KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025 | Sudeep Goswami, Traefik Labs

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Sudeep Goswami

CEO

Traefik Labs

play_circle_outline Traefik Shines at KubeCon 2025: Uniting VMs, Containers, and Serverless with Nutanix's Innovative Application Intelligence

play_circle_outline Embracing Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Solutions: The Key to Unified Operations and Flexible Infrastructure Management

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Sudeep Goswami, Traefik Labs

Sudeep Goswami

CEO Traefik Labs

In this interview from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, Sudeep Goswami from Traefik Labs joins theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack new partnerships with Nutanix and Oracle and what they mean for cloud-native infrastructure. Goswami explains how Traefik and Nutanix are bringing unified application intelligence across VMs, containers and serverless, and how integrating the full Traefik portfolio into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and OKE supports hybrid, multi-cloud and sovereign-cloud deployments. He connects these moves to a unified layer-seven opera... Read more

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here at KubeCon North America 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty and I'm joined today by Sudeep from Traefik. How are you doing?

Sudeep Goswami

>> Good. How are you?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great. Great to have you on and a lot's happening with Traefik. How's the show going for you?

Sudeep Goswami

>> It's going great, Paul.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, it's super busy, right?

Sudeep Goswami

>> It's day three, but it still seems like day one.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Exactly. Exactly. Lots of people. It's still very active for day three, which is pretty crazy.

Sudeep Goswami

>> Yeah, it is.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But let's talk about some of the key partnerships. That's some of the announcements that happen. We saw some of the activity that's been going around with Nutanix and Oracle. Why don't we expand a little bit on that?

Sudeep Goswami

>> Yeah, and I think the KubeCon is a great event for us to deepen our partnerships, deepen our relationship with our users. And at this KubeCon event, I was really pleased to go deeper with two of our partners, Nutanix, we talked about that at theCUBE yesterday, and with Oracle. So, with Nutanix, what we did was launch this concept of a unified application intelligence, tying VMs, containers and serverless together. Traefik provides the layer seven, Nutanix provides the infrastructure and the layer four. So, it's a beautiful partnership there.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's great.

Sudeep Goswami

>> And with Oracle, we moved forward in our partnership, integrating all of the Traefik portfolio into OCI and OKE. So, we're making a lot of progress with them, not just on API, but also with AI. As you know, Oracle is going super hard on the AI, making AI available in multiple different geographies, so we're pleased to see those partnerships come to fruition.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. But can we explain to the audience a little bit about why this is important? Why is it really important to this?

Sudeep Goswami

>> And I think, really, if you take a step back, look at the trends what are happening, hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, sovereign-cloud deployments are on the rise. And what customers are looking for is to be able to run their infrastructure wherever they want and they want a unified operating model. And that's why this becomes very important because what Traefik does is operates at the layer seven, at the application layer. And therefore, working with infrastructure providers like Nutanix, like Oracle makes sense because we can make that same architecture available wherever the users want.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And when we were walking by your booth and we were talking a lot. There's lots of traffic at your booth, no pun intended there, traffic, right? But there was a lot of conversation around operational models and there's also offline models and such. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why was that so important to talk about?

Sudeep Goswami

>> Yeah, so there's two parts to that. One is the operating model on how you manage the infrastructure. Specifically, how do you do day-two ops? And increasingly, more people are going down the path of infrastructure as code, everything being fully declarative. And Traefik has been fully declarative from day one. So, that's a very nice validation of the approach that we took many, many years ago. Second part to that is the deploy-anywhere requirement, almost, that's coming up, where they don't want to just deploy everything on the public cloud, they don't want to bring everything. There's going to be this hybrid nature, but also they want sovereign optionality to be able to move and port their application to wherever they want. It could be in a data center that is totally air-gaped, offline, disconnected from the internet, or it could be some combination of all of these options. So, people are looking for options because this thing is now entering the next phase of optimization. A lot of trials have happened. People have figured out how public cloud works, how private cloud works. Now, I think with cost being the overarching theme, people are really trying to... Cost compliance and risk, if you look at all of that under the umbrella, people want optionality. They want to have that flexibility deploy anywhere. Same operating model, whether it's a VM, whether it's a server-less, or whether it's a container, like a microservices type workload.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Freedom of choice absolutely is something that's kind of the key theme of the show as well, is just choice happens. It's really how we're dealing with it. But one of the things that is very apparent, being at KubeCon, we have you, of course we're going to have cloud-native and Kubernetes focus, but the big theme that I'm hearing is around, of course, AI. AI is a big area focus. MCP gateways and API gateways, that's a big conversation. Agents is a big conversation. What does this mean for Traefik?

Sudeep Goswami

>> Yeah, and this was a big topic of conversation at our booth. People are coming to the realization that MCP gateway, API gateway, AI gateway, they cannot be three distinct product offerings. Even though they have different scope or being mandated to deploy three different products in their architecture is a non-starter. So, they're looking for ways to bring it all in together. And then, that's another validation of what Traefik has already done. With us, we package the API, the AI, and the MCP gateway into a single binary and that is extremely compelling when you're trying to deploy this at scale. And we wrote about this and the concept of a triple-gate pattern emerges for agentic workflows. And what that really means is when you are trying to secure an agentic workflow, you have to secure three parts of the conversation. You have to secure the conversation that an agent has with the LLM. You have to secure the conversation that the agent has with the APIs through the MCP server. And then, you have to control the conversation and secure the conversation between an agent and the MCP server resources. These are three distinct protocols, three distinct ways of doing, but being able to bring them all together in a compelling platform, infrastructure as code, that operating model, and giving people the deploy-anywhere capability, all of that is a super compelling value prop, which got validated at our booth .

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well, on top of that, it also sounds like it reduces complexity significantly, and that's one of the key areas that we see that is a challenge with AI workloads.

Sudeep Goswami

>> Exactly. The fragmentation is a real problem. Whether you talk about fragmentation between workload types, fragmentation between VMs, containers and serverless, but also, fragmentation of the AI ecosystem, whether you're talking about an API gateway, an AI gateway, an MCP gateway. I mean, there's fragmentation already starting to happen and people don't like it and they're looking for better options.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, one of the other things that was interesting around your booth where your T-shirts, what's the deal? Everybody wants the T-shirts.

Sudeep Goswami

>> Yeah, I should have worn one, but every year, every time we're at KubeCon, the T-shirts seem to be the biggest hit. And this year, again, people came to our booth just looking for T-shirts.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Oh, I need to get my T-shirt.

Sudeep Goswami

>> I'm going to get you a T-shirt. Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I appreciate it. Appreciate it. All right. So, big news happened at this event. We saw that there's a major shift in the Kubernetes ecosystem today. We saw that Kubernetes SIG Network officially announced that the retirement of the NGINX environment. So, let's talk a little bit about that because a big impact to the ecosystem.

Sudeep Goswami

>> Yeah, it happened yesterday. We're day three today, so towards the end of day two-

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's just one long day for me.

Sudeep Goswami

>> Oh, I know. A big announcement got dropped. And there's two parts to that announcement. So, to parse it properly, Ingress NGINX, which has been a very popular open-source Kubernetes ingress solution used by many, many users and many, many companies, they announced that they're going to end-of-life at the end of March 2026. So, we have four months-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, four months....

Sudeep Goswami

>> and there will not be any bug fixes, any enhancements, any support thereafter.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's aggressive.

Sudeep Goswami

>> Yeah, and that would've been okay if the follow-on project for that would've kept going. And that was the second part of the announcement, which is InGate, which was supposed to be the follow-on project that would carry it along, also declared that they're basically folding shop and they're done because they could not get enough people to participate in that community and contribute. So, with both of these coming together at an end, I mean now customers are really struggling to find an option.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well, we see 41% of internet-facing clusters run on Ingress today, run on this today.

Sudeep Goswami

>> Yeah, it's wild.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So, what are the options? It sounds like Traefik has a solution, right?

Sudeep Goswami

>> We have a solution, luckily, because we saw this coming a few months back when Ingress NGINX actually announced that they were going to end-of-life, they didn't give a date, but they announced that they were going to end-of-life and InGate was going to take over. We quickly followed up with that. We created a Ingress NGINX provider to seamlessly migrate users to Traefik with minimal changes to their infrastructure. So, we released that back in July of this year. And now, with this becoming a forcing function, I think that becomes a great pathway for people to migrate off of Ingress NGINX and go to Traefik.

Paul Nashawaty

>> How seamless or frictionless is it?

Sudeep Goswami

>> Literally, it's a drop-in replacement. So, you install the Traefik binary, you replace the existing Ingress NGINX binary. Your configuration that you have used in the Ingress NGINX, that stays. So, you preserve that configuration, and we're going to do the magic on the back-end being able to convert from the Ingress NGINX over to the Traefik side.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, it sounds like this is a major move in the ecosystem?

Sudeep Goswami

>> This is a major development, and there's a lot of managed Kubernetes distros that use Ingress NGINX under the hood, and they will now have to find a second option.

Paul Nashawaty

>> No, that's great. I mean, I think that it's great that you have a solution for this, right? I think it's a little bit challenging when you just say, "Okay, 41% of internet-facing clusters are using it," yet, there's no path forward. That's not .

Sudeep Goswami

>> And I mean, not only do we have a solution, I think the important thing here to also realize is our commitment to open source. We've been doing this for 10 years and we have not wavered in our commitment to open source. Traefik started back in 2015, was the first project, so 10 years ago, the first code was put in GitHub. And now, we have 3.4 billion downloads. We have over 900 contributors. We have almost 59,000 pushing 60,000 GitHub stars. That didn't happen by accident. It was a methodical, committed, very diligent effort in building a community. And so, that's what people are going to get that are migrating away from Ingress NGINX. You're not getting another, just people that are doing this on part-time basis. There's a real company behind it. Open source is really important to us, but also, we have advanced capabilities. So, if and when those users want to choose to migrate or to upgrade, I should say, to advanced capabilities, we provide that pathway, and that's a very seamless pathway. Within 30 seconds, you can upgrade your OSS to advanced capabilities with the unlock of a license, and you would have everything.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, reducing the complexity, add in the frictionless movement. That's really, really great. This is awesome. Great news. I mean, kind of exciting too, at the same time.

Sudeep Goswami

>> It is exciting. Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's really exciting,

Sudeep Goswami

>> And it's exciting that we have an option to provide to the community.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right, absolutely. Absolutely. So, let's fast forward. We're here next year and we're sitting here talking. What are your thoughts? What do you want to see next year at this time with Traefik, with the show, with everything?

Sudeep Goswami

>> Yeah. I think same spirit. Deepen our partnership with users. Be able to provide value, build more champions, deepen our partnerships with Nutanix, with Oracle. Perhaps there'll be others on the table as well, but we want to do what we love doing, which is solving problems and making it easier for users to just use infrastructure at scale.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well, Sudeep, it's always a pleasure having you on and having the conversations. It's forward thinking. I like where you're going with it. I like that the audience can have a place to go and learn about the next generation of where they want to go with their solutions. So, thanks for being on.

Sudeep Goswami

>> Thank you.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you.

Sudeep Goswami

>> Great to be here, Paul.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Paul Nashawaty coming to you live from the show floor at KubeCon North America 2025. Coming from theCUBE, your leading source of tech news.