The Technical Advisory Groups are going through a restructuring to prepare for the next 10 years in the Cloud Native computing. This session will discuss the new TAG structure, areas of involvement and how you leverage the new TAGs to further your technical aspirations and provide ROI.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing applications, but efficiently serving them in production is a challenge. Existing API endpoints, LoadBalancers and Gateways focus on HTTP/gRPC traffic which is a well defined space already. LLM traffic is completely different as an input to an LLM is usually characterized by the size of the prompt, the size and efficiency of the model...etc

Why are LLM Instance Gateways important? They solve the problem of efficiently managing and serving multiple LLM use cases with varying demands on shared infrastructure.

What will you learn? The core challenges of LLM inference serving: Understand the complexities of deploying and managing LLMs in production, including resource allocation, traffic management, and performance optimization.

We will dive into how LLM Instance Gateways work, how they route requests, manage resources, and ensure fairness among different LLM use cases.

With the growing maturity of the Kubernetes Gateway API and the Argo Rollouts plugin for Gateway API, it's now easier than ever to integrate Argo Rollouts with any traffic provider that implements the Gateway API. This allows you to automate progressive delivery decisions based on custom HTTP metrics. While most traffic providers focus on north-south traffic, some now offer seamless support for both north-south and east-west traffic patterns.

In this demo-driven session, we’ll explore how to use Argo Rollouts and the Kubernetes Gateway API to control traffic for both north-south and east-west directions without requiring application restarts. By leveraging Istio Ambient Mesh and HTTP metrics, we’ll dynamically monitor application health to drive progressive delivery decisions.

Service Mesh unlocks powerful capabilities for Kubernetes, enhancing observability, security, and traffic control. However, concerns about complexity and overhead have slowed adoption. This session debunks those myths! We’ll showcase how Service Mesh technologies have matured, offering approachable solutions with minimal impact. Istio’s Ambient mode exemplifies this shift, minimizing operational complexity and overhead. Many existing benchmarks raise doubts due to conflicting results. This session tackles this head-on! We’ll run a live, representative benchmark at scale (10s of nodes, thousands of Pods, thousands of RPS throughput) and dissect the metrics with the audience.

Ahoy, Kubernetes fans! Captain Kube is thrilled to host a grand cruise celebrating Kubernetes’ 10th birthday. But trouble looms on the horizon—three pirates have sneaked into the party, intent on disrupting the celebration and looting the precious birthday gifts.

Can Captain Kube and his friends uncover the pirates’ identities and safely evict them before the festivities are ruined? Join Phippy, Izzy, Owlina, Goldie, Tiago, Hazel, Zee, and the rest of the crew as they work together to protect the party. Will they get to enjoy cocktails and cake, or will the pirates spoil all the fun?

Istio maintainer and authors of the CNCF Phippy book-”Izzy saves the Birthday”, Faseela K and Lin Sun invite you to an engaging first look at their new book. This interactive session will also include live demos showcasing how CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Istio, Prometheus, SPIFFE, Envoy, and more come together to tackle challenges, ensuring a fun, safe, and seamless cruise experience.

Cloud-native environments present complex operational challenges that often require specialized expertise. In this session, we’ll introduce kagent, an open-source framework that brings agentic AI to Kubernetes.

Built on top of Microsoft’s Autogen and with extensibility in mind, kagent comes with a set of prebuilt tools for working with leading projects in the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystem and supports first-class integration with any MCP (Model Context Framework) compliant tool for domain-specific extensions.

In this demo, learn how kagent can transform your operations by extending your team's capabilities with AI agents that execute complex workflows across Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio, and Argo—reducing operational bottlenecks and accelerating problem resolution.

While we may not have a firm date on when AGI will emerge, one thing for certain is that 2025 will be the year of AI agents. Kubernetes is already the go-to platform for predictive analytics, MLOps, and inferencing today. What new challenges and opportunities emerge when autonomous, non-deterministic agents are deployed within our Kubernetes environments?

This talk will cover the primary building blocks of agents and multi-agent architectures and map them to Kubernetes primitives, patterns, and relevant ecosystem projects. We will discuss key challenges (and their solutions) in agentic architectures including:

• Adapting existing workloads and resources to integrate with agents via tool calling
• Observability and auditing to debug, diagnose, and explain agent behavior
• Sandboxing security context for agents to enforce principle of least privilege for the agent’s domain
• Connecting and orchestrating multi-agent interactions to support sophisticated workflows

At The New York Times, we manage a multi-tenant Kubernetes architecture across diverse regions, leveraging projects like Istio, OPA, and Karpenter. With Istio ambient mode now generally available, we’re exploring whether it’s time to eliminate sidecars in our production environment and allow the service mesh to integrate seamlessly into our infrastructure for multiple teams.

In this talk, we’ll take you through our journey of collaborating with the Istio and cloud-native community to build a sidecar-less architecture from scratch, utilizing the broader cloud-native stack we already have. We’ll share the technical challenges we encountered, practical tips for adopting Istio ambient mode, and the tangible benefits we’ve realized along the way. Join us to discover how we’re reshaping our cloud-native architecture for simplicity and efficiency.

Istio, a CNCF graduated project, is the most popular service mesh, simplifying observability, traffic management, and policy for your services. The project, its roadmap, and the community have gone through several changes over the past few quarters and we’d like to give some updates. We will discuss the project and its health, new features added in recent releases, progress on the new ambient sidecar-less data plane mode, Gateway API support, the project roadmap, and much more. We will also discuss the plans for the future of community-building efforts and how you can help us make Istio the best that it can be.