My journey back to India’s premier cloud-native conference, now in Mumbai

Back to the Cloud Native Stage

A PROMISE KEPT

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025 in Hyderabad, one of the very first announcements from the keynote stage was that KubeCon 2026 is coming to Mumbai in June. The entire hall erupted, and as someone deeply invested in the CNCF ecosystem across South Asia, that moment hit differently. I made a silent promise to myself right then – I would be there. And here we are. Just a genuine passion for this community and everything it stands for.

Attending KubeCon for the second time felt different. The first time everything is new – the scale, the energy, the sheer number of brilliant minds under one roof. The second time, you arrive knowing what to look for. You come with questions, with relationships to build on, and with a sharper sense of how to make the most of every session and hallway conversation.

Day 1: Keynotes, Connections & the Solution Showcase

Collecting Badges and Hitting the Keynote Hall

We arrived at the venue, collected our badges, and headed straight to the Keynote Hall. The energy was electric — Mumbai had brought out the entire cloud-native community in force. Seeing the room filled with engineers, platform teams, and community builders from across India and the world was a reminder of just how far the Kubernetes ecosystem has grown.

The morning keynotes set the tone perfectly, covering everything from AI infrastructure at scale to how India’s biggest platforms are running production workloads on Kubernetes today.

Morning Keynotes

From Afterthought to Practice: How Flipkart Built a Multi-tenant Chaos Platform on LitmusChaos – Aditya Sridasyam, Flipkart & Uma Mukkara, Harness
Plug in and Scale: Serving LLM Models on Kubernetes Made Simple — Shrinidhi Venkataraman & Nithin R, AstraZeneca
From Platforms to AI Factories — Has Kubernetes Solved It? — Saiyam Pathak, vCluster
Engineering Population-Scale AI & AI Infrastructure with Cloud Native Technologies at NPCI – Tittu Varghese, NPCI
Cloud Native at Bharat Scale — How Rapido Scaled to 7+ Million Rides — Srivatsa Katta & Adarsh K Kumar, Rapido
How JioHotstar Streams Cricket to 72 Million Fans in Real Time with Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry — Pradeep Bishnoi, JioStar

The JioHotstar keynote was particularly fascinating – streaming cricket to 72 million concurrent fans is a genuinely jaw-dropping engineering problem. It’s one thing to read about scale in a blog post; it’s another to hear it directly from the engineers who built and operate those systems.

Solution Showcase: Technologies and Conversations

After the keynotes, we headed into the Solution Showcase – an expansive floor buzzing with demos, live product walkthroughs, and conversations that often turned out to be more valuable than any session. This is where KubeCon’s real magic happens. We explored a wide range of cloud-native and observability technologies, had deep conversations with product teams, and got hands-on with tools we had only read about before. The showcase floor is always a reminder of how fast the ecosystem moves and how much there is still to learn.

Sessions That Stood Out

Protecting the Software Supply Chain

I attended the Learning Lounge session by Ram Iyengar from the Cloud Foundry Foundation on protecting software from supply chain attacks. Ram is no stranger to our community – he spoke at KCD Sri Lanka 2023 and delivered a fantastic session at Hyderabad last year as well. His ability to make security concepts both accessible and urgent is something I genuinely admire.

“Learning Lounge: Learn to Protect Your Software from Supply Chain Attack”

Software supply chain security is one of those topics that only grows more critical with every passing year, and this session delivered actionable insights I could bring directly back to my professional work.

A Neighbor on the KubeCon Stage: OTel-Driven CI/CD

One of the proudest moments of the entire conference was watching Chamod Perera from Sri Lanka take the KubeCon stage alongside Shivay Lamba from India, CNCF ambassadors. Their session on OTel-driven CI/CD was one of the most practically useful talks of the event.

“From Flaky Builds to Self-Healing Deployments: An OTel-Driven CI/CD Tale”

The session walked through using OpenTelemetry traces to diagnose and ultimately eliminate flaky builds – something every engineering team deals with but rarely has a structured approach to solving. Seeing a fellow Sri Lankan community builder represent at this level on an international stage is genuinely inspiring.

When LLMs Hit Production

“When LLMs Hit Production: Why You Need an AI Gateway by Gavrish Prabhu · Nutanix“

This was one of the sessions I had been looking forward to most. With LLMs moving rapidly from prototypes into production systems, the operational challenges are real – rate limiting, routing, observability, and security. The talk made a compelling case for a dedicated AI Gateway layer and gave a clear picture of what that looks like in practice at scale.

Bridging Big Data and Machine Learning with Kubeflow

“Bridging Big Data and Machine Learning Ecosystems: A Cloud Native Approach Using Kubeflow by Johnu George & Shiv Jha”

This session provided valuable depth into how cloud-native tooling – specifically Kubeflow – is bridging the historical gap between big data pipelines and ML workflows. Given my research work on AI-enabled systems, the intersection of ML orchestration and cloud-native infrastructure is something I follow closely. This talk gave me several new angles to think about.

Day 2: Chai, Community Interviews & Closing Connections

Morning Rituals

Day 2 followed a wonderful rhythm – morning keynotes at the main hall, followed by a perfect cup of Mumbai cutting chai. If Hyderabad had biryani as its culinary memory, Mumbai gave us chai. These small cultural moments of immersion are what make attending a conference in India so special compared to anywhere else in the world.

Video Interviews and Community Building

We spent a meaningful portion of Day 2 conducting video interviews with members of the Indian CNCF community and tech experts. This is something we have been doing consistently – bringing the conversations from KubeCon back to the wider community through our YouTube channel. Every interview is a chance to surface perspectives that don’t always make it into the official content. Getting these voices on record, from engineers and community builders across India, is one of the most rewarding things we do at these events.

Networking and New Friendships

Beyond the formal sessions, the real value of KubeCon lives in the hallway conversations, the impromptu discussions at the showcase floor, and the connections made over meals and coffee breaks. We met engineers and community builders from across India, had conversations that will turn into collaborations, and left with a full list of follow-ups and new friendships.

REFLECTION

“Every conversation at KubeCon teaches you something – whether it’s a new tool, a new perspective, or simply the reminder that this community is one of the warmest and most generous in tech. Mumbai confirmed that all over again, and then some.”

Watch the Story Unfold

We captured the experience across two videos – a live stream from the event and a dedicated interview compilation featuring voices from India’s CNCF and tech community.

YOUTUBE STREAM (Kubernetes Sri Lanka)
What happened at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPWGZh90moo

COMMUNITY INTERVIEWS (CeyTechNet)
Interviews from KubeCon India 2026 — CNCF & India tech community
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sZGaFSasRg

Reflections: An Unforgettable Return

As the conference wrapped up, I found myself in that familiar bittersweet state – already missing the energy, the conversations, and the sense of being surrounded by people who are genuinely excited about what they build. That feeling is hard to replicate anywhere else. My second KubeCon reinforced something I already believed: this community is special. Not just because of the technical depth on display, but because of the openness with which people share knowledge, make introductions, and invest in each other’s growth. From Mumbai’s engineers to speakers who flew in from across the world, everyone I encountered was generous with their time and their expertise. My humble gratitude goes to the organizers of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026 and the entire CNCF team for orchestrating a 4,000+ participant event with such seamless execution. The scale is staggering. The care that goes into making it welcoming and inclusive is even more so. Mumbai – the City of Dreams – lived up to its name. See you at the next one.

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