A Wouter Scholte in 't Hoff recap of our visit to KubeCon EU 2025 London
Another year of KubeCon EU is here. This year marks my third year of attending KubeCon EU after visits to Amsterdam and Paris. This time hosted in beautiful London with I guess the best weather London has ever seen in early April. My travel started on Sunday to attend Cloud Native Rejekts. This was located at an amazing venue with a nice historic character. Really great to see these people joining London early to share their knowledge and connect with all the people in the community. Between the sessions we also used the time to view some of London’s landmarks and enjoy the city.
On Tuesday it was time for OpenShift Commons. As I’m working a lot with these products it great to see the experience and choices made by other client’s of Red Hat. Especially great to see the people from Vodafone group sharing their insights and how to align with my work.
Then we’re off for KubeCon itself. This year the event hosted around 13.000 people. Very nice to see that the community is growing every year. As always these 3 days are packed with interesting talks and both companies and open source projects available for interaction. I cannot share everything I’ve done these 3 days but will stick to the key highlights for me.
Developer experience
Last year the Kubernetes project turned 10 years old, and now it was up to the CNCF to celebrate its 10th year anniversary. At first Kubernetes and other CNCF projects were for the selected few geeks and nerds who went all in on it (sure it still is). But now you see more and more adoption into a lot of organizations and sectors. This requires a streamlined developer experience to make sure companies and developers can use their full potential. During this year’s KubeCon I saw a clear highlight in companies and projects focusing on improving the developer experience. Projects like Backstage and Dapr are on the front to help companies and developers focus on what’s important. Backstage is becoming a standard on how companies manage their applications and helping developers focus on what is important. Dapr is great at abstracting dependencies for developers so that they can focus on delivering value to the business.
Observability
For a few years now, I′ve seen a lot happening in the observability domain. In 2019 OpenTelemetry was created and over the last few years a lot has been done to create a strong observability framework. It is now second biggest CNCF project after Kubernetes. With the rise of AI/ML there is more to ask from observability. Over the last few years since I started working in the Cloud-native domain I see the amount of data that can be collected has grown exponentially. AI/ML workloads add another dimension to this. I’m very interested to see how the rise of AI/ML workloads can help observability manage the vast amounts of data. After all we are not interested in the raw data but want to translate it into useful information.
AI/ML
I guess there are not a lot of IT conferences where AI/ML is not being discussed. Also for KubeCon I saw a lot of attention to this topic. I use AI almost daily in my work but nevertheless I look at this topic a bit differently than most people. Due to my work in infrastructure I’m most excited to see what the rise of AI/ML requires from the infrastructure. I already saw and heard that with the use of AI/ML we also need to think differently about how we manage infrastructure. AI/ML requires advanced scalability and scheduling to make sure resources are used efficiently. Also from a networking perspective you see companies and projects evolving their gateways and networking capabilities specifically for AI/ML.
Of course an event like KubeCon is also about fun. I had a great time on the parties hosted by our partners Red Hat and Suse. It was great to see that our KuBBBeCon tradition continued to gather our Benelux friends at KubeCon. I had a lot of fun with this year’s pub quiz and all the people that were there. Next year is already confirmed we will be back on the bowling alley!
Overall I had a great time at this KubeCon. I was able to meet lots of new, interesting people and reconnect with others. I want to thank everyone for putting the time and effort into this great event. It is always one of my main highlights for the year.
Next year KubeCon EU will once again come back to my home country in Amsterdam. Looking forward to this next episode.
Thank you KubeCon and London, you were great!
