The Best of KubeCon Europe 2025: The CNCF Ambassador’s Cut
KubeCon Europe 2025 in London has wrapped up, and it’s time to share some of the highlights, trends, and behind-the-scenes insights straight from the show floor!
I didn’t want you to settle just for my own insights from London — it was, after all, the largest KubeCon ever with some 12.5 thousand participants in person—so I couldn’t cover all grounds. That’s what friends are for. I invited two fellow CNCF Ambassadors of mine to chime in on the latest episode of OpenObservability Talks: Kasper Borg Nissen, the Co-Chair of this KubeCon as well as of the KubeCon 2024 editions, and a Developer Relations Engineer at Dash0; and William Rizzo, Consulting Architect at Mirantis and Linkerd Ambassador.
Together, we unpacked the major themes from the event — from platform engineering and internal developer platforms, to open source observability, and important trends in European tech sphere.
Kubernetes 1.33 release
Kubernets 1.33, codenamed Octarine, is out with a lovely theme showing the open source magic that Kubernetes enables. Here are some noteworthy capabilities I found interesting:
𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐒𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲
Finally native sidecar containers are Stable. We’ve been using the sidecar pattern in Kubernetes for so long, but now it’s really becoming a first level citizen, with proper management of startup, teardown, restart etc. I particularly like this feature as it enables a more robust collection of logging and metrics from your containerized K8s workloads.
𝐈𝐧-𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐨𝐝𝐬
What happens if your application scales and you need to allocate more resources like memory and CPU for your pod for vertical scaling? Before, every update to the spec resulted in pod restart, which inevitably meant downtime. With this feature, now in Beta, you can do in-place updates to the pod resources (or other configuration) for seamless scaling up or down.
𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐱 𝐏𝐨𝐝𝐬
This KEP was open since 2016! It provides important security improvement by using Linux User namespaces for Pods, and I’m glad to see it now turned on by default, though still in Beta.
Check out the Kubernetes 1.33 release blog for more highlights.
Backstage Celebrates 5 Years of Developer Productivity
Backstage, the open-source developer portal, celebrated its 5th anniversary at KubeCon Europe 2025. Initially created by Spotify, Backstage has grown from a tool for managing microservices to a full-fledged platform adopted by a wide range of companies in the cloud-native ecosystem. Backstage’s evolution speaks to the increasing need for companies to manage and scale their internal developer tools in a unified, accessible way. As Tim, one of the core contributors, remarked, “Backstage is more than just a tool; it’s become a part of how we think about developer productivity and the internal experience.”
During the celebration, the Backstage team shared insights on new features and improvements in the platform, such as enhanced support for managing security policies and integrations with more observability tools.
Reflecting on 10 Years of CNCF and What’s Next
During the KubeCon keynote, The CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) celebrated the CNCF’s 10th anniversary, marking a decade of growth, innovation, and collaboration in the cloud-native space. Funny to look back at the blog I wrote about it a decade ago. Since its inception, CNCF has been at the forefront of driving the adoption of Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies, and its impact is undeniable. “It’s incredible to think how far we’ve come since the early days of Kubernetes,” reflected Kasper. “The foundation has helped shape an entire ecosystem that now powers much of the modern cloud infrastructure.”
The CNCF also unveiled the results of its 2024 annual survey, shedding light on the latest trends in the cloud-native ecosystem. Among the key findings were the increasing adoption of Kubernetes and containerization, with 91% of respondents reporting that they use Kubernetes in some capacity. Additionally, the survey highlighted the growing importance of observability tools and platform engineering in managing complex, distributed systems.
It was impressive to see OpenTelemetry as the top project used in production among the incubating CNCF projects — 39% said their org uses it in production, with 23% more evaluating it. Observability also shines among the graduated projects with 73% report using Prometheus in production, 39% use Fluentd, and 14% use Jaeger.
Sovereign Cloud Initiatives Shaping Europe’s Future
One of the most interesting discussions at KubeCon Europe 2025 centered on sovereign cloud in Europe. The need for cloud providers that comply with European data sovereignty regulations has never been greater, as businesses and governments demand more control over where their data is stored and processed. This drove initiatives such as Lidl’s Cloud Gambit by StackIT under Schwarz Group, and the Gaia-X initiative.
This was the background for launching the NeoNephos initiative at KubeCon 2025, presented by VP of cloud-native strategy at SAP. NeoNephos, backed by European corporates and governments, aims to address this gap by promoting the development of cloud-native platforms that are fully compliant with European laws and regulations. NeoNephos boasts some impressive member companies such such as SAP, T-Systems and the above-mentioned StackIT by Schwarz Group. William shared, being based in The Netherlands, how vendors in The Netherlands provide computing and data residency to meet these needs, building it from the ground up, from the bare metal to the service layer.
Rising Adoption of CI/CD Practices in Production Environments
The adoption of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) has skyrocketed, and KubeCon Europe 2025 provided ample evidence of its growing importance in cloud-native development. According to the CNCF survey shared at KubeCon, use of CI/CD in production grew 31% from 2023 to 2024. It also showed the role of open source projects such as Argo and Jenkins, alongside major players such as GitHub and GitLab.
This provided additional validation to my own mission, advocating for the need for CI/CD observability, and to the special interest group (SIG) that I co-lead to standardize on that under the OpenTelemetry project. In fact, that was also the topic of the talk I delivered at this KubeCon along with my co-lead Adriel Perkins.
OpenInfra Joins Forces with the Linux Foundation
Another big news discussed during KubeCon Europe 2025 was that OpenInfra, the open-source infrastructure community, had joined The Linux Foundation. This move signals a deeper integration between OpenInfra and the broader open-source ecosystem, further solidifying the role of open-source infrastructure technologies in the cloud-native landscape. The collaboration aims to foster greater interoperability between projects and create a unified platform for infrastructure-as-code and automation tools.
As someone who’s been involved with OpenStack a decade ago, I’m curious how this ammalgemantion will influence the future direction of the project.
Paving the Way for Observability Query Standardization
One of the standout sessions at KubeCon Europe 2025 focused on the latest updates from the Observability Query Standardization Special Interest Group (SIG). With the increasing complexity of cloud-native environments, the need for a standardized query language for observability data has become more urgent. During the session, SIG members discussed the progress of efforts to create a universal query language for telemetry data. “We’re at the tipping point of standardizing how we query observability data,” said Chris, one of the SIG leads. “A unified query language will allow teams to work across different observability tools without being locked into proprietary formats.”
A very interesting conclusion is that relational approach with an SQL-like language is the best path. Why? because we should recognize that DevOps and SREs are no longer the main folks querying observability data. we need to cater for developers, data scientists, platform engineers and more. You see also the data analytics community moving back to SQL after the hype of NoSQL. Ultimately, SQL is a common language.
And don’t worry, the idea is to adapt it to time series, and some syntactic sugaring to make it more intuitive. For more background on the working group, check out my earlier blog post with the SIG co-lead
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Heart of Cloud-Native Communities
Local cloud-native communities continue to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the cloud-native ecosystem, and KubeCon Europe 2025 highlighted the growing emphasis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) within these communities. William, who’s a lead for the CNCF’s BIPOC initiative, shared the progress made in mentoring underrepresented groups. “It’s been incredible to see how far we’ve come in the past year,” William said. “We’ve expanded mentorship programs, helped foster a more inclusive environment, and have seen more BIPOC individuals take leadership roles in the community.” This initiative, which aims to provide opportunities for BIPOC individuals in open-source, continues to gain momentum, creating more diverse pipelines for future tech leaders.
Another key topic was the importance of fostering inclusive local communities. As Kasper shared, “The local meetups are the heart of the cloud-native ecosystem. They allow people from all walks of life to get involved and contribute to the success of these technologies.” The emphasis on DEI is not just about ensuring that more diverse voices are heard but also about creating spaces where individuals feel welcome and supported. This is crucial for the long-term success of open-source communities, as diverse perspectives often lead to more innovative solutions and more resilient technology ecosystems.
Want to learn more? Check out the OpenObservability Talks episode: CNCF Ambassadors Share the Best of KubeCon Europe 2025.
