KubeCon Amsterdam 2026

I needed a bit of time to recover after this intense KubeCon week in Amsterdam. I had so many great conversations with people I already knew and also made a lot of new connections. I even managed to improve my bowling skills at a co-event party.

The exhibition floor

We didn’t have an Exoscale booth this time, and I spent quite a bit of time in the sponsor exhibitions and project pavilions with Iva Bosotina, Sebastian Fischer, and Philip Möller. There was a lot of AI, but also many non-AI projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem, which I personally enjoyed a lot, as these projects built the ecosystem we know today.

Presenting Karpenter

We had the opportunity to present our Exoscale implementation of Karpenter at the partner corner on the SUSE booth. Karpenter is a game changer when it comes to aligning cluster resources with workload requirements. Thanks a lot, Martina Ilieva, for hosting us!

Projects and conversations

It’s always a pleasure to catch up with Jussi Nummelin and Tom Wieczorek. Our discussions around k0s and its ecosystem (k0smotron, k0rdent) always end up in ClusterAPI topics, something I want to explore more. And thanks again for the k0s hoodie.

Eleni Grosdouli, thank you for taking the time to chat about Sveltos. I’ve been a fan since you told me about it in Geneva last year. It’s one of those projects that gave me a real “wow” effect: simple and incredibly useful for managing add-ons. And thanks for the Sveltos t-shirt!

As I’ve been a NATS.io fan for many years, I also enjoy these events to discover the new features being built around it. NEX is definitely something worth checking out. Also, thank you, Daan Gerits, for sharing your vision about event messaging systems in the AI age.

Always a pleasure chatting with Engin Diri and getting his perspective on a wide range of topics. We also managed to chat a bit in French, which was fun.

It was also a nice surprise to run into Daniele Polencic in the hallway. Great to finally meet in person, and thanks for showing me the book “GPU-Enabled Platforms on Kubernetes” co-authored with Saiyam Pathak. This is such a great resource for people interested in using GPUs in Kubernetes.

People

It was great to see Donia Chaiehloudj and Henrik Rexed, even if we’ve been seeing each other quite a lot lately while preparing KCD Provence. December 10th in Aix-En-Provence, note the date! If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, feel free to reach out.

It was a pleasure to see Arash Khoddami again. He’s currently looking for new opportunities, so feel free to reach out if you’re looking for a platform engineer.

Iveta Babulenkova, Marcy Paramonova, Aurélie Vache, Chay Te, Daniel Drack, Rachid Zarouali, and many others, it was great seeing you all again, even if only briefly. Looking forward to the next one.

The talks

There were so many talks running in parallel that I missed quite a few. Catching up on the recordings is already on my list.