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Microsoft Azure at KubeCon North America 2025 | Atlanta, GA - Nov 10-13

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coryskimming
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Oct 27, 2025

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America is back - this time in Atlanta, Georgia, and the excitement is real. Whether you’re a developer, operator, architect, or just Kubernetes-curious, Microsoft Azure is showing up with a packed agenda, hands-on demos, and plenty of ways to connect and learn with our team of experts.  Read on for all the ways you can connect with our team!

Kick off with Azure Day with Kubernetes (Nov 10)

Before the main conference even starts, join us for Azure Day with Kubernetes on November 10. It’s a full day of learning, best practices, deep-dive discussions, and hands-on labs, all designed to help you build cloud-native and AI apps with Kubernetes on Azure. You’ll get to meet Microsoft experts, dive into technical sessions, roll up your sleeves in the afternoon labs or have focused deep-dive discussions in our whiteboarding sessions. If you’re looking to sharpen your skills or just want to chat with folks who live and breathe Kubernetes on Azure, this is the place to be. 

Spots are limited, so register today at: https://aka.ms/AzureKubernetesDay 

Catch up with our experts at Booth #500

The Microsoft booth is more than just a spot to grab swag (though, yes, there will be swag and stickers!). It’s a central hub for connecting with product teams, setting up meetings, and seeing live demos. Whether you want to learn how to troubleshoot Kubernetes with agentic AI tools, explore open-source projects, or just talk shop, you’ll find plenty of friendly faces ready to help. 

We will be running a variety of theatre sessions and demos out of the booth week on topics including AKS Automatic, agentic troubleshooting, Azure Verified Modules, networking, app modernization, hybrid deployments, storage, and more. 

🔥Hot tip: join us for our live Kubernetes Trivia Show at the Microsoft Azure booth during the KubeCrawl on Tuesday to win exclusive swag! 

Microsoft sessions at KubeCon NA 2025

Here’s a quick look at all the sessions with Microsoft speakers that you won’t want to miss. Click the titles for full details and add them to your schedule!

Keynotes

Date: Thu November 13, 2025 

Start Time:  9:49 AM 

Room: Exhibit Hall B2

Title: Scaling Smarter: Simplifying Multicluster AI with KAITO and KubeFleet 

Speaker: Jorge Palma 

Abstract: As demand for AI workloads on Kubernetes grows, multicluster inferencing has emerged as a powerful yet complex architectural pattern. While multicluster support offers benefits in terms of geographic redundancy, data sovereignty, and resource optimization, it also introduces significant challenges around orchestration, traffic routing, cost control, and operational overhead.

To address these challenges, we’ll introduce two CNCF projects—KAITO and KubeFleet—that work together to simplify and optimize multicluster AI operations. KAITO provides a declarative framework for managing AI inference workflows with built-in support for model versioning, and performance telemetry. KubeFleet complements this by enabling seamless workload distribution across clusters, based on cost, latency, and availability. Together, these tools reduce operational complexity, improve cost efficiency, and ensure consistent performance at scale.

Date: Thu November 13, 2025 

Start Time: 9:56 AM 

Room: Exhibit Hall B2

Title: Cloud Native Back to the Future: The Road Ahead  

Speakers: Jeremy Rickard (Microsoft), Alex Chircop (Akamai)

Abstract:  The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) turns 10 this year, now home to more than 200 projects across the cloud native landscape. As we look ahead, the community faces new demands around security, sustainability, complexity, and emerging workloads like AI inference and agents. As many areas of the ecosystem transition to mature foundational building blocks, we are excited to explore the next evolution of cloud native development.  The TOC will highlight how these challenges open opportunities to shape the next generation of applications and ensure the ecosystem continues to thrive.

  • How are new projects addressing these new emerging workloads?
  • How will these new projects impact security hygiene in the ecosystem?
  • How will existing projects adapt to meet new realities?
  • How is the CNCF evolving to support this next generation of computing?

Join us as we reflect on the first decade of cloud native—and look ahead to how this community will power the age of AI, intelligent systems, and beyond.

Featured Demo

Date: Wed November 12, 2025 

Start Time: 2:15-2:35 PM 

Room: Expo Demo Area

Title: HolmesGPT: Agentic K8s troubleshooting in your terminal

Speakers: Pavneet Singh Ahluwalia (Microsoft), Arik Alon (Robusta)

Abstract: Troubleshooting Kubernetes shouldn’t require hopping across dashboards, logs, and docs. With open-source tools like HolmesGPT and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, you can now bring an agentic experience directly into your CLI. In this demo, we’ll show how this OSS stack can run everywhere, from lightweight kind clusters on your laptop to production-grade clusters at scale. The experience supports any LLM provider: in-cluster, local, or cloud, ensuring data never leaves your environment and costs remain predictable. We will showcase how users can ask natural-language questions (e.g., “why is my pod Pending?”) and get grounded reasoning, targeted diagnostics, and safe, human-in-the-loop remediation steps -- all without leaving the terminal. Whether you’re experimenting locally or running mission-critical workloads, you’ll walk away knowing how to extend these OSS components to build your own agentic workflows in Kubernetes.

All sessions

Microsoft Speaker(s)

Session

Will Case 

No Kubectl, No Problem: The Future With Conversational Kubernetes 

Ana Maria Lopez Moreno 

Smarter Together: Orchestrating Multi-Agent AI Systems With A2A and MCP on Container 

Neha Aggarwal 

10 Years of Cilium: Connecting, Securing, and Simplifying the Cloud Native Stack 

Yi Zha 

Strengthening Supply Chain for Kubernetes: Cross-Cloud SLSA Attestation Verification 

Joaquim Rocha & Oleksandr Dubenko 

Contribfest: Power up Your CNCF Tools With Headlamp 

Jeremy Rickard 

Shaping LTS Together: What We’ve Learned the Hard Way 

Feynman Zhou 

Shipping Secure, Reusable, and Composable Infrastructure as Code: GE HealthCare’s Journey With ORAS 

Jackie Maertens & Nilekh Chaudhari 

No Joke: Two Security Maintainers Walk Into a Cluster 

Paul Yu, Sachi Desai 

Rage Against the Machine: Fighting AI Complexity with Kubernetes simplicity 

Dipti Pai 

Flux - The GitLess GitOps Edition 

Trask Stalnaker 

OpenTelemetry: Unpacking 2025, Charting 2026 

Mike Morris 

Gateway API: Table Stakes 

Anish Ramasekar, Mo Khan, Stanislav Láznička, Rita Zhang & Peter Engelbert 

Strengthening Kubernetes Trust: SIG Auth's Latest Security Enhancements 

Ernest Wong 

AI Models Are Huge, but Your GPUs Aren’t: Mastering multi-mode distributed inference on Kubernetes 

Rita Zhang 

Navigating the Rapid Evolution of Large Model Inference: Where does Kubernetes fit? 

Suraj Deshmukh 

LLMs on Kubernetes: Squeeze 5x GPU Efficiency with cache, route, repeat! 

Aman Singh 

Drasi: A New Take on Change-driven Architectures 

Ganeshkumar Ashokavardhanan & Qinghui Zhuang 

Agent-Driven MCP for AI Workloads on Kubernetes 

Steven Jin 

Contribfest: From Farm (Fork) To Table (Feature): Growing Your First (Free-range Organic) Istio PR 

Jack Francis 

SIG Autoscaling Projects Update 

Mark Rossetti 

Kubernetes SIG-Windows Updates 

Apurup Chevuru & Michael Zappa 

Portable MTLS for Kubernetes: A QUIC-Based Plugin Compatible With Any CNI  

Ciprian Hacman 

The Next Decoupling: From Monolithic Cluster, To Control-Plane With Nodes 

Keith Mattix 

Istio Project Updates: AI Inference, Ambient Multicluster & Default Deny 

Jonathan Smith 

How Comcast Leverages Radius in Their Internal Developer Platform 

Jon Huhn 

Lightning Talk: Getting (and Staying) up To Speed on DRA With the DRA Example Driver 

Rita Zhang, Jaydip Gabani 

Open Policy Agent (OPA) Intro & Deep Dive 

Bridget Kromhout 

SIG Cloud Provider Deep Dive: Expanding Our Mission  

Pavneet Ahluwalia 

Beyond ChatOps: Agentic AI in Kubernetes—What Works, What Breaks, and What’s Next 

Ryan Zhang 

Finally, a Cluster Inventory I Can USE! 

Michael Katchinskiy, Yossi Weizman 

You Deployed What?! Data-driven lesson on Unsafe Helm Chart Defaults 

Mauricio Vásquez Bernal & Jose Blanquicet 

Contribfest: Inspektor Gadget Contribfest: Enhancing the Observability and Security of Your K8s Clusters Through an easy to use Framework 

Wei Fu 

etcd V3.6 and Beyond + Etcd-operator Updates 

Jeremy Rickard 

GitHub Actions: Project Usage and Deep Dive 

 
We can't wait to see you in Atlanta!

Microsoft’s presence is all about empowering developers and operators to build, secure, and scale modern applications. You’ll see us leading sessions, sharing open-source contributions, and hosting roundtables on how cloud native powers AI in production. We’re here to learn from you, too - so bring your questions, ideas, and feedback.

Updated Oct 27, 2025
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