My recap of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 in Salt Lake City. The question all week was how to take agents to production. My takeaway: we already have most of the building blocks, but we need to rethink how we put them together, especially around governance, observability and autonomy.
A full day of MCP and agents at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City, which I co-chaired with Chris Mazur. Open governance, securing the tool layer and running agents on Kubernetes kept coming up, and most of it came back to platform engineering.
Three days in Malmö at Øredev's 20th edition, under the theme Legacy. Agents came up in almost every talk, but the conversations kept returning to older questions: where the bottleneck is, what the platform should carry, how much structure our systems have, and who we're building for.
A day in Warsaw with a vibrant Polish community. Alex Chircop on where the CNCF is heading, Paweł Sułkowski's bakery trap, Marcus Noble's Kube-Oddities, €230,000 of GitOps scale testing, capybaras and AI delegation from Adriana and Josh, Julia's career traced with OpenTelemetry, my talk on observability as a platform product, and a photo with Jerzy Dudek.
My first KCD UK, and my first time in Edinburgh. Abby Bangser made the case that platform engineering is the prerequisite for getting value from AI, and the rest of the two days kept agreeing with her: agent sandboxes, security as a platform user, policy as the platform's API, and a Kubernetes API that survives whatever you swap out underneath it. Plus Hazel Weakly on strategy, Adriana's career lessons, and the talk Adriana and I gave.
My first Open Source Summit, and the end of a week in Prague. The idea that kept coming back was participation: in the governance of the projects Europe depends on, in defending maintainers now that AI makes vulnerabilities cheap to find, and in the instrumentation and guardrails that let us trust agents. Plus agentgateway, the Kubernetes Agent Sandbox, a benchmark of agent memory backends, and the talk Adriana and I gave.