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.
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.
Nearly every talk I saw at GOTO Copenhagen this year was about coding agents. The surprising part wasn't the AI. It was how often the answer came back to fundamentals we already knew mattered: code health, deterministic checks, clear boundaries, and platforms built for humans first.
Telemetry can already show what an AI agent did. Deciding whether it should have done it is the harder problem, and it came up on stage and at both dinners at SREday London.
Most organizations have observability as a capability, not as a product. Platform engineering was Kubernetes' Rails moment; observability is still looking for its own.