#KubeCon + #CloudNativeCon EU 2025 was special and the most exciting one for me in so many ways! My first conference after maternity break, first one as the event co-chair and as the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee Member, and I had a book signing too for my first book as an author. I couldn't have asked for more!

Maintainer Summit

I had decided to travel with my one year old baby, which in turn meant I had to travel with my whole family to support me during the conference hours. I cannot thank my spouse and 10 year old daughter enough for dedicating one whole week just for me, taking a break from all their other responsibilities - supporting me in looking like a superwoman to the external world.

Monday kicked off with the Maintainer Summit where I had responsibilities throughout the day being a member of the CNCF TOC. The CNCF TOC shared updates on what we do, upcoming TAG restructuring, a leadership refresh, and how the community can get involved.

The TOCs led a well attended roundtable discussion around the TAG (Technical Advisory Groups) reboot. We had a wealth of new initiatives put forward and are all looking forward to seeing these develop in the upcoming months.

The Maintainer Summit was awesome as it was relatively small—most attendees are maintainers of CNCF projects, and the vibe is all about learning and collaborating on shared challenges.

The Istio contributors gathered for a project meeting where we discussed future roadmap items like ext_proc and rate-limiting support for waypoints.

Co-Located Events

This year I was a program committee member for two of the Co-located events - Cloud Native University and IstioDay. Sadly, I missed most of the talks, due to a conflicting CNCF TOC offsite, but I caught the last few—very interesting sessions.

TOC Offsite

The TOC held an offsite co-located event with KubeCon, where Bob Killen, Senior Technical Program Manager at CNCF, started with a TOC101 session for the newly elected TOC members. We also did a SWOT analysis to reflect on the previous years’ activities. The priorities for the upcoming year were also discussed -- including steering the TAG reboots, ensuring credibility, and emphasizing standardization.

KubeCon Keynotes

For me, the biggest highlight of the London event was my opportunity to host the keynotes on all three days, a privilege given to the three KubeCon co-chairs.

I also had the opportunity to deliver a keynote myself on the “Cloud Native Evolution in Telecom” with senior experts from Telco based CNCF end users. Philippe Ensarguet, VP of Software Engineering at Orange, Tom Kivlin, Telco Cloud Architect at Vodafone and Joel Studler, System Architect at Swisscom joined me on stage to discuss how they are leveraging CNCF projects in their network transformation journey. Being on the big stage facing the 13000+ crowd was really a rewarding experience.

KubeCon sessions

I also had a KubeCon talk along with Lin Sun, Head of Open Source at Solo.io, where we did a story reading and live demo based on our latest Istio Phippy Book “Izzy saves the Birthday”.

After the session, CNCF also organized a book signing event for us, where the audience got a chance to get a free signed copy of our book.

We also had an Istio Contribfest session on enabling beginners to onboard on Istio contribution, and the workshop was well attended.

CNCF TOC also had a panel discussion on the final day of KubeCon to clarify any doubts or questions the KubeCon audience had regarding our work, as well as our priorities. There were many questions related to the TAG reboot initiative and concerns if the same will obstruct the project moving levels. Overall, the TAG reboot will serve to guide projects with better technical guidance to move between maturity levels as well as be better prepared for end user adoption.

Istio kiosk at the KubeCon Project Pavilion

We had a very active Istio kiosk at KubeCon, where many of the maintainers served and interacted with our contributors, end users and vendors around multiple areas including multi cluster, ambient, and extensibility.

Overall KubeCon EU 2025 was an amazing event, and the largest ever! And I am lucky enough to have had all the opportunities CNCF and Ericsson entrusted me with! And it was double the delight to share the keynote stage while the announcement of Ericsson upgrading its CNCF membership to Gold was being made by Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. As the co-chair, I have two more events to go. And I hope to welcome you all in Atlanta in November 2025!