- Announcement
Platform Engineering Activities at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 is almost here, and we cannot wait.
If you have been to a KubeCon in the last few years, you probably know us already. We are the CNCF Platform Engineering Technical Community Group, the people handing out coffee before breakfast and arguing happily about golden paths for the rest of the day. We are back in Salt Lake City, where we last did this in 2024.
This year feels different though. Platforms and AI have stopped being two separate conversations. Agents are turning up as users of our platforms, and nobody has fully worked out what that means yet. You can see it all over the schedule below. Golden paths built for agents. Governing code that nobody reviewed. Whether the maturity model still holds up. These are live questions, and we get to chew on them together for four days.
So yes, we have a lot going on. Platform Engineering Day, Platform Coffees every single morning, a booth, lightning talks, and a conference schedule stuffed with platform engineering sessions. Here is all of it in one place.
All times are in MST (UTC-7).
Platform Engineering Day
On Monday, November 9th, join us for Platform Engineering Day, a full day on the real work of building and scaling internal developer platforms. It is co-chaired by Paula Kennedy, Stacey Potter, and Ramiro Berrelleza. The talks are pitched at every stage of the journey, whether you are starting out or already running a mature platform.
The day opens with an update from our community. At 9:10 AM, right after the opening remarks, Chris Plank, Colin Griffin and Atulpriya Sharma will give the Platform Engineering Technical Community Group update. Ten minutes on what we have been up to, what is coming next, and how you can get involved. Come say hi to us afterwards.
Please note that Platform Engineering Day requires the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon All-Access Pass. You can pick it when you register.
Platform Coffees
This is one of the most happening things at KubeCon, and easily the hottest ticket that does not need a ticket.
- When: Monday, November 9th to Thursday, November 12th, 7:00 - 8:30 AM
- Where: Venue to be confirmed
- Cost: Free, and no pre-registration needed
Coffee first, conversation right after. Bring a topic you want to talk through, put it on a sticky note, and the group takes it from there. Everyone chips in with what they have seen work and what they have seen break. Some of the best hallway conversations of the week start here.
We have been doing this for a while now. Paris in 2024, Salt Lake City in 2024, London and Atlanta in 2025, Amsterdam and Japan earlier this year, and now back in Salt Lake City. The topics keep changing. The format never does. Sticky notes, strong coffee, and people who actually run platforms for a living.
We are still locking down the venue. Join the #platform-engineering channel in the CNCF Slack and we will post it there the moment we have it.
A big thank you to Syntasso, Krumware, WSO2 and Infisical. They are the reason there is a fresh brew waiting for you every morning. Four days of good coffee and better conversation does not happen on its own, and we are grateful to them for making it happen.
Platform Engineering Booth
We have had a booth at every KubeCon since Paris in 2024, and it is where a lot of the week actually happens.
On Tuesday, November 10th, come and find us at the Platform Engineering booth in the Solutions Showcase.
- When: Tuesday, November 10th, 3:00 - 7:00 PM
- Where: Solutions Showcase, Booth P-16B
- Lightning talks: 4:00 - 5:00 PM
Had a good conversation over coffee that morning? Come carry it on at the booth. Missed coffee entirely? Even better. Come find us here instead.
Lightning Talks
Five short platform engineering talks, back to back, at the booth.
| Time | Talk | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 4:00 PM | Introduction and Welcome | Atulpriya Sharma, Chris Plank and Colin Griffin |
| 4:05 PM | Platform Engineering for Humans and Agents: One Golden Path for Both Users | Samudra Weerasinghe |
| 4:20 PM | Easy Is Taken: What’s Left for Platforms When Software Is a Utility? | Luke Philips |
| 4:35 PM | When Deployment Friction Becomes a Developer Experience Problem | Avinash Sabat |
| 4:50 PM | Closing the Gap Between Ready and Usable in a DBaaS Platform | George Kechagias |
Schedule
There are some genuinely interesting platform engineering sessions this year, and we did not want you to miss any of them. So here is everything platform at KubeCon, in one place.
November 9th is Platform Engineering Day, a full day co-located event. From November 10th onwards it carries on as the platform engineering track at the main conference.
Rooms are in the Salt Palace unless the location says Hyatt Regency. You can find the full program in the official schedule and the CNCF-hosted co-located schedule.
Monday, November 9th: Platform Engineering Day
After lunch, sessions run in two rooms: Grand Ballroom BDF and Grand Ballroom J.
Tuesday, November 10th: Conference Day 1
| Time | Location | Topic | Presenter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM | Grand Ballroom GI | So You Want to Build a Platform? You Probably Already Have One | Juho Syrjänen, ŌURA |
| 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM | Hyatt Regency, Salt Lake Ballroom C | One Recipe, Five Clouds, One Query: Portable GPU Configuration with a Queryable Audit Layer | Christopher Haar, Upbound & Yuan Chen, NVIDIA |
| 12:20 - 12:50 PM | Grand Ballroom GI | When Infrastructure Breaks in Production: How EarnIn Brought Testing to the Full CNCF Stack | Priya Namasivayam, EarnIn |
| 12:20 - 12:50 PM | Hyatt Regency, Salt Lake Ballroom C | Platform Engineering after the AI Hype: Why IDPs Must Become Intent-Driven | Daniel Bryant, Syntasso |
| 2:50 - 3:20 PM | Grand Ballroom GI | The New Scaling Matrix: Balancing In-Place Resizing, VPA, HPA and Automation Solutions | Dolis Sharma, Nirmata |
| 2:50 - 3:20 PM | Level 2, 255 BC | You Don’t Have to Choose: Argo and Flux Are Friends! | Emily Chen, Akuity & Leigh Capili, ControlPlane |
| 2:50 - 3:20 PM | Hyatt Regency, Salt Lake Ballroom C | The Prompt Layer: What Platform Engineering Has to Own Next | Atulpriya Sharma, Improving |
| 3:40 - 4:10 PM | Grand Ballroom GI | Welcome to Health Check Hell: CRDs, Statuses and Missing Standards | Regina Voloshin, Octopus Deploy & Dag Bjerre Andersen, Egmont |
| 3:40 - 4:10 PM | Level 2, 255 BC | Why Quotas Are Hard in Kubernetes: Lessons from Building a Production-Grade Quota System | Deepak Kinni & Xing Yang, VMware by Broadcom |
| 3:40 - 4:10 PM | Hyatt Regency, Salt Lake Ballroom C | N Clusters, One kubectl: Multi-Cluster That Just Works | Anne Lau, Salesforce & Scott Brimhall, NVIDIA |
| 4:40 - 5:10 PM | Grand Ballroom GI | Agents on the Platform: Four Perspectives on the Conversation We’re Already Having in Private | Kasper Borg Nissen, Dash0; Juraci Paixão Kröhling, OllyGarden; Joseph Sandoval, Adobe; Jed Salazar, Edera; Alexa Griffith, Red Hat |
| 4:40 - 5:10 PM | Level 2, 255 BC | Why Are You Still Wasting Whole GPUs? Hardware-Level Sharing, Scheduled with DRA | Engin Diri, Pulumi |
| 4:40 - 5:10 PM | Hyatt Regency, Salt Lake Ballroom C | Multicluster AMA: The Community Answers | August Simonelli, Red Hat; Laura Lorenz, Google; Liqian Luo, Microsoft; Trevor Swanson, Evernorth |
| 5:30 - 6:00 PM | Grand Ballroom GI | Beyond the Cluster Boundary: Sharing GPUs at Scale | Tim Killian, Snapchat |
| 3:00 - 7:00 PM | Solutions Showcase, Booth P-16B | Platform Engineering Booth (lightning talks 4:00 - 5:00 PM) | Platform Engineering community |
Wednesday, November 11th: Conference Day 2
Thursday, November 12th: Conference Day 3
| Time | Location | Topic | Presenter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11:00 - 11:30 AM | Level 2, 255 BC | Four Resources, One Object: Surviving Gateway API After Ingress NGINX | Sitesh Pattanaik, AWS |
| 11:50 AM - 12:20 PM | Grand Ballroom GI | Follow the GPUs: How a Regulated Fortune 100 Serves Customers When No Single Cloud Has Enough | Michael Kinsley & Yuva Peavler, GEICO |
| 11:50 AM - 12:20 PM | Level 2, 255 BC | From Citadel to Contract: Migrating a Monolith with 500+ Services to Kubernetes | Holly Mooneyham, Cisco Meraki |
| 11:50 AM - 12:20 PM | Hyatt Regency, Level 4, Regency Ballroom CD | MCP Was the Easy Half, The Rest Was a Skill Issue | Isala Piyarisi & Lakmal Warusawithana, WSO2 |
| 1:50 - 2:20 PM | Grand Ballroom BDF | BurritoBot Said Let’s Dance, the Platform Said No | Michael Rishi Forrester, Accenture & Whitney Lee, Datadog |
| 1:50 - 2:20 PM | Grand Ballroom GI | Beyond Stateless vs Stateful: A Unified Workload API for Multi-Cluster Kubernetes | Ronak Nathani, LinkedIn |
| 1:50 - 2:20 PM | Hyatt Regency, Level 4, Regency Ballroom CD | From Maintenance Chaos to Steady Uptime: GitOps-Driven Scheduling across GPU Fleets | Natalie Bandel & Soumya Balakrishnan, NVIDIA |
| 2:40 - 3:10 PM | Grand Ballroom GI | From Platform Catalog to Conversational Agent: Wiring AI Into Your Internal Developer Platform | Eduardo Munari, Stone & Fabiano Amaral, Stone Payments |
| 2:40 - 3:10 PM | Level 2, 254 | Platform Engineering User Group BoF | Chris Plank, NatWest Group & Colin Griffin, Krumware |
| 3:30 - 4:00 PM | Level 2, 254 | The CNCF Platform Engineering User Group & Platform Factors | Chris Plank, NatWest Group & Colin Griffin, Krumware |
See You in Salt Lake City!
Come to learn something, come to meet people who are solving the same problems you are, or honestly, just come for the coffee. All three are good reasons. Platform Engineering Day, four mornings of Platform Coffees, the booth, the lightning talks, and a week of great sessions. We would love to meet you at any of them.
To keep up with all of it, join the #platform-engineering channel in the CNCF Slack. That is where the coffee venue, the booth updates and everything else lands first. Follow us on LinkedIn as well for the latest. You can also join the Platform Engineering Technical Community Group to stay in touch with us through the year.
Got a question before then, or want to know where we will be? Ask in #platform-engineering or send us a DM on LinkedIn.
See you in Salt Lake City!
Feedback
Was this page helpful?
Glad to hear it! Please tell us how we can improve.
Sorry to hear that. Please tell us how we can improve.