KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026: Full Schedule

18-19 June
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Please note: This schedule is automatically displayed in India Standard Time (UTC+5:30). To see the schedule in your preferred timezone, please select from the drop-down menu to the right, above "Filter by Date." The schedule is subject to change and session seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

12:00pm IST

What Did My Agent Do? Observability and Accountability for AI Agents - Ishan Jain, Grafana Labs

Thursday June 18, 2026 12:00pm - 12:30pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Generative AI systems and AI agents behave very differently from traditional software. Their non-deterministic nature and ability to act across multiple steps make debugging and accountability harder, which increases the need for better observability. Beyond latency and error rates, teams need insight into prompts, responses, and agent actions to understand what an agent did and why.

In this session, I will show how to instrument AI agents using OpenTelemetry and the GenAI Semantic Conventions, with OpenLIT as the native SDK. Through a live demo, I will demonstrate how to capture agent interactions alongside performance telemetry using Prometheus and Jaeger, while keeping sensitive data separate to reduce risk and cost.

I will also show how telemetry can support ongoing evaluations, helping teams reason about agent behavior over time without logging everything. This talk is for engineers building AI agents who want to improve trust and accountability without oversharing data.

Speakers

Ishan Jain

Senior Software Engineer, Grafana Labs

I’m a Developer Experience Engineer at Grafana Labs, focused on making observability practical and accessible. I maintain the Grafana Ansible Collection, Grafana Operator, and OpenLIT, with over 5M downloads. Formerly an SRE, I enjoy working in open source and sharing real-world... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 12:00pm - 12:30pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Observability

Content Experience Level Beginner

12:40pm IST

When Kafka Goes Cloud Native: Observability That Actually Works! - Roopadharsini K & Mary Vinothini, Fidelity Investments

Thursday June 18, 2026 12:40pm - 1:10pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

In the fast-paced world of cloud-native infrastructure, monitoring Kubernetes Kafka clusters shouldn’t feel like a puzzle or a last-minute audit surprise. In financial organisations, Kafka on Kubernetes powers critical needs, from regulatory compliance to real-time client updates. But legacy monitoring couldn’t keep up, and relying on sleep-deprived SREs wasn’t an option. We overcame this challenge by building custom dashboards in a unified observability platform using OpenTelemetry for vendor-agnostic collection, deployed natively on Kubernetes, and integrating Grafana and OpenSearch for real-time visibility and faster troubleshooting.

Attendees will learn how to meet compliance needs, speed up incident response, and design reliable Kafka observability at enterprise scale and also walk away with a practical blueprint for modernizing monitoring and adopting open-source practices in Kubernetes.

Speakers

Mary Vinothini

Principal Cloud Engineer, Fidelity Investments

Kafka Engineer, leading the Kafka Platform in Fidelity Investments. Specialized in designing, deploying, and managing Kafka clusters to ensure high availability and scalability of data streaming platforms. Possess expertise in Kafka architecture, performance tuning, and troubleshooting... Read More →

Roopadharsini K

Software Engineer, Fidelity Investments

Roopadharsini K is a Software Engineer at Fidelity Investments, with a keen focus on onboarding applications and platforms to enterprise messaging and event streaming ecosystems. Her work is inclined towards ensuring that integration efforts adhere to organizational event taxonomy... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 12:40pm - 1:10pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

2:30pm IST

Who Watches the Watchers? From Closed Observability To Open Control at Scale - Aditi Gupta, JioHotstar; Madhu Patel, Adobe; Sandeep Kanabar, Gen

Thursday June 18, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Observability is your safety net - but at scale, it often fails first. As our Kubernetes platform grew, rising traffic produced more telemetry, overwhelming our stack and leaving us blind during incidents. High-cardinality metrics exhausted memory, and ingestion brownouts became recurring nightmares. We didn't have too much data; we had too little control.
In this talk, we dissect the concrete failure modes and show how we rebuilt observability by treating telemetry pipelines as first-class distributed systems with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo.

We will walk through production fixes:

- Active Traffic Shaping: OTel Collectors for batching and tail sampling.
- Defusing Cardinality Bombs: Prometheus recording rules to stabilise memory.
- Back pressure & Limits: Surviving 10x traffic spikes.

This isn't a tool comparison. It's a blueprint for building observability you can reason about under stress, so your monitoring doesn't become the “next outage” you're explaining.

Speakers

Sandeep Kanabar

Lead Software Engineer, Gen (formerly NortonLifeLock)

Hailing from India, Sandeep is a passionate software engineer and individual contributor. A frequent meetup speaker, he loves sharing real-world lessons and insights with the community. He's a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, serving as co-chair of the CNCF Deaf and Hard... Read More →

Aditi Gupta

Software Engineer II @JioHotstar, JioStar India Pvt. Ltd.

I'm Aditi Gupta, a Software Developer Engineer. Graduated from Asia's largest tech university for women, Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University,I've been deeply immersed in cloud-native technologies and AI/ML advancements. Skilled in containerisation, micro-service architecture... Read More →

Madhu Patel

Software Engineer 2, Adobe

I'm Madhu Patel, a Software Development Engineer at Adobe, where I work on large-scale distributed backend services supporting Creative Cloud platforms, as well as AI agents designed to enhance user productivity. I am a graduate of Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Observability

Content Experience Level Beginner

3:10pm IST

The Lean Observability Stack: Quick and Native Telemetry for Service Mesh - Arpitha Srivathsa Malavalli, Google

Thursday June 18, 2026 3:10pm - 3:40pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

When timelines are tight or infrastructure is isolated, setting up complex observability suites can be a bottleneck. However, a service mesh like Istio, backed by Envoy, already provides a goldmine of data. Drawing from experience in restricted, air-gapped environments, we demonstrate how to turn Envoy and Istio into primary telemetry sources to build a reliable pipeline using Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry (OTel). We will break down essential Istio and Envoy metrics—such as request totals, bytes, and duration—and demystify their rich labels. Attendees will learn to leverage these metrics for "Golden Signal" dashboards, SLOs, and meaningful alerts, without manual per-service configuration. We also cover setting up OTel-based pipelines for Envoy access logs. Finally, we address "day 2" operations: using Prometheus relabeling to reduce cardinality, managing log verbosity via the Istio Telemetry API, and determining when to use synthetic probers over standard metrics.

Speakers

Arpitha Srivathsa Malavalli

Software Engineer, Google

Arpitha Malavalli is a Software Engineer at Google specializing in the reliability and observability of cloud-native services. She plays a key role in enhancing Anthos Service Mesh (ASM) for Google Distributed Cloud Hosted, focusing on high-security, air-gapped environments. Arpitha... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 3:10pm - 3:40pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Observability

Content Experience Level Any

4:10pm IST

The Invisible Tax: How Data Format Conversions Drive up Telemetry Pipeline Costs - Cijo Thomas, Microsoft

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:10pm - 4:40pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Telemetry travels long pipelines before reaching observability backends. While enrichment, filtering, and sampling provide clear diagnostic value, much of the compute cost comes from repeatedly converting telemetry between different data formats.

Telemetry flows through SDK representations, wire protocols, collector-internal formats, and backend ingestion schemas. Each boundary introduces marshaling, unmarshaling, and copying. These transformations add no new information, yet consume CPU and memory and scale linearly with data volume—creating a hidden “transform tax” that compounds at scale.

This talk presents measurements from instrumented OpenTelemetry SDK and Collector pipelines, quantifying compute spent on pure format conversion versus value-generating processing. Attendees will learn where conversion costs arise and explore strategies to reduce waste, including fewer representation hops, zero-copy techniques, and emerging approaches such as Apache Arrow-based layouts.

Speakers

Cijo Thomas

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Cijo is a Software Engineer at Microsoft specializing in Observability. He has been deeply involved with the OpenTelemetry project since its inception and is a core maintainer for the OpenTelemetry .NET and OpenTelemetry Rust implementations. His expertise extends beyond OpenTelemetry... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:10pm - 4:40pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Observability

Content Experience Level Any

4:50pm IST

Observability 2.0: Shifting Left From Reactive Monitoring To GenAI-Powered Insights - Kokilavani Kathiresan & RK Gupta, Intuit; Sivakumar Krishnamurthy, Cloudera; Suresh Kumar Khemka, Atlassian India LLP

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:50pm - 5:20pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

In this panel, engineering leaders from Intuit and Atlassian discuss how they transitioned from fragmented monitoring to a unified, OTel-based observability strategy across 1000+ microservices, built on CNCF standards like OpenTelemetry and Argo.

Key discussion points include:
- Standardization at Scale: How to drive OpenTelemetry adoption across thousands of microservices without slowing down feature delivery.
- The Cost of Insight: How to move beyond the "collect everything" mentality. We’ll discuss the architectural shift from mindless ingestion to intelligent sampling
- AIOps & The Future: Moving beyond dashboards to predictive incident response and AI-augmented root cause analysis.
- 'Signal' vs. 'Noise':How are teams leveraging AI to separate true signals from the noise of thousands of clusters?

Join us for a candid conversation on the technical hurdles, cultural shifts, and architectural "oops" moments encountered while scaling observability for millions of customers.

Speakers

Sivakumar Krishnamurthy

Head, SRE/DevOps & GCC Leader, Cloudera

Strategic Engineering Executive and Global Capability Center (GCC) Leader with 22+ years of expertise leading, scaling, and transforming global engineering organizations for high-growth IaaS/PaaS/SaaS enterprises. Proven ability to translate complex technology roadmaps into operational... Read More →

Kokilavani Kathiresan

Engineering Manager, Intuit

Kokila is an Engineering Manager at Intuit, leading an exceptional team of Observability experts. Specializing in Tracing and Real User Monitoring, her team effortlessly handles millions of spans per second. A proud member of Tech Women at Intuit, sharing her expertise and providing... Read More →

Suresh Kumar Khemka

Head of Engineering - Compute, Atlassian India LLP

Two decades of experience in Platform engineering, SRE. Devops, Performance engineering.

RK Gupta

Global Head of Engineering, Observability, Intuit

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:50pm - 5:20pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Observability

Content Experience Level Any

5:30pm IST

Offline but Not Blind: Observability in Air-Gapped Kubernetes Environment - Manoj Sardana, HCL Software

Thursday June 18, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

In many regulated industries, especially across India, not every Kubernetes cluster runs in the cloud. Banks & government systems often operate air-gapped Kubernetes clusters with no internet access. In these environments, SaaS-based observability assumptions does not hold good &Observability becomes core Kubernetes infrastructure, not a service.

This session explains why air-gapped K8s environments matter and outlines the challenges they introduce, including constrained scaling, offline upgrades, local image management, and storage-bound observability pipelines.

We then walk through a real-world journey of building K8s observability in an air-gapped setup using OpenTelemetry and self-hosted LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir). The talk covers in-cluster telemetry design, cardinality control, offline upgrades, autoscaling without internet and operating observability components as first-class Kubernetes workloads, followed by practical limitations and operational best practices.

Speakers

Manoj Sardana

Director of Operations and devOps Tooling, HCL Software

With over 20 years of IT experience, I am Director of operations and information Systems at HCLSoftware, where I lead a team to manage the availability, reliability, and performance of SaaS-based solutions on AWS, GCP, and IBM Cloud. I have extensive experience on cloud native tools... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 5:30pm - 6:00pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

12:00pm IST

A gRPC Transport for the Model Context Protocol - Pawan Bhardwaj, Google

Friday June 19, 2026 12:00pm - 12:30pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

We want to introduce gRPC as native transport for Model Context Protocol.

As we know gRPC is already well establish in microservices, these services are now evolving as tools for AI.

Using gRPC as native transport for MCP have following advantages
1. Authentication and Authorization features of gRPC channels can be used for transport.
2. As gRPC uses protobuf, hence we get the advantage of more throughput and less bandwidth usage.
3. gRPC already has streaming capabilities which can be used for MCP as required.
4. It would be less frictional for micro-services to have their services as MCP using gRPC transport as infra remains the same.
5. Protobuf specification creates strong API contracts between various language implementations.
6. As gRPC supports proxy-less service mesh, MCP servers having gRPC transport can take advantage of it for various features such as load balancing, MTLS etc.

Speakers

Pawan Bhardwaj

Senior Software Engineer, Google

As a senior software engineer specializing in gRPC within Google's open source team, my focus lies in enhancing the performance and usability of networking systems for applications. My previous experience includes working with Cumulus Linux and Cisco NxOS on network forwarding pl... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 12:00pm - 12:30pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Connectivity

Content Experience Level Intermediate

12:40pm IST

Conversations With the Kernel: A Netlink Deep Dive - Yash Kumar Singh & Daman Arora, Broadcom

Friday June 19, 2026 12:40pm - 1:10pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

The Linux Netlink API is the kernel’s structured communication channel for the user space, enabling interaction with subsystems such as routing, netfilter, and interface management. Introduced as a modern replacement for ioctl, Netlink provides a message-based architecture where the user space and the kernel exchange serialized binary messages through dedicated Netlink families. This session explores how Netlink’s extensible design and attribute-based encoding enable efficient communication between layers of the networking stack.

We’ll then demonstrate how these capabilities can be leveraged in cloud-native systems - showcasing how we are using netlink in kube-proxy to interact with the netfilter accounting (nfacct) subsystem for in-kernel packet counting, and how we recently shifted conntrack cleanup from a user-space binary-based approach to Netlink, significantly reducing connection cleanup time from minutes to seconds.

Speakers

Yash Singh

Senior Software Engineer, Broadcom

Yash Singh is a Software Engineer at Broadcom. He works on Kubernetes core components releases, building and validating the Kubernetes FIPS for Tanzu. He plays an important role in the development of Tanzu Extend Support of Kubernetes and its components. Yash contributes to a host... Read More →

Daman Arora

Software Engineer, Broadcom

Trying to maintain kube-proxy.

Friday June 19, 2026 12:40pm - 1:10pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Connectivity

Content Experience Level Intermediate

2:30pm IST

Service Networking Within Air-Gapped Environments: Deployment Strategies and Operational Management - Anirban Nandi, Google

Friday June 19, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

During the development of an air-gapped cloud infrastructure, Google engineering teams encountered a major challenge: the heavy operational burden on each service owner to manage common networking functions like load balancing, authorization, mTLS, rate limiting, etc. This was further complicated by the prevalent use of open-source software stacks with limited customisations for such use cases. Consequently, a collective decision was made to implement an Istio service mesh and in-cluster gateways to abstract these operations. However, operating a mesh in an air-gapped environment introduces unique technical and logistical difficulties.

This talks presents methodologies for reliably scaling meshes and gateways both zonally and globally across diverse bare-metal and KubeVirt clusters spanning multiple networks by integrating with established OSS technologies like MetalLB, Cilium ClusterMesh, etc. as well as OpenTelemetry, Fluentbit, Grafana, etc. for robust operational transparency.

Speakers

Anirban Nandi

Software Engineer, Google

Anirban is working as a software Engineer at Google and has been involved in the Kubernetes ecosystem for the past 3 years while primarily working on Kubernetes networking technologies such as Istio, Envoy, xDS, Gateway API, etc.

Friday June 19, 2026 2:30pm - 3:00pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Connectivity

Content Experience Level Beginner

3:10pm IST

Why We Ditched Kube-proxy: Scaling 10M Daily Browser Sessions With Kubernetes EndpointSlices - Rajat Khanna, CommerceIQ

Friday June 19, 2026 3:10pm - 3:40pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

At CommerceIQ, we scrape 850+ retailers daily through Kubernetes-orchestrated headless browsers — 10M pages, thousands of ephemeral pods per hour.

This talk covers when our networking broke at scale and how we fixed it with native Kubernetes.

At 8K+ concurrent pods, kube-proxy's iptables rules and conntrack exhaustion caused latency spikes. We bypassed kube-proxy with direct pod-to-pod routing via the EndpointSlice API — achieving 40% latency improvement while handling stale endpoints and scale-up race conditions.

We also built custom HPA metrics tied to scrape queues, scaled from 4K to 16K concurrent scrapes with spot VMs, and used MinIO as in-cluster cache to cut egress by 60%.

No fancy tooling — just deep Kubernetes knowledge solving hard problems with what's already there.

Speakers

Rajat Khanna

Senior Tech Lead, CommerceIQ

Senior Tech Lead at CommerceIQ, leading the BOT Evasion team — one of the largest browser automation fleets in e-commerce, orchestrating 10M+ daily scrapes across 850+ retailers on Kubernetes. Contributor to OpenTelemetry JS (Jaeger Remote Sampler). Active CNCF community member... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 3:10pm - 3:40pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Connectivity

Content Experience Level Intermediate

4:10pm IST

Kubernetes API Server Performance Clinic: Auditing, and Priority & Fairness in Production - Neel Shah, Middleware & Suman Chakraborty, Platform9 Systems

Friday June 19, 2026 4:10pm - 4:40pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

The Kubernetes API Server is the heart of your cluster, but at scale, it often becomes a hidden bottleneck, throttling critical controllers, freezing deployments, or crashing under "thundering herd" list-watch storms. This talk is a deep-dive operational clinic for SREs running high-throughput clusters (10k+ pods) who need to move beyond default configurations.

Attendees will learn how to dissect API latency using Audit Logs and Prometheus metrics (apiserver_request_duration_seconds) to identify "noisy neighbor" controllers that starve critical system components. We will dissect the Priority and Fairness (APF) flow control system, replacing legacy-- max-requests-inflight to guarantee that critical system calls (like node heartbeats) never get dropped, even during massive scale-up events. The session includes a live "autopsy" of a real-world API outage caused by unoptimized LIST calls and demonstrates how to fix it using API Streaming (WatchList), proper client-side caching, and more.

Speakers

Suman Chakraborty

Solutions Architect, Platform9 Systems

Suman is a Solutions Architect at Platform9 systems. He is a consultant and advisor for Kubernetes & Cloud Native Solutions, helping Customers and End users in their application modernisation journey and adoption with DevOps best practices. Suman has been a distinguished speaker and... Read More →

Neel Shah

Developer Advocate, StackGen

A DevOps engineer with a great passion for building communities around DevOps. Organiser of Google Cloud Gandhinagar, CNCF Gandhinagar, Hashicorp User Group Gandhinagar and Open Source Weekend. Have mentored 15+ hackathons and open source programs. I have given more than 15 talks... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 4:10pm - 4:40pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Operations + Performance

Content Experience Level Intermediate

4:50pm IST

Kubernetes Workload Resiliency in Action: Beyond Basics - Nabarun Pal & Akhil Mohan, Broadcom

Friday June 19, 2026 4:50pm - 5:20pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Kubernetes provides powerful mechanisms to protect and isolate workloads, but many teams deploy applications without leveraging these capabilities. In the context of AI workloads, which are often resource-intensive and long-running, maintaining resilience is more critical than ever.

This talk explores Kubernetes workload protection mechanisms and demonstrates how to combine them strategically for maximum resilience.

We'll examine resource requests/limits, priority classes, resource quotas, runtime classes, and strategies like pod disruption budgets and affinity rules. Through practical examples and real-world scenarios, you'll learn how to configure each mechanism, understand their interactions, and avoid common pitfalls that lead to pod evictions, performance degradation, and cascading failures.

Whether you're running mission-critical services or shared multi-tenant clusters, this session will equip you with a resilience framework that protects your workloads under pressure.

Speakers

Akhil Mohan

Software Engineer, Broadcom

Akhil works as a Software Engineer at Broadcom. An active contributor to projects in cloud native and container ecosystem. Akhil is a reviewer for containerd and a maintainer of kubernetes publishing-bot. He works mostly on container runtimes and kubernetes sig-node aspects.

Nabarun Pal

Principal Software Engineer at Broadcom, Kubernetes Maintainer, Broadcom

Nabarun is a Principal Software Engineer at Broadcom, a maintainer of the Kubernetes project, an emeritus member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee member and a chair of Kubernetes SIG Contributor Experience. He is a Release Manager for Kubernetes and has been the Kubernetes 1.21... Read More →

Friday June 19, 2026 4:50pm - 5:20pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Operations + Performance

Content Experience Level Intermediate

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