KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 | AnalystANGLE

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Rebecca Knight

Host

SiliconANGLE Media

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host

theCUBE Research

Paul Nashawaty

Practice Lead and Principal Analyst

theCUBE Research

play_circle_outline Record 13,000 Attend KubeCon EU: Open-Source Spirit, Merge Forward, and Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing Inclusion

play_circle_outline Cloud-Native Maturity vs. AI-Driven Complexity: KubeVirt, OpenFeature, Argo and the Growing Skills Gap

play_circle_outline AI Energy and Security Debates Meet Bill Mulligan’s Cilium Kubernetes Book for Kids

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AnalystANGLE

Rebecca Knight

Host SiliconANGLE Media

HOST

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host theCUBE Research

HOST

Paul Nashawaty

Practice Lead and Principal Analyst theCUBE Research

In this final wrap-up from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 in Amsterdam, theCUBE's Rebecca Knight, Paul Nashawaty, and Rob Strechay reflect on three days of live coverage and examine how the cloud-native ecosystem is converging around AI, open source governance and platform maturity. The event drew a record 13,000 attendees from more than 100 countries — surpassing the previous cap of 10,000 — underscoring the global reach of the CNCF community. Knight, Nashawaty and Strechay highlight how this year's European setting amplified governance themes, with the EU... Read more

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How has the event been this year in terms of attendance, international representation, community atmosphere, diversity initiatives, and notable guests? add

Which cloud-native/open-source projects have graduated or are currently going through graduation, and what does that indicate about the maturity and remaining challenges in the cloud-native ecosystem? add

What were the main themes and topics discussed at the conference/event? add

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good morning, everyone. We are smack dab in the middle of day three of theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2026 live in Amsterdam. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and I'm sitting alongside two of my fantastic colleagues from theCUBE, Rob Stretchay and Paul Nashawaty. Guys, we're wrapping. It's almost over. I can't believe it.

Rob Strechay

>> It's been crazy. So much energy at this event always, but this one in particular has seemed even more so. The engagement of people has just been fantastic and everybody we've had on.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely. I think that this event, if I understand it correctly, was the highest-attended event with over 13,000 attendees. I was here in 2023. They capped it at 10,000 people. There was 2,000 people on the wait list. 13,000 of our closest friends. It's been really busy.

Rebecca Knight

>> From 100 countries around the world. It also feels like a mini UN walking around the halls.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It does.

Rebecca Knight

>> And I think you're absolutely right. I mean, this is always such a community-oriented event, but it definitely feels like a very vibrant, collaborative spirit here. Absolutely.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, we've had on the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group from the CNCF with their Merge Forward initiative to bring in diversity as well. And I think that this has always been a very welcoming community, to put it mildly. But to see how they're going and looking for people with ... And focusing on their abilities to be inside and helping do this has been fantastic this week. And I think that that group has been growing massively. They're always looking for more, but it's one of those things that it's just a vibrant community.

Rebecca Knight

>> 100%. And speaking about favorite guests and interesting guests, having on Spotify yesterday, talking about Backstage and how ... I mean, it's a really big gesture to say, "Hey, we've got this really cool tech. Let's not hoard it. Let's actually open it up to the world." I mean, that's a pretty sharing and generous thing to do, especially in the tech industry which is not known for that.

Rob Strechay

>> Exactly.

Rebecca Knight

>> I mean, it is. I mean, it really gets at the open-source community and what everyone is trying to do for each other here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I think it's important to note. I mean, one of the main themes is ... Spotify, giving back with Backstage, awesome initiative. Awesome kind of growth there. We have to kind of highlight the fact that we're here in Europe. And the themes of this show is governance, compliance, regulations, and data sovereignty. And no surprise. When you have the EU CRA that's going into effect this year, that's a big, big factor. I've been walking the show floor. I've been having many, many conversations about those. That's a big area. I think that Backstage is going to help accelerate these projects. I think that the vendors that are here are very much aware of it. I'm looking forward to see what happens in North America because the themes are usually very different, but here definitely those were the themes that I was in tune to.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think it's interesting who's graduated and not graduated out of the different projects. We got to talk to a number of them. The KubeVirt folks have put in in September. Haven't quite gotten through the knot hole yet on the ... They're into the second phase, I think, of graduation. We also talked to OpenFeature folks earlier with Dynatrace, and they're looking at going towards graduation as well. I think there's a maturity to the cloud native part of this that's coming on, not just the Kubernetes. I mean, we're now almost 12 years in with Kubernetes. Again, it's a big thing. Now things like Argo is 10 years old, and other things are 10 years old, and we're starting to see that maturity. It is the de facto standard at this point.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Excuse me. It's interesting. I mean, the 10 years old, you would think that that's plenty of time for these companies to kind of get their head around this, but yet we're still seeing complexity and skill gap issues. We're still seeing those are the challenges. And then adding AI on top of it is just amplifying it because it's happening very fast, accelerating. I mean, I love having those conversations. We had Krobe on from the OSS. That was a good, great conversation. The open community here is really kind of trying to overcome some of these challenges, but I think the more we're trying to overcome, we're also seeing some areas that are exposing other things as well.

Rob Strechay

>> What was one of your favorite things that we talked about?

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, there's so many cool projects and cool new technologies. Definitely my favorite was the robotic dog. And this is from ITQ. And they're not a robotic dog company. They're not robotics, but it was all just a proof of concept about showing the architecture and showing enterprises, "Here's how we can do this, and watch our dog that has been trained to learn gestures. And we can do this, too, for your enterprise and what your needs are." It was a very clever and creative way to show enterprises what they can do with their tech. Absolutely.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think it tied in really well to what Paul was saying about the big theme of sovereignty and obviously AI. The AI community is blowing up here. And Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard for building your AI. And I think that proof of concept where they're using OpenShift in the backend, but the dog itself is running based off of communicating with a large language model that's running on Kubernetes in the backend and the stack that's on it that has its small language model that knows ... And they talked about their 50 training runs to get it from 70% up to 90-some-odd percent of accuracy with the sign language. It was very cool.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I mean, I think that's a great example. I mean, there was also talking to OpenSearch. I was talking to Bianca Lewis, which she's going to be on at the next session here, but I was talking to her this week, and she's talking about that where they've evolved. They've changed from just being the observability side to really being a focus in on the AI front.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, AI has been a theme throughout everything here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely.

Rob Strechay

>> I think that a big piece of it has been, how do you control AI? Like you said, with OpenSSF, we had a really great conversation around how you're securing it and how fast things are going. And I think that-

Rebecca Knight

>> And how do you make it sustainable too? I mean, that was a big part of our conversation with Tintri yesterday too. And he was really passionate about it. And it's interesting to hear people being so thoughtful about these really hard, complex questions.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Phil was very passionate yesterday. Yes, he was. No, it's absolutely true though. I mean, he's passionate because he's right. He's saying people are burning oil for stupid things. And he's like, "Why? Why do that? You don't have to do that. You can maximize your investment by capitalizing it together." I think it's very, very great. And if you haven't seen that, watch that session because that was a great session as well.

Rebecca Knight

>> Absolutely. Absolutely. Lest you think technology is just for geeks like you guys, no, it's also a children's book. We had Bill Mulligan the other day on from Cilium, and he has written this very colorful children's book that explains Kubernetes and explains security and network policy. I mean, just great stuff. Anyway, it looks really fun for your kiddos and maybe will also help them go to bed on time. Just saying.

Rob Strechay

>> These every year, and then we talked about the documentary that's coming out or came out last night. I think the CNCF has just done a wonderful job of really enabling the community and enabling these different projects to be highlighted. And I think the companies that come here, of course, they want to make revenue, but at the same time, they're contributing a massive amount to open source. And I think that's what's so fun is to see the community coming together that's very passionate about helping out others and stuff like that. I mean, we even had Nvidia on the main stage on day one talking, kind of bridging the gap from last week at GTC to this week. And then we actually talked to Kevin from Vulture, the CMO from Vulture, about this bridging that gap as well from last week. I think you start to look at how the community is evolving and how many more users of the technology are also participating here.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, that is something that really has become apparent. So much more involvement from end users here. What do you think that that will mean for where the community goes, the next journey, the next chapter, Paul?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, I mean, some of the segments we had on, we had Red Hat on. We had SUSE on. They were also giving back to the communities. Where is it going? I mean, look, it's going to evolve. I mean, people are looking at how to maximize what they're doing but also trying not to be so focused on being a specialist and letting generalists do the job. I mean, we see in our research 67% of organizations are hiring generalists over specialists. That's showing here. And largely due to the fact that AI is an accelerator to help you do your job. It doesn't replace your job. It's a tool. It's a tool to do-

Rob Strechay

>> It's a buddy.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's a buddy.

Rob Strechay

>> It's a buddy.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But you can use a hand screwdriver, or you can use a drill, and it's the same thing. I think that's really where the community's going.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right. Mark Twain was apparently the first author who used a typewriter. He wrote Huckleberry Finn on a typewriter.

Paul Nashawaty

>> There you go.

Rebecca Knight

>> AI is a typewriter in and of itself. I mean, as one of our guest said, at the end of the day, AI is just another workload that you're running. I mean, that's what it is. Absolutely.

Rob Strechay

>> I agree. And I think when you start to look at where this is going, and I think we know that the open source ... I would say the number of open-source activities going on this year is insane. I mean, next week is MCP Dev in New York City. Then there's open source-

Paul Nashawaty

>> LSS and Open Observability Summit. There's a whole slew of ...

Rob Strechay

>> And then they're actually going back to India, back to China, I believe to Japan as well. I think they're bringing this all around, which is fantastic because I think it is ... And I think Jonathan, who's going to be on in a minute or two, was talking about how, hey, the largest contributions have actually come out of Europe in here. And then second is the US. But when you start to look at that, that's pretty impressive about that. And then you have India and China behind that which just talks to the global nature of what's going on. And standardization absolutely helps. It helps from a security perspective. It helps from an abilities perspective. It is leveling the playing field, which I think has to happen for AI to really be what it needs to be.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. Indeed. Well, this has been a fabulous three days with both of you, so thank you so much.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great.

Rob Strechay

>> Well, thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> It's really a lot of fun. And there's still more to come. There's still more to come of theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU live from Amsterdam. I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Nashawaty and Rob Stretchay. Stay tuned for more. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.