin ecosystem, examining several plugins that significantly enhance DNS scalability in Kubernetes. We’ll also walk through developing a Go-based demo plugin that leverages source IP for service discovery. Finally, we will look at the latest project updates and outline the roadmap for the CoreDNS community moving forward.

This talk will go through all the exciting new features we have recently added to gRPC. We will be covering topics such as OpenTelemetry, Service Mesh, K8s Gateway APIs and GAMMA. We will also cover tips and tricks for building a Microservices Application with gRPC.

In this maintainer track we'll cover existing and upcoming features that allow developers to more easily create Agentic AI systems. We will also showcase Dapr's role as an Application Developer Platform that is filling the gap required to govern and regulate access from applications to their underlying infrastructure and providing zero-trust security across both service to service and service to infrastructure interactions.

The CNCF community has been doing security assessments through TAG security for years, and the value is clear.

Individual assessors are leveling up their skills, getting more connected with projects, and advancing their careers. Projects are reaching graduation faster, improving their development processes, and finding new ways to provide security features for end users.

This talk from a TAG leader and project maintainer will explore the inner workings of self- and joint-assessments, the value these bring to projects and assessors, as well as the difference between a security assessment and a threat model.

Kubernetes SIG Security takes a community-building approach to improving security for end users, project maintainers, and the Kubernetes project itself. Much like a garden thrives with careful planning, diverse plants, and collaboration, we use the same techniques to ensure our community is well tended and blooming. Join us as we introduce the next generation of SIG Security leadership and talk about succession plan(t)ing to ensure a smooth transition, encourage growth, and maintain the values that cultivate and foster the community we’ve built together.

Come learn what we’ve been working on, what we have planned for the future, and how you can get involved. We will go over the many roles required to create a rich community, from the gardeners to the pollinators - it really does take a village! Everyone is welcome: we all have something to teach and something to learn, and we would love to learn from you!

Bring questions, share ideas, and let’s plant some seeds. See you there!

The last year has seen a lot of features added to Linkerd, and we’re not slowing down! In this latest project update, you'll learn about the latest developments and upcoming features from Linkerd maintainers and directors. We'll discuss new Gateway API developments, client-specific policy configuration, improvements to federated Services and multicluster UX, and more. Come prepared to learn about the world's fastest, lightest service mesh!

Emissary-ingress 4.0 is underway! This is the first new major version in some years for Emissary, one of the first Kubernetes-native, self-service API gateways and ingress controllers.

In this session, we'll start with a quick overview of the need for ingress controllers in general, the benefits of self-service developer workflows, and how Emissary-ingress can help with these issues. We'll also talk about the state of project, what Emissary 4 brings to the table, and how to get involved as a contributor, how to best offer feedback, and what's in store for the project in the future.

Emissary's maintainer sessions are always great opportunities to talk directly with Emissary-ingress maintainers and make sure your voice is heard when it comes to the project's future -- looking forward to seeing you there!

Kyverno has emerged as a go-to tool for enforcing security, compliance, and operational best practices in Kubernetes. But it's not just about the past; it's about the future! Join Kyverno maintainers, Vishal and Frank, as they unveil the latest innovations in Kyverno and show how Kyverno's new policy formats align perfectly with the rapidly evolving Kubernetes APIs, including enhanced support for Kubernetes Validating Admission Policies (VAP) and Mutating Admission Policies (MAP). You will learn how Kyverno's adoption of Common Expression Language (CEL) empowers you to create, test, and manage sophisticated, dynamic, and expressive policies for all your policy use cases. Whether you're a policy newbie or a seasoned pro, this session will provide actionable insights and tips to elevate your Kubernetes policy-based security, automation, and governance.

The Kubernetes project has some of the best documentation in the industry, and it’s part of the reason for the project’s success. Writing and maintaining that documentation requires the help of a small army of contributors, but there’s an often unseen aspect to the documentation that still needs work: the API reference docs generator. SIG Docs is beginning work to overhaul this process, and we need you! Learn more about how the reference docs are currently generated, the technical problems we face with that process, our plans for the future, and how you can get involved in ensuring the Kubernetes documentation continues to be the best it can be.

Join containerd maintainers for an update and deep dive into the latest developments in containerd. This panel will feature discussion of the launch and adoption of containerd 2.0, what’s next in 2.1, 1.7’s transition into Extended support, and how LTS is going with 1.6. Topics will also include how the containerd project is involved with the KEP process and highlight how the broader cloud native ecosystem is enhanced through extension points in containerd and subprojects like runwasi.

The maintainers of the CNCF Crossplane project (https://www.crossplane.io/) will lead this session that will not only introduce the project to new attendees, but also dive deep into the details of Crossplane’s latest features, releases, and future direction. There is always something new to show off at Kubecon!

We will start with the basics on how Crossplane enables you to compose cloud infrastructure and services into custom platform APIs, and accelerate the journey of folks new to Crossplane to build a control plane of their own.

Then we will take a detailed tour through the key maturity investments we’ve been making and how to adopt them into your production ready platforms. Finally, as the project is now more than 5 years old, we will focus on the future direction of Crossplane and how we think we can take the project to the next level for the next 5 years. You won’t want to miss this chance to influence the future of Crossplane!

SIG Contributor Experience has been wildly successful in helping grow the contributor base of Kubernetes in the first ten years of the project via New Contributor Workshops. We stressed on the importance of growing existing contributors in our last maintainer track session. However, the other side of the sustainability coin is ensuring that contributors who get started with contributing to Kubernetes, actually stick around. A lot has changed in the last decade, and we also need to change how we teach folks to contribute and interact with the community. Join us as we give a comprehensive overview of the Kubernetes governance and community structure, where you can seek help and what some pitfalls are that you will unexpectedly but inadvertently face in your contributor journey. We will highlight areas that are suited for folks from all backgrounds: marketing, content creation, event planning, community elections, automation and so much more!

Fluent Bit has become the de facto standard for log processing in Kubernetes, powering observability pipelines across countless deployments. As we celebrate 10 years of Fluent Bit, we are excited to introduce Fluent Bit v4: a major milestone that pushes the boundaries of performance, efficiency, and interoperability.

This release brings extended and faster processing capabilities, deeper OpenTelemetry signals integration, expanded Prometheus support, and performance optimizations that further enhance Fluent Bit’s lightweight and high-performance design. In this session, we’ll explore what’s new in Fluent Bit v4, discuss real-world use cases, and showcase the next evolution of observability pipelines.

Whether you’re a long time user or new to Fluent Bit, this talk will provide valuable insights into the latest advancements and how they can elevate your observability stack.Fluent Bit has become the de facto standard for log processing in Kubernetes, powering observability pipelines across countless deployments. As we celebrate 10 years of Fluent Bit, we are excited to introduce Fluent Bit v4: a major milestone that pushes the boundaries of performance, efficiency, and interoperability.