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Table of Contents
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025 is nearly here, returning to Hyderabad on August 6–7 for the second edition! With a diverse range of talks and thousands of attendees, sifting through the agenda can be overwhelming, and it is for me as well.
Drawing inspiration from a few blogs that were posted highlighting their favorite picks, here are my top session choices this year, selected for their mix of deep technical insight, real-world impact, and compelling narratives.
1. From Outage to Observability: Lessons from a Kubernetes Meltdown
Speakers: Saiyam Pathak (LoftLabs), Arnab Chatterjee (Nomura)
This keynote explores a DevOps platform failure caused by inadequate observability with basic tools like Prometheus and ELK, leading to log chaos, unusable tracing, and an overwhelmed control plane. A single tenant failure collapsed the multi-tenant cluster.
Saiyam and Arnab discuss their shift to distributed monitoring, tenant isolation, and refined autoscaling with experimental tracing tools (Parca/Odigos). This talk offers a raw view of how experienced teams recover from disaster.
2. Supercharge Backstage: Self-Service GitOps Staging Environments with vCluster and FluxCD
Speakers: Farhaan Shamsee & Rakesh Reddy (Siemens Technology)
Empowering developers through self-service is becoming key in DevOps. This session shows how Siemens uses Backstage, vCluster, and FluxCD to let teams create staging environments via a developer portal. Virtual clusters (vCluster) speed up operations and testing, enabling isolation, quick experiments, and realistic workflows without losing operational consistency.
This talk will give practical insights into GitOps environments, using FluxCD for automation, and integrating CI pipelines with Backstage. If your team faces slow, centralized processes or cross-team bottlenecks, you’ll leave with actionable ideas for platform engineering at scale.
3. Rewriting the Rules: Why Kubernetes Is Moving to NFTables
Speakers: Daman Arora & Yash Kumar Singh (Broadcom)
The networking plumbing in Kubernetes is evolving. This talk highlights why NFTables will replace legacy IPTables and IPVS, from maintainers' and users' views. It offers accounts of users facing persistent IPTables issues, incremental IPVS improvements, and stability and scalability gains after switching to NFTables.
This session will include performance benchmarks, kernel compatibility, and CNI plugin integration. It is a clear guide and lesson learned for those running large-scale environments or planning migration.
4. Pushing the Limits: Scaling ArgoCD’s Repo-Server to Handle 30,000 Applications
Speakers: Aditya Sharma & Isha Gusai (Expedia Group)
GitOps at scale isn’t just a buzzword. Expedia’s journey managing 30,000+ applications with ArgoCD’s repo-server proves it. This keynote covers scaling challenges, memory use, and performance issues.
This session will show you how the team at Expedia Group stabilized the repo server, tuned configurations, and built resilience. It is ideal for those handling large GitOps workloads, especially organizations facing scaling challenges. It offers real-world troubleshooting and optimization tips.
5. Panel: Security - The Thing That Everyone Loves to Hate
Speakers: Bhavani Indukuri (Zscaler), Sonali Srivastava (InfraCloud Technologies), Ram Iyengar (The Linux Foundation), Anusha Hegde (Nirmata)
I really liked the panel because it discusses how security often becomes a serious issue only after a disaster. In this panel, experts share real stories about breaches, failures, and “DevOops” moments, focusing on culture, communication, training gaps, and human error. Expect honest, practical advice based on field experience about integrating security into your SDLC.
The panel shares what has truly worked or failed in building security-conscious teams. These talks highlight real-world complexity, lessons, and actionable insights, making them valuable for anyone dealing with scale, security, or team development.
Final Thoughts
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025 promises engaging sessions on observability, scaling, networking, and security. These sessions will offer technical insights, storytelling, and actionable ideas for teams. These ideas can always be used to optimize your infrastructure.
Want to explore even more or arrange a meetup?
Join the vCluster Slack to continue the conversation around these sessions, share your own Kubernetes experiences, and connect with fellow attendees. If you’ll be at KubeCon, don’t forget to stop by and say hi to the vCluster team, Saiyam and I will be there, ready to talk all things clusters and cloud-native!
See you in Hyderabad. Safe travels ✈️
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