Bret and Nirmal recorded this special offline episode at KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City. We hung out at the AWS booth to break down the major trends and developments from the conference.
The event drew a record-breaking 10,000 attendees, with roughly half being first-timers to the Cloud Native ecosystem.

Starting with Cloud Native Rejekts and moving through the pre-conference events, we noticed Platform Engineering emerged as the dominant theme, with its dedicated conference track drawing standing-room-only crowds.

The main conference showcased a notable surge in new vendors, particularly in AI and security sectors, representing about a quarter of all exhibitors. We dissect the key engineering trends, ongoing challenges in Cloud Native adoption, and insights gathered from various conferences including ArgoCon, BackstageCon, and Wasm Day. In our 40-minute discussion, we tried to capture the essence of what made this year's KubeCon significant. It's a great listen whether you couldn't attend or if you're a veteran of the CloudNative community.

Creators & Guests

Cristi Cotovan - Editor
Beth Fisher - Producer
Bret Fisher - Host
Nirmal Mehta - Host

(00:00) - Intro
(03:38) - KubeCon Rejekts
(04:50) - Better Than Namespaces
(07:17) - Day 0
(08:32) - BackstageCon and Platform Interfaces
(12:35) - Argo CD and Deployment Dashboards
(13:57) - GitOps Bridge: Bridging Infrastructure and GitOps
(14:49) - Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator (KRO)
(16:23) - Fleet Management in Kubernetes
(18:12) - Ford's Approach to Kubernetes Tooling
(19:36) - CNOE: Community-Driven Kubernetes Reference Architectures
(26:21) - AI Integration in Kubernetes Tools
(34:03) - Managing Infrastructure at Scale with Karpenter
(35:13) - KubeCon Highlights and Future Trends

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KubeCon Engineering Takeaways

DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling