KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA took place in Atlanta, Georgia, from 10-13 November, and continued to highlight the ongoing growth of the open source, cloud-native community. Microsoft participated throughout the event and supported several open source projects in the Project Pavilion. Microsoft’s involvement reflected our commitment to upstream collaboration, open governance, and enabling developers to build secure, scalable and portable applications across the ecosystem.
The Project Pavilion serves as a dedicated, vendor-neutral space on the KubeCon show floor reserved for CNCF projects. Unlike the corporate booths, it focuses entirely on open source collaboration. It brings maintainers and contributors together with end users for hands-on demos, technical discussions, and roadmap insights. This space helps attendees discover emerging technologies and understand how different projects fit into the cloud-native ecosystem. It plays a critical role for idea exchanges, resolving challenges and strengthening collaboration across CNCF approved technologies.
Why Our Presence Matters
KubeCon NA remains one of the most influential gatherings for developers and organizations shaping the future of cloud-native computing. For Microsoft, participating in the Project Pavilion helps advance our goals of:
- Open governance and community-driven innovation
- Scaling vital cloud-native technologies
- Secure and sustainable operations
- Learning from practitioners and adopters
- Enabling developers across clouds and platforms
Many of Microsoft’s products and cloud services are built on or aligned with CNCF and open-source technologies. Being active within these communities ensures that we are contributing back to the ecosystem we depend on and designing by collaborating with the community, not just for it.
Microsoft-Supported Pavilion Projects
containerd
Representative: Wei Fu
The containerd team engaged with project maintainers and ecosystem partners to explore solutions for improving AI model workflows. A key focus was the challenge of handling large OCI artifacts (often 500+ GiB) used in AI training workloads. Current image-pulling flows require containerd to fetch and fully unpack blobs, which significantly delays pod startup for large models.
Collaborators from Docker, NTT, and ModelPack discussed a non-unpacking workflow that would allow training workloads to consume model data directly. The team plans to prototype this behavior as an experimental feature in containerd. Additional discussions included updates related to nerdbox and next steps for the erofs snapshotter.
Copacetic
Representative: Joshua Duffney
The Copa booth attracted roughly 75 attendees, with strong representation from federal agencies and financial institutions, a sign of growing adoption in regulated industries. A lightning talk delivered at the conference significantly boosted traffic and engagement. Key feedback and insights included:
- High interest in customizable package update sources
- Demand for application-level patching beyond OS-level updates
- Need for clearer CI/CD integration patterns
- Expectations around in-cluster image patching
- Questions about runtime support, including Podman
The conversations revealed several documentation gaps and feature opportunities that will inform Copa’s roadmap and future enablement efforts.
Drasi
Representative: Nandita Valsan
KubeCon NA 2025 marked Drasi’s first in-person presence since its launch in October 2024 and its entry into the CNCF Sandbox in early 2025. With multiple kiosk slots, the team interacted with ~70 visitors across shifts. Engagement highlights included:
- New community members joining the Drasi Discord and starring GitHub repositories
- Meaningful discussions with observability and incident management vendors interested in change-driven architectures
- Positive reception to Aman Singh’s conference talk, which led attendees back to the booth for deeper technical conversations
Post-event follow-ups are underway with several sponsors and partners to explore collaboration opportunities.
Flatcar Container Linux
Representatives: Sudhanva Huruli and Vamsi Kavuru
The Flatcar project had some fantastic conversations at the pavilion. Attendees were eager to learn about bare metal provisioning, GPU support for AI workloads, and how Flatcar’s fully automated build and test process keeps things simple and developer friendly. Questions around Talos vs. Flatcar and CoreOS sparked lively discussions, with the team emphasizing Flatcar’s usability and independence from an OS-level API. Interest came from government agencies and financial institutions, and the preview of Flatcar on AKS opened the door to deeper conversations about real-world adoption. The Project Pavilion proved to be the perfect venue for authentic, technical exchanges.
Headlamp
Representatives: Joaquim Rocha, Will Case, and Oleksandr Dubenko
Headlamp had a booth for all three days of the conference, engaging with both longstanding users and first-time attendees. The increased visibility from becoming a Kubernetes sub-project was evident, with many attendees sharing their usage patterns across large tech organizations and smaller industrial teams.
The booth enabled maintainers to:
- Gather insights into how teams use Headlamp in different environments
- Introduce Headlamp to new users discovering it via talks or hallway conversations
- Build stronger connections with the community and understand evolving needs
Inspektor Gadget
Representatives: Jose Blanquicet and Mauricio Vásquez Bernal
Hosting a half-day kiosk session, Inspektor Gadget welcomed approximately 25 visitors. Attendees included newcomers interested in learning the basics and existing users looking for updates. The team showcased new capabilities, including the tcpdump gadget and Prometheus metrics export, and invited visitors to the upcoming contribfest to encourage participation.
Istio
Representatives: Keith Mattix, Jackie Maertens, Steven Jin Xuan, Niranjan Shankar, and Mike Morris
The Istio booth continued to attract a mix of experienced adopters and newcomers seeking guidance. Technical discussions focused on:
- Enhancements to multicluster support in ambient mode
- Migration paths from sidecars to ambient
- Improvements in Gateway API availability and usage
- Performance and operational benefits for large-scale deployments
Users, including several Azure customers, expressed appreciation for Microsoft’s sustained investment in Istio as part of their service mesh infrastructure.
Notary Project
Representative: Feynman Zhou, Yi Zha and Toddy Mladenov
The Notary Project booth saw significant interest from practitioners concerned with software supply chain security. Attendees discussed signing, verification workflows, and integrations with Azure services and Kubernetes clusters. The conversations will influence upcoming improvements across Notary Project and Ratify, reinforcing Microsoft’s commitment to secure artifacts and verifiable software distribution.
Open Policy Agent (OPA) - Gatekeeper
Representative: Jaydip Gabani
The OPA/Gatekeeper booth enabled maintainers to connect with both new and existing users to explore use cases around policy enforcement, Rego/CEL authoring, and managing large policy sets. Many conversations surfaced opportunities around simplifying best practices and reducing management complexity. The team also promoted participation in an ongoing Gatekeeper/OPA survey to guide future improvements.
ORAS
Representative: Feynman Zhou, Yi Zha and Toddy Mladenov
ORAS engaged developers interested in OCI artifacts beyond container images which includes AI/ML models, metadata, backups, and multi-cloud artifact workflows. Attendees appreciated ORAS’s ecosystem integrations and found the booth examples useful for understanding how artifacts are tagged, packaged, and distributed. Many users shared how they leverage ORAS with Azure Container Registry and other OCI-compatible registries.
Conclusion
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 reinforced the essential role of open source communities in driving innovation across cloud native technologies. Through the Project Pavilion, Microsoft teams were able to exchange knowledge with other maintainers, gather user feedback, and support projects that form foundational components of modern cloud infrastructure. Microsoft remains committed to building alongside the community and strengthening the ecosystem that powers so much of today’s cloud-native development.
For anyone interested in exploring or contributing to these open source efforts, please reach out directly to each project’s community to get involved, or contact Lexi Nadolski at lexinadolski@microsoft.com for more information.
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