KubeCon Day Two Recap: The Cloud Native Oscars

With over 9,200 attendees buzzing, Day Two at KubeCon was all about security...the sessions, networking, and the Sponsor Showcase were in full swing. We're in the thick of it, baby! Here’s a rundown of what went down.

Taylor Dolezal, head of ecosystem, dropped big news: CNCF’s Tech Radar is back in full force. Plus, the End User TAB—the “voice of the end user”—shared updates, from new reference architectures to boosted end-user participation.
Alexa Griffith from Bloomberg introduced the Envoy AI Gateway, a collaboration with Tetrate, aiming to solve the wild access pattern and credential issues in large language models (LLMs).

The Awards Show

And the winners are…

3rd place: Reddit—handling millions of users, page views galore. They’ve implemented CNCF tech across their hybrid cloud setup. Cool, cool, cool. Upvote from me.
2nd place: Capital One. Cloud-native banking! Increased deployment speed and AWS cost cuts. ~~Guess those savings don’t trickle down to the consumer, but hey,~~ congrats!
1st place: Adobe, making over 5,160 contributions to CNCF projects....Now, ~~only if their user didn't need a reference architecture to cancel.~~

Community Shoutouts
The Community Awards were presented by Chris Aniszczyk. Joe Stringer won top committer, Qiming Teng and Haifeng Yao for top docs. Plus a new “Lift and Shift” award for a crew of Kubernetes champs, and the Lifetime Achievement Award went to Tim Hockin, which sounds kind of like a tech version of a lifetime supply of cereal. I hope it's Cap'n Crunch. Because I'd totally work for that.

The Real Talk Sessions

Stop being a software ostrich! Kubernetes is “stable and boring,” which Nikhita Raghunath says is great—until attackers get sneakier. With AI, SBOMs, and quantum computing coming, security needs to be baked in deep.
Open source security is not a spectator sport: Justin Cappos and Santiago Torres-Arias remind us that everyone can pitch in. Whether you’re new or a pro, dive in—CNCF TAG Security or OpenSSF are good starting points.

Recap of Announcements and, Uh, Observations

CNCF launched a Technology Landscape Radar. Sounds helpful, right? (Because who hasn’t been a little lost in the landscape?)
Adobe won Top End User Award – ~~Uh...Can we poll the~~ ~~actual users~~ ~~on that?~~
2024 Community Awards announced. Round of applause for the people making cloud native tick.
Oh, and a new Argo documentary. Ben Affleck’s not in this one, so this documentary confused me. The portion about GitOps took over most of the film. But I really enjoyed it.

My favorite session of today was "What Istio Got Wrong". Istio’s journey to simplify service mesh was laid bare in an honest session by Christian Posta and Louis Ryan. They really dug into Istio's early missteps—overcomplexity, feature overload, and contributor challenges—and how the project evolved to its streamlined, user-friendly (ish) Ambient Mode. I'm still going to use Linkerd, but I am happy for the project regardless. It was an honest talk that stood out as my favorite of the day alongside the Diversity luncheon.