Adriana’s KubeCon EU 2026 Recap
Finding my people amidst a chaotic but fun week
As I write this, I am flying home to Toronto from Amsterdam, host city to this year’s KubeCon EU 2026. I was extra excited to attend this one because I chose not to attend the last KubeCon NA. As a Canadian, traveling to the US just doesn’t feel safe to me. This meant that I missed out on seeing many of my cloud native friends last November. I needed to make up for lost time!
This is the second time that KubeCon has taken place in Amsterdam. The first time was in 2023 – my second KubeCon ever, my first one in Europe, my first one attending as a CNCF Ambassador, and my first one attending and speaking at Cloud Native Rejekts. So, returning to Amsterdam this time around has been extra special.
As always, KubeCon week is a whirlwind, to put it lightly. The following is a recap of my personal experience at KubeCon Amsterdam.
Bouldering
I managed to squeeze in one bouldering session while in Amsterdam! Last time I was in the city, I went to a gym called Beta Boulders, which I quite liked. This time, I decided to try a different gym, so I checked out Boulder Amsterdam, which was about 2km from my hotel – very walkable. The gym was lovely – cozy, not too busy, and with a great vibe. The setting was HARD (I think I climbed v2/5b most of the time), but the problems were fun, and I had a great time soaking it all in. Also, the gym was next to a cute little windmill, so bonus for that!
Cloud Native Rejekts
Saturday: Cloud Native Rejekts. Rejekts always takes place before the start of KubeCon. And this year, Cloud Native Rejekts EU almost didn’t happen. Fortunately, the community came together at the last minute, pulled off an AMAZING event! I love Rejekts because it’s small, cozy, and low-key. I find that the conversations are way more meaningful because folks aren’t rushing off to The Next Thing like they are at KubeCon.
Rejekts used to take place on a Sunday/Monday but with KubeCon Maintainer Summit taking place on Sunday, and Co-located Events taking place on Monday, Rejekts was on Saturday.
Since I was speaking at Rejekts, I had to alter my travel plans to arrive in Amsterdam a day earlier than I'd originally planned, to make sure I got some rest before my talk. I was going to say “enough rest”, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as “enough rest” on KubeCon week. 🙃
The talk I gave was on OpenTelemetry (OTel) Vendor Neutrality with one of my favourite speaking partners, Josh Lee. OTel vendor neutrality means that we don’t have to re-instrument our application code when we switch vendors, but it doesn’t translate to a straight lift and shift when you make the switch. This talk explains what’s portable and what’s not.
The talk has toured 5 European countries since its début it in the fall of 2025. I love that it’s gotten so much love. 🥰
It started in 2025 at CND Austria and KCD Warsaw in October, followed by KCD Porto in November. So far in 2026, we’ve had 3 more opportunities to give this talk: at the ClickHouse Meetup following SREDay London, in mid-March (sans Josh), Rejekts, and Devoxx Greece in late April (sans Josh). Although the talk is way more fun as a duo (Josh and I have a lively banter going on), it still works great as a solo talk!
Day -1: Maintainer Summit
Sunday: Maintainer Summit. The event is open to CNCF project maintainers and contributors. Since I am a maintainer of the OTel End User SIG and OTel Community Manager, I’m eligible to attend. That, and I was on a panel with Reese Lee and Josh Lee (no relation) – my two favourite co-speakers ever. Seriously. Our talk writing styles are super compatible, and we have great speaking chemistry together. So how cool was it that I gave a talk with my two favourite co-speakers?!
The panel was about building community in OpenTelemetry via the OpenTelemetry End User SIG, with Josh serving as moderator. Reese and I have been working on the SIG together as maintainers since 2023 (when it was still a working group – it got turned into a SIG just after KubeCon Amsterdam 2023), and I’m so proud of the work that we’ve done together. We built up a lovely community of OTel folks who are willing to share their OTel experiences and contribute to the SIG, and acquired 2 additional maintainers. Building up this SIG is what led us to become OTel Community Managers, and I feel so lucky to have Reese by my side in this new Community Manager adventure!
Several OTel maintainers joined our session, so it was another chance to connect with cloud native friends in a more lowkey setting. I was also happy to see maintainers in other projects attend our session, including OpenFeature, were looking for guidance on building and sustaining an open source community.
Day 0: Co-located Events
The CNCF Co-located Events were up next, taking place on the Monday. Compared to Maintainer Summit, Co-located Events is BUSY. Still less frenetic than KubeCon proper, but definitely busy with 16 Co-located Events taking place at once this time around. I usually attend Observability Day, as that’s where my OTel people are at. Hey-o! 🤘
And I spoke there too! As a newly-minted OTel Community Manager, I was asked to give the OTel project updates at the beginning of Observability Day. Later that day, I also participated in a panel put together by my former Lightstep co-worker, Alex Boten, called the Spec-tacular Game Show. The panel was done in a game show format, with Alex and me as hosts, with fellow OTel maintainers Marylia Gutierrez, Pablo Baeyens, and Tyler Helmuth as contestants. We all wore bowties (provided by Alex), and I put on my best game show announcer voice, to the delight of many in the room. And yes, I committed to the bit for the entire duration of the panel (I’ll post the video once it’s out). Alex did a great job preparing for this. He made the buzzers, wrote a scorekeeping program, and made a scoreboard. Seriously, hats off to him, because he put in a LOT of work.
The purpose of the game show was to test contestants’ knowledge of the OTel specification. No easy feat, as the spec has a LOT of stuff in it! In fact, I learned a lot just from reading the questions! And the winner was…Marylia!
Days 1-3: KubeCon Main Conference
Tuesday: KubeCon Day 1. Okay, we made it to KubeCon! After 4 talks in 3 days, I was VERY tired. But hey, no rest for the weary! While I didn’t have any talks at KubeCon (very glad at that point), there was still tons to keep me busy.
Ambassador Breakfast & Keynotes
Every KubeCon kicks off with a breakfast for CNCF Ambassadors. It’s early (07:30). I’m not a morning person. I grumble. I still go. Every. Single. Time. Because it’s a freak breakfast and also it’s a great chance to connect with other CNCF Ambassadors before the madness of KubCon sets in.
That and we get our “Ambassador class photo” taken, and walk together as a group to the KubeCon keynotes. The keynotes are always a huge production, and if you’ve never attended a KubeCon before, the keynotes have the feel of a rock concert. Tons of people. Tons of excitement. Tons of energy.
PS: KubeCon EU 2027 will be in Barcelona, and KubeCon EU 2028 will be in Berlin. Can’t wait!
Solutions Showcase
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m a hallway track girlie. Attending talks isn’t my jam, and that’s super fine. We all get different things out of conferences. For me, attending conferences is all about talking to people, because you never know what it might lead to. A new talk idea. A new collaboration idea. A new bestie!
Some great hallway track moments:
- Chatting with Chris Williams – OMG he’s a tall dude and an absolutely delightful human! PS: Josh and I will be on vBrownBag on April 1st!
- Hanging out with KCD Warsaw (turned CND Poland) folks: Tomasz Cholewa and Pawel Piwosz and learning about the differences between CND and KCD.
- Extended hangtime with Cortney Nickerson and chatting about Kyverno!
- Chatting with Danielle Cook, one of the KubeCrash organizers. PS: I’ll be speaking at KubeCrash this spring!
- Seeing just how popular my co-worker Andi Grabner is. 😁
And no conference is complete without a good swag run. I always travel with a carryon, so I must be selective about my swag, but I will say that I came out with some awesome goodies.
- Argo plushie (my favourite CNCF project mascot)
- Dynatrace Tetris game (one of the only videogames I will ever play)
- Akamai bracelets (collect them all, yo!)
- KubeCon conference tee (I didn’t know there was a Maintainer Summit tee 😭)
- A fitted Dynatrace tee (bless you marketing people for considering us petite ladies who like fitted tees)
- OTel maintainer pin
- OTel stickers
Humans of OTel and What’s Up, OTel?
Humans of OTel was back once again for KubeCon, but this time, we decided to shake things up a bit, by recording each interview as a YouTube short. Huge shoutout to my teammate Giulia DiPietro for helping with the recordings, and to Josh Lee for rounding up interviewees! Be sure to subscribe to the OTel YouTube channel to get notified when the shorts drop!
PS: HUGE thanks to Sophia Solomon who did a great job editing the video for KubeCon NA 2025 in Atlanta, and interviewing our lovely OTel humans alongside Reese.
We also returned with our on-location, live-from-KubeCon-OTel-livestream, under the name “What’s Up, OTel?”, previously under “Humans of OTel Live”. The stream aired on Wednesday at 16:30 CET, and is available now to watch on demand, if you missed it live. My super talented teammate, Henrik Rexed (is there NOTHING this guy can’t do??), did a great job producing the show. Julia Morgado (Associate OTel Community Manager) and I did the interviews.
Our first guest was Dan Gomez Blanco (New Relic). Dan is a fellow maintainer of the OTel End User SIG, and talked to us about OTel Blueprints, a project of the OTel End User SIG, which provides frameworks and reference implementations for organizations seeking “OTel Day 2” guidance.
Our second guest was Imma Valls (Grafana). Imma works on the Spanish Localization SIG, helping to translate the OpenTelemetry docs from English to Spanish. Imma is a super charismatic community organizer whose passion just radiates from her. The work she and other localization SIG contributors do is SO important, because not all developers and/or open source contributors speak English. By having documentation available in their native languages, it opens the doors to increased project contribution and adoption.
Both Imma and Dan were wonderful guests. They were super easy to talk to, incredibly friendly, and it was a blast interviewing them. It was definitely a great way to end a busy Wednesday at KubeCon!
Also, if you’re looking for podcast guests, Imma and Dan should be on your list. Just sayin’…
What happened to the OTel Observatory?
Contrary to past years, we didn’t have OTel Observatory this KubeCon. This put us in a bit of a pickle, because we typically run in-person SIG meetings during KubeCon, and were accustomed to running them in the OTel Observatory. To add to that, some scheduling SNAFUs meant that we only had an OTel booth in the Project Pavillion on Tuesday (KubeCon Day 1) and half of Wednesday (KubeCon Day 2). 🙀🙀🙀 Reese, Julia, and I planned to grab some picnic tables next to the OTel booth, and prayed to the OTel gods that things would work out despite these setbacks. And work out they did. The picnic tables next to the booth served as great meeting spot and OTel hangout area. OTel people came and went. Practitioners, contributors, and maintainers reunited. Friends hugged after a long time apart. It was lovely. The booth was busy the entire time. All was well with the world, and my heart was full.
Final Thoughts
I’m not gonna lie. This week was EXHAUSTING. There were times when I thought I was going to run out of steam. There were times when I was walking around the solutions showcase floor thinking, “This is too much stuff. I don’t want to be here anymore.” But then I’d run into a friendly face and have the loveliest chat. I’d get a hug from someone I hadn’t seen in a while. Or I’d take a silly photo with someone. And then all my anxieties and misgivings melted away.
If only high school me could see me now. I’ve found my people 😉
