Day 0 of KubeCon2025 conference had me in in three different buildings that were a mile or more apart! This conference is run by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a project of the Linux Foundation, focused on Kubernetes and its various variants. I got more than 25,000 steps attending the following events:

Red Hat OpenShift Commons

Red Hat OpenShift is based on Kubernetes, with advanced capabilities to make it usable for Fortune 500 enterprises. In the morning, I attended the OpenShift Commons, a series of presentations from customers that use Red Hat OpenShift, including Ford Motor Company, Morgan Stanley, and Northrop Grumman. As one attendee put it, the presentations were "refreshingly devoid of any references to AI".

AWS EKS Auto Mode hands-on Lab

Amazon Web Services offers its own variant of Kubernetes, called Elastic Kubernetes Services, or EKS for short. In the afternoon, I took a four-hour hands-on lab that walked us through Amazon's new "Auto Mode" feature to help manage storage, compute and network resources over traditional EKS. There were 92 attendees in the class, and near the end we had a fun speed-quiz of 15 questions to make sure we learned the material. While both EKS and OpenShift are based on the same Kubernetes, they have different terminology.

CyberArk Workload Identity

CyberArk had a series of guest speakers to present on Workload Identity. These sessions covered the Security Production Identify Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and the SPIFFE Runtime Environment (SPIRE) projects of Kubernetes. Humans have credentials like userids and passwords to access systems and communicate with other users, but what about AI Agents? We now have multi-agent systems, with one AI agent talking to other AI agents.  Where are their userids and passwords? Workload identity tries to address that gap.

This was a good way to start the conference. I got my conference badge, met lots of people, and was exposed to some new ideas.

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