Welkom terug – Welcome back to Amsterdam. This year, we were once again thrilled to send our colleagues Nico, Stephan and Philip to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026. After Paris and London in previous years, we were excited to be back in the Dutch capital, which last hosted KubeCon EU in 2023 for yet another incredible week of cloud-native innovation, community connections, and exciting announcements. Here are the highlights from the whole KubeCon week.

Cloud Native Rejekts

Cloud Native Rejekts continues to be the perfect appetizer before the main KubeCon event. While smaller in scale and only 1 day in this year’s edition, the quality of content and networking opportunities remain outstanding. This year’s edition featured some particularly compelling sessions:

• In-Place Pod Resize – A long-awaited VPA feature graduating to GA with Kubernetes 1.35, allowing resources to be adjusted automatically and seamlessly based on usage with minimal disruption. Another game-changer is CPU Startup Boost, where applications can request more CPU during startup and then automatically scale back down.
• A security-focused session on snapshots for forensic analysis demonstrated how teams can improve their incident investigation workflows. Sadly this feature is not available on managed Kubernetes services yet, but it’s a great example of how the ecosystem is evolving to meet real-world security needs.

A special shout-out goes to the organizers for putting together such a great event and providing us with the opportunity to learn and connect with other members of the community. Also worth mentioning: Miro generously let the event use their fantastic office as the venue.

Azure Day with Kubernetes & GitHub Social Club

Day 0 kicked off with Azure Day with Kubernetes, the must-attend event for anyone in the Azure and AKS ecosystem. The day started with a keynote by Jorge Palma from Microsoft, who walked us through the latest innovations and announcements in Azure Kubernetes Service. Here is a good summary from Brendan Burns about What’s new with Microsoft in open-source and Kubernetes.

From our point of view the following highlights stood out, though most of them are still in preview:

• Blue-green node pool upgrades – a long-awaited feature that makes the traditional node surge upgrade strategy obsolete. With surge upgrades, workloads get moved twice – first off the old node, then onto the upgraded one. Blue-green avoids this by spinning up a completely new node pool and migrating workloads only once, resulting in fewer disruptions and faster upgrades.
• In-transit encryption with WireGuard – bringing transparent, high-performance encryption for pod-to-pod traffic without the complexity of traditional mTLS setups.
• Cross-cluster networking for Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager – enabling seamless network connectivity across multiple AKS clusters, a key building block for multi-cluster architectures.
• GPU metrics in Azure Monitor – providing native observability for GPU workloads, giving teams visibility into GPU utilization, memory, and performance directly within Azure Monitor.
• Azure Kubernetes Application Network for AKS – a new networking layer that simplifies application connectivity and traffic management for microservices running on AKS.
• Cilium mTLS encryption – adding mutual TLS encryption powered by Cilium, offering another strong option for securing in-cluster communication alongside WireGuard.

Our day ended with a GitHub Social Club event, where we had the chance to meet members of the GitHub team and other community members. It was a great opportunity to network, discuss the latest developments across both platforms, and catch up with friends from the community.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

After record-breaking events in Paris and London, KubeCon EU returned to Amsterdam – and the cloud-native community showed up in full force once again. Over three packed days, we deep dived into the latest trends and innovations shaping the future of Kubernetes and the broader cloud-native ecosystem.

AI agents meet Kubernetes. If last year was about AI workloads on Kubernetes, this year was about AI agents managing Kubernetes. Tools like HolmesGPT for intelligent troubleshooting, pluggable MCP-based AI agents like Klaus and Muster from our Giant Swarm friends, and kagent for running AI agents inside Kubernetes clusters were hot topics. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) continued to gain traction as the standard for connecting AI agents to infrastructure tooling.

The end of an era: NGINX Ingress archived. In one of the most impactful developments this year, the NGINX Ingress Controller was live on-stage officially archived. Several sessions focused on migration strategies, with tools like ingress2gateway leading the charge to help teams transition to the Gateway API. If you haven’t started your migration yet, now is the time.

Platform engineering is still king. Platform engineering continues to dominate the cloud-native conversation, and this year the tooling ecosystem matured significantly. Tools like Sveltos, OpenChoreo, and Kubara were popular topics across many sessions and discussions, alongside long-time players like Crossplane, which announced its newest 2.2 release – with teams sharing real-world experiences on building and managing Kubernetes platforms at scale.

GPUs everywhere. GPUs were one of the dominant themes this year, with sessions covering the full spectrum: multi-tenant GPUs, serverless GPUs, GPU sharing, observability for GPUs, and managing large GPU clusters. A standout highlight was Anthropic sharing the story of how they used Claude Code to write their own custom Kubernetes scheduler for their GPU clusters – a fascinating example of AI building its own infrastructure.

Summary

Like all great things, this incredible week filled with cloud-native innovations and exciting announcements has come to an end. We had an amazing time in Amsterdam connecting with the community, soaking up insights, and enjoying the energy of the cloud-native ecosystem at its best. See you in Barcelona for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2027 and already looking forward to Berlin in 2028!

If you would like to find out more details or get started with the implementation, please feel free to contact us! Also, don’t miss following our blog for more cloud-native insights!