Day 2 of KubeCon2025 started with keynote sessions, followed by breakout sessions. This conference is run by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a project of the Linux Foundation, focused on Kubernetes and its various variants. I know no much better how to get from point A to point B in this conference centers, and am down to 11,000 steps for the day.

Keynote: How one line of code saved 30,000 CPU cores

There was quite a lineup of keynote speakers, but the one I enjoyed the most was Fabian Ponce from OpenAI. This is the company that runs ChatGPT as a service, and his team was tasked to improve the performance of their logging. They ran performance traces, and found one line was consuming 39% of the cycles. What? To add a line of message to end of a very long file, this line was requesting the size of the file? They removed it, and celebrated the benefits.

Keynote: EU's new Cybersecurity law

Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Foundation, explained the new EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), a regulation aimed at enhancing cybersecurity for products with digital elements sold in the EU. Basically, if your product includes software, you have to "list the ingredients", much like American manufacturers have to do on processed food products. Fortunately, this won't affect individual hobbyists who contribute to open source projects.

My presentation at the IBM booth: Protecting Containers and Virtual Machines from Disasters and Cyberthreats

This was the primary reason I was here this week, to present this important talk about IBM Storage Defender to a good-sized crowd. Unlike many of the other talks, IBM was NOT giving away any Lego kits to the people who attended my session, so the audience was real and ready to listen to me.

One attendee commented that he understood why people protect VMs, but why protect containers? They are so easy to re-build, he said. I had to explain that it is not about re-building the code images, it is about protecting the data! The persistent data! The data that allows your organization to do whatever it does. When your house is on fire, you save your family photos, not the plumbing fixtures and door knobs. I think he finally got it. At the end, I displayed a QR code to download the deck, but too my horror it had already expired?!? Argh! Anyway, here it is: [Presentation]

Ten Minutes, Ten Insights

Hilary Carter, Linux Foundation, managed to present ten insights from Research done by the Linux Foundation on a variety of topics, including Cloud, AI, and open source.

Tuning GenAI workloads on Kubernetes

I went to this session as I had just finished developing a GenAI web application on our internal Red Hat OpenShift cluster, so was curious what techniques could be used to tune it. The three speakers from NVIDIA (Ishaan Seghal, Omnara Lockwood, and Brian Lockwood) presented Skyhook and Kaito.

Skyhook is an open source project to make it easier to run jobs like database migrations on Kubernetes, so this helps both developers and platform managers. Kaito is an acronym, short for "Kubernetes AI Toolchain Operator". They used these two tools to test LLama, Falcon, and Phi-4 inference workloads through single and dual GPU systems, tweaking various parameters and settings to see what helped and what didn't. Very clever!

Sound Bath

As a certified laughter yoga instructor, I had to see this one for myself. As a way for attendees to de-stress, the room had nothing but yoga mats on the floor. Everyone laid down on a mat, closed their eyes, as the instructor walked around with a Bluetooth speaker of the most relaxing sounds. The whole experience only lasted 10 minutes, and then everyone got up, allowing the next batch of attendees to take part.

The future of Virtualization on Kubernetes

Did you know you could run traditional Virtual Machines on a Kubernetes cluster? I did. At IBM, we called them Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (OSV) machines. Red Hat speaker Vladik Romanovsky explained the underlying technology called KubeVirt and all the enhancements that were made in the past year, and some exciting improvements to look forward to in 2026.

It is starting to warm up, and there is hope to have normal temperatures about the time most people are leaving Atlanta.

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