🇬🇧 KubeCon 2025: A Week That Reignited My Passion for Cloud Native
When I landed in London on a chilly morning at the end of March, I was already buzzing with excitement. KubeCon EU 2025 at ExCeL London was waiting, and thanks to Redeploy sponsoring my trip (forever grateful ❤️), I had the chance to soak in everything the Kubernetes community had to offer.
Little did I know how much I would learn — not just from talks, but from conversations, hallway chats, and moments of pure inspiration.
🌍 Day 1: Finding Focus Amid Chaos
The first few sessions were a blur of energy, logos, and coffee. But one talk quickly stood out: Beyond Security: Leveraging OPA for FinOps by Sathish Kumar Venkatesan.
He spoke about bringing financial accountability into Kubernetes with OPA — using the same tools we use for security to also enforce cost efficiency.
Takeaway:
“Shifting FinOps left isn’t just about saving money — it’s about giving developers visibility into the costs they create.”
That stuck with me. FinOps isn’t a finance team’s job anymore. It’s everyone’s.
🔍 Day 2: Rethinking Observability with eBPF
On the second day, Dom Delnano’s session on Expanding eBPF’s Reach totally changed how I see observability.
He explained how auto-instrumentation at the kernel level can free us from the nightmare of manually tracing every microservice, in every language.
Takeaway:
“Good telemetry doesn’t just collect data — it enriches it, structures it, and makes it programmable.”
Now, I see eBPF not as “just cool tech,” but as a real solution for the complexity of modern, polyglot systems.
🧠 Midweek: When HPC Meets AI
Midweek fatigue was setting in (too many coffee-fueled nights) but Andrey Velichkevich and Yuki Iwai’s talk on From HPC to AI workloads using Kubeflow TrainJob re-energized me.
They explained how Kubeflow TrainJob hides the messy complexity of distributed training and lets ML engineers focus on models, not MPI configurations.
Takeaway:
“If we want to democratize AI, we must hide complexity, not celebrate it.”
This deeply resonated with me. Tools should serve the builders, not slow them down.
⚡ Late Week: Scaling Without Melting Down
Thursday brought a rollercoaster session from NVIDIA’s Ryan Hallisey and Alay Patel: Scaling GPU Clusters Without Melting Down!.
They shared some painfully honest stories — like how listing too many Kubernetes Secrets caused entire clusters to crash!
Takeaway:
“Real-world scaling is messy. You don’t ‘fix’ it — you constantly tune it.”
Sometimes the best lessons come from war stories, and this one made me appreciate the raw engineering grit behind massive GPU clusters.
🛠️ AI at Scale: Preemption and Benchmarks
Two other sessions made me reflect on the future of AI at scale:
- Bloomberg’s AI Workload Preemption — learning how priority-based scheduling ensures that critical AI jobs don’t get stuck.
- Benchmarking AI Workloads — seeing how tools like fmperf bring science to measuring LLM performance.
Takeaway:
“AI infrastructure isn’t just about raw power — it’s about smart scheduling, realistic benchmarking, and intentional design.”
🚗 Volvo Cars: From Chaos to ML Control
One of the most inspiring talks came from Volvo Cars. George Markhulia and Steve Larkin shared how they built a practical ML platform with GitOps at the core.
It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t magic. It was just thoughtful engineering, clear ownership, and empathy for users.
Takeaway:
“Success is 10% tools, 90% people and process.”
Their journey reminded me that while Kubernetes is complex, it’s people who make platforms succeed.
🎉 Wrapping Up: Why KubeCon Feels Different
As I packed my bags to leave London, I realized KubeCon wasn’t just another tech conference. It felt like being part of a living, breathing community — one that’s still writing its story.
Whether it’s AI, infrastructure, or anything we build, nothing is ever truly “finished” — it’s all an evolving journey, just like us.
At every talk, in every hallway conversation, there was this quiet energy: a shared belief that we can always make things better — more open, more efficient, more human.
If you ever get a chance to go: say yes. Go with open eyes and even wider curiosity.
It’s not just about the sessions. It’s about the people you’ll meet, the mistakes you’ll learn from, and the small sparks of ideas that might just change how you build things forever.
I know it changed me. ✨
