KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 took place from 23 to 26 March at RAI Amsterdam, and it was a strong one. The themes running through the week reflected where the cloud native community is right now: AI moving from experimentation into production, platform engineering continuing to mature, and security and sovereignty top of mind for organizations across Europe. Microsoft was there throughout, and once again supported a range of open source projects in the Project Pavilion.
The Project Pavilion is a dedicated, vendor-neutral space on the show floor reserved for CNCF projects. It is where the work gets talked about honestly. Maintainers and contributors meet directly with end users, share what they are building, get real feedback on what is and is not working, and have the kinds of technical conversations that are hard to have anywhere else. For open source communities, it is one of the most valuable parts of the event.
Why Our Presence Matters
Microsoft's products and services are built on and alongside many of the technologies represented in the pavilion, and the health of these communities matters to us directly. Showing up means our teams hear firsthand what is working, what is missing, and where these projects need to go next. It also means we get to contribute as community members, not just as a company name on a sponsor board. That distinction matters to us, and to the communities we are part of.
Microsoft-Supported Pavilion Projects
Confidential Containers
Representative: Jeremi Piotrowski
The Confidential Containers booth gave attendees a chance to learn more about the project and its approach to protecting workloads using hardware-based trusted execution environments. Jeremi was on hand throughout the kiosk hours, fielding questions from interested users and developers exploring confidential computing in Kubernetes environments. Conversations touched on use cases around data privacy, regulated workloads, and the role Confidential Containers plays in the broader cloud-native security landscape.
Drasi
Representative: Daniel Gerlag and Nandita Valsan
The Drasi team had a busy time in the pavilion, engaging around 40 attendees across two kiosk shifts in focused technical conversations. Most visitors were developers and platform engineers curious about change-driven architectures and real-time data processing. There was strong positive feedback on the newly introduced Drasi Server modes and embeddable library, which complement Drasi for Kubernetes. The team came away with useful validation of current design decisions and good input for the roadmap ahead.
Envoy
Representative: Mikhail Krinkin
The Envoy booth was staffed for the full duration of KubeCon EU by maintainers from Microsoft, Google, Isovalent, and Tetrate, reflecting the broad and healthy contributor base behind the project. The biggest topic at the booth was migration from ingress-nginx to Gateway API implementations. The archival of ingress-nginx pushed a lot of users into making changes they were not quite ready for, and questions ranged from technical specifics like HTTP default differences between Envoy and Nginx, to more foundational questions about what Envoy and Gateway API actually are. The team had anticipated this and invested in the ingress2gateway project to give users a clear migration path. Extensibility was another frequent conversation topic, with dynamic modules increasingly becoming the go-to answer for user-specific requirements. Starting with the 1.38 release of Envoy, dynamic modules will have a backward compatible ABI, a sign of real production readiness for that feature.
Flatcar
Representative: Thilo Fromm and Mathieu Tortuyaux
The Flatcar booth had great energy, with maintainers from Microsoft, STACKIT, and CloudBase joining for conversations throughout the pavilion hours. Operational sovereignty came up again and again as a theme, with users and consulting partners sharing how they are building their Kubernetes offerings on Flatcar because of how reliable and secure it is.
There were a lot of meaningful conversations. Lambda.ai currently runs Flatcar on their control plane and is looking at extending it to worker and customer clusters, with interest in contributing to the project. ReeVo has built their hosted Kubernetes distro on Flatcar across multi-cloud and bare metal environments and is planning to move hundreds of customer clusters over soon. Users from ClearScore, Avassa, Recorded Future, and several other organizations also stopped by with positive feedback on the project's robustness and security. STACKIT uses Flatcar as the default OS for their hosted Kubernetes offering and sponsors a full-time maintainer for the project. The team also connected with TAG Infrastructure to talk through Flatcar's CNCF graduation progress.
Headlamp
Representatives: René Dudfield and Santhosh Nagaraj S
The Headlamp booth was a busy one, with users, contributors, and partner projects all stopping by throughout the pavilion hours. Conversations covered real-world deployments, federation challenges, multi-tenant namespace visibility, and feature requests like multi-CR data aggregation. There was notable interest from consultancies deploying Headlamp across hundreds of customer clusters, as well as from companies already running it at cloud scale. Several CNCF projects expressed interest in building UIs for their own projects inside Headlamp, with a few even getting started right there at the conference. The team also heard from users getting budget approved to migrate from the deprecated Kubernetes Dashboard, which is a good sign for the project's growing momentum. Demand for air-gapped AI agent support and deeper Azure and AKS integrations for internal developer platforms came up as clear areas to watch.
Hyperlight
Representative: Ralph Squillace
The Hyperlight booth ran as a half-day session on Tuesday, in line with the project's current Sandbox status, but the corner location in the project area made a real difference in visibility. Ralph was fielding questions from the moment the doors opened, with a steady stream of visitors right up until the shift ended. Live and recorded demos were central to the conversations, helping attendees quickly grasp what Hyperlight does and how it fits into their environments. One standout visit came from an engineer at SAP who spent nearly an hour at the booth, pushing the conversation from fundamentals and embedding examples all the way through to agentic protection scenarios in Kubernetes. That conversation continued beyond KubeCon and turned into a scheduled meeting to explore a proof of concept, a good example of the kind of follow-on engagement the pavilion can generate.
Inspektor Gadget
Representative: Michael Friese and Qasim Sarfraz
The Inspektor Gadget booth had a lot of great energy, drawing in contributors, new users, and people just discovering the project for the first time. There was genuine excitement around Inspektor Gadget Desktop and its visual troubleshooting experience for Kubernetes and Linux environments. The integration with HolmesGPT, which was also featured in the keynote, came up frequently and was one of the main talking points throughout the event. A theme that surfaced consistently in conversations with platform engineers was multi-tenancy, with teams looking for ways to safely give developers ad-hoc access to troubleshoot issues independently while keeping overall control at the platform level. It was a good set of conversations that reflected both the project's maturity and the growing demand for a flexible observability framework.
Istio
Representative: Mitch Connors, Mikhail Krinkin, Jackie Maertens and Mike Morris
The Istio booth had steady traffic throughout the conference, with a noticeable shift in who was stopping by. More visitors came from teams with existing sidecar-based production deployments looking for guidance on moving to ambient mode, which is a change from previous years when ambient interest was mostly coming from greenfield users. The motivation to make the move was often tied to cost optimization and performance, with teams having read case studies and feeling more confident about the direction. That said, the increased interest also surfaced some real gaps, including requests for clearer migration guidance, more clarity around architectural differences like mTLS egress workflows, and better support for VM-based workloads. The team is planning to prioritize migration guidance over the coming months. The updated Istio Day format, with a half day of sessions at the Cloud Native Theater stage, also drew a strong crowd with standing room only throughout.
Notary Project
Representative: Toddy Mladenov and Flora Taagen
The Notary Project kiosk drew a wide range of visitors, from people learning about container image signing for the first time to experienced engineers asking detailed questions about what is coming next on the roadmap. A major highlight of the week was the project's conference talk on per-layer dm-verity signing, which drew a packed room and over 660 online sign-ups, one of the stronger turnouts for a project-level session at the event. The talk walked through how the new capability moves container security beyond pull-time verification to continuous runtime protection, backed by dm-verity, which generated a lengthy Q&A and a lot of enthusiasm from the audience. The team also sees a real opportunity ahead as AI workloads push organizations to think harder about the integrity of models, datasets, and container images, and the interest at the booth reinforced that Notary Project is well positioned to play a big role in securing those workflows.
ORAS
Representative: Toddy Mladenov
The ORAS kiosk was staffed by maintainers from Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Red Hat, a good reflection of the healthy multi-vendor community the project has built. Attendees engaged with maintainers on ORAS use cases and adoption, with conversations ranging from how artifacts are tagged and packaged to how ORAS fits into broader multi-cloud workflows. One practical takeaway from maintainer conversations was around leveraging the ORAS SDK more often as a substitute for CLI operations when working with container registries, which helps teams build simpler and more robust tooling.
Radius
Representative: Sylvain Niles and Will Tsai
The Radius booth, supported by the Microsoft Azure Incubations team, attracted a good mix of enterprise platform teams, prospective adopters, and fellow open source maintainers throughout the pavilion hours. There was strong interest in the extensible Radius Resource Types feature and how it helps teams abstract infrastructure complexity and move workloads across different environments. Conversations also surfaced useful feedback on where the project should focus next, including agent-driven infrastructure workflows and using the Radius application graph to improve observability and operational visibility for cloud-native applications.
Conclusion
KubeCon EU 2026 was a good reminder of why this community continues to grow. The conversations in the Project Pavilion were substantive, the feedback was honest, and the connections made there will carry forward into the work. Microsoft will be back for KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City this November, and we are already looking forward to it.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of these projects, the best starting point is each project's community directly. You are also welcome to reach out to Lexi Nadolski at lexinadolski@microsoft.com with any questions.
Microsoft