Tech professionals from the world over gathered in London for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 last week to discuss key issues in cloud native technology around artificial intelligence (AI), community engagement and performance enhancements. Held between April 1-4, this year’s British version of KubeCon was the best attended KubeCon ever, with an approximate 15,000 participants.
Among the many notable keynote speeches was a welcoming address by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) CTO and founder Chris Aniszczyk, who reminisced about the remarkable journey that cloud computing has taken since the birth of cloud native platforms 10 years ago. He also detailed the beta release of gitjobs.dev, a site for open source jobs.
Aniszczyk was joined onstage by Vasu Chandrasekhara, VP of Cloud Native Strategy and chief architect at SAP, who discussed the NeoNephos Foundation, an organization that promotes collaboration for cloud native technologies and digital sovereignty in Europe. The emphasis on European cloud computing was a major talking point among conference attendees; certainly the region has benefitted from a new sense of urgency as it works to keep pace with Chinese and U.S. advances in AI.
Also notable among the keynotes: Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Kernel maintainer and Fellow with The Linux Foundation, spoke on Rust in the Linux Kernel, discussing how this combination heralds a new level of cloud native security and performance. Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb, gave a keynote about observability in the age of large language models (LLMs). Yen, noting that LLMs can be challenging to fully test and debug, said that to counterbalance this difficulty, users should deploy observability technology to assist in monitoring problems.
Key uses cases were the focus of a four-person panel, “Mind the Gap: Bridging cloud native innovation with real world use,” which spotlighted how cloud native technology has dramatically shifted operations for large enterprise workloads. To illustrate this, representatives from Apple, Spotify, HSBC and Peptone spoke about how cloud native platforms enabled fixes for operational headaches.
The HSBC rep explained that the company’s platform services 600 million discrete hits daily and has more than 7,000 services in production. To keep operations running smoothly during upgrades, they run clusters in a blue/green pair and rehydrate clusters from an etcd backup. The Apple rep discussed open source in Apple’s private cloud compute, detailing how the company’s private cloud helps scale AI.
The mention of AI was a constant. A remarkable 74% of the sessions included a significant focus on how AI and machine learning work in concert with Kubernetes. A recurrent theme was that AI can boost the efficiency of resource security and compliance while simultaneously streamlining the daily work of developers.
This streamlining is really important: Developers typically devote only a fraction of their time to actually code software, with a larger chunk of time spent in admin/maintenance tasks; KubeCon attendees heard about how AI can reduce this non-coding time. Even beyond this benefit, the conference spotlighted how AI has become a core force helping boost Kubernetes’ growth in performance, automation and scaling.
Plenty of sessions explored the security issues involved with cloud native deployments, with presenters stressing the importance of ensuring that security remains a top priority. Part of security best practices is always deploying the most current security frameworks, and monitoring security risks in real time. Indeed, the focus on real-time monitoring and using current tools are hallmarks of cloud native platforms.
The open source community has long been one of the most collaborative of all the sub-sectors in technology, and this spirit was evident in KubeCon Europe 2025. With open source being the foundation of cloud native technology, it’s likely that this collaborative force will continue to drive growth as cloud native adoption expands in the years ahead.
