KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025

In containerized environments like Kubernetes, service mesh has emerged as a key architectural component to ensure reliable, secure, and observable communication between services. Despite the growing popularity of service mesh, many developers, operators, and architects find the concept of a service mesh intimidating due to its perceived complexity and wide array of features.

In this talk speaker from the gRPC team in Google will demystify service mesh technology by returning to the basics, providing clear understanding of what a service mesh is, the problems it solves, and how it fits into a cloud-native ecosystem. Additionally, this talk will explore the differences between proxy-based and proxyless service mesh architectures, discussing their advantages, disadvantages, and use cases.

We spend countless hours making applications resilient and scalable, but often overlook their final moments. While we obsess over startup performance and runtime behavior, the shutdown process remains a mystery. Yet, understanding this crucial phase can mean the difference between clean service transitions and disrupted user experiences.

Join us as we decode Pod termination in Kubernetes, exploring the lifecycle from shutdown signal to final goodbye. We'll examine real-world scenarios through kubectl, kubelet, and API interactions, and share practical strategies for smooth shutdowns. Transform your chaotic Pod terminations into choreographed farewells and enhance your application's reliability.

For: DevOps engineers, SRE teams, and Kubernetes developers.

Kubernetes is powerful, but its true strength lies in extensibility. Many developers struggle to adapt it to their needs, often resorting to workarounds instead of leveraging built-in extension mechanisms. What if Kubernetes worked for you, not the other way around?

This beginner-friendly session will introduce you to Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and custom controllers, guiding you through their design, implementation, and deployment. You'll learn how to create Kubernetes-native abstractions that automate workflows, simplify operations, and enhance the developer experience. We'll cover best practices, automation strategies, and performance optimizations to ensure scalable and maintainable extensions that integrate seamlessly with Kubernetes.

Get ready to move beyond workarounds and let your pods thrive with clean, scalable, and native Kubernetes extensions!

Edge computing is still a fairly new area in the cloud native tech industry and is growing fast. As computing moves to the edge, what does Kubernetes look like beyond the cloud, and why does it matter?

This session features a live demo with a Raspberry Pi, camera, and real-time AI detection. Watch as our edge device identifies raised hands, sends data to a Kubernetes cluster via KubeEdge, and visualizes results instantly.

We'll explore:
- Edge Kubernetes challenges: connectivity, resources, security
- KubeEdge's approach to decentralized workloads
- Real-world applications across industries

Join us to see how AI, Kubernetes, and edge computing converge to enable powerful new possibilities.

Building a CNCF community comes with wins and challenges. We launched KCD Sri Lanka in 2022 with a high-grade green screen production, featuring global speakers and over 1K YouTube livestream views. In 2023, our in-person KCD Sri Lanka was an early sold-out, house-full event, drawing speakers from around the world.

From securing sponsorships and growing engagement to handling setbacks, we’ll share key lessons from leading Kubernetes Sri Lanka. Whether you’re starting or scaling a CNCF community, this talk will provide practical takeaways to build a sustainable and impactful cloud native ecosystem.

This session delves into Zomato's journey of adopting Kuma Service Mesh to manage over 500 microservices with 10,000 dataplanes. The session begins by addressing common challenges in service communication, such as observability gaps, insecure traffic, and inconsistent configurations across environments, and explore how Kuma Service Mesh resolves these issues.

The presentation highlights how Kuma standardises configurations, minimises debugging efforts, and improves application performance, thereby reducing developer overhead. A key focus is on leveraging Kuma to enhance developer workflows through local-preview environments, allowing dynamic traffic routing to local services based on headers. This facilitates rapid iteration and debugging.

Additionally, we will discuss our roadmap for utilising Kuma's zone-aware routing to reduce cross-zone data transfer, lowering costs and enhancing efficiency.

This session will explore why NFTables offer clear advantages over IPTables and IPVS, especially in large-scale production environments from both maintainers and end users perspective. We’ll share a user story who faced persistent issues with IPTables, saw some success with IPVS, and finally solved their scalability problems by migrating to NFTables. From a maintainers perspective we will showcase how and why NFTable outperforms the other proxy modes. We’ll provide performance insights and discuss kernel compatibility.
We will also discuss NFTables compatibility with various CNI providers and plugins, and how NFTables support is already integrated in many environments, providing a smoother transition. Attending this session you will get an indepth understanding of behavioral changes when migrating from IPTables and IPVS to NFTables, including key metrics to track.

In the world of containerization, workloads require reliable, performant storage for logs, data persistence, debugging, and real-time processing. Today, Kubernetes and open-source solutions provide a diverse range of storage provisioning options to choose from for single-cluster environments.

Now, envision scaling this to a broader fleet model, where multiple clusters are in play—worker clusters managed by a single control cluster, supporting a variety of workloads with replica counts in the range of thousands. How can we ensure seamless, dynamic volume provisioning through intelligent, capacity-aware decisions, while optimizing disk utilization across clusters, minimizing manual intervention, and maintaining high performance, reliability, and security as workloads and customer demands grow?

In this session, we will tackle these challenges head-on, exploring the architecture of capacity-aware, dynamic volume provisioning for LVM local storage across a multi-cluster Kubernetes fleet.

Running large-scale, performance-sensitive distributed databases on K8s requires balancing between latency, reliability, and cost efficiency. At Flipkart, we tackled this challenge by leveraging K8s Local Persistent Volumes (Local PVs) to optimize both performance and infrastructure costs for our stateful workloads.

With a storage footprint of 4PB of directly attached SSDs, 15PB of directly attached HDDs, comprising 1000 K8s stateful nodes spanning across 3 clusters (2 on-prem & 1 on public cloud infrastructure) LocalPV storage currently powers various internal database platforms (Aerospikes, HBase, TiDB) leveraged by critical business applications at Flipkart.

In this talk, we’ll share practical insights from our journey of scaling database infrastructure with Local PVs. We’ll dive into key challenges and solutions, including dynamic provisioning, workload scheduling, and automating maintenance workflows to ensure operational efficiency at scale.

In cloud-native environments, high-performance networking is crucial for scalability and security. Calico, a leading solution for container networking, integrates the VPP dataplane alongside eBPF. VPP provides a scalable solution combining security with high-performance packet processing. In this session, we’ll discuss our work with Calico’s VPP dataplane, optimized by integrating Marvell’s high-performance native plugin, an open-source Data Acceleration Offload solution. This integration offloads cryptographic tasks and inline IPSec encryption to SmartNICs, reducing CPU usage and optimizing secure data transmission. VPP offers fast packet processing, low latency, and high throughput, essential for service meshes, edge computing, and microservices. By leveraging hardware offloading and optimizations, VPP enhances throughput and reduces CPU load, making it ideal for demanding networking tasks. We’ll present benchmark results showcasing improved throughput, latency, and resource use.

This session delves into the critical aspects of developing production-ready Large Language Model (LLM) applications using Java. We'll explore how to leverage Java's strengths to build scalable and efficient LLM systems, addressing key challenges such as performance optimization, resource management, and seamless integration with existing infrastructures.

Attendees will gain practical knowledge on handling massive datasets, optimizing model inference, and fine-tuning LLMs for optimal performance. We'll discuss strategies for ensuring the reliability and scalability of your LLM deployments, empowering you to create robust and high-performing AI applications. Whether you're a seasoned Java developer or new to the AI domain, this session will provide valuable insights and guidance for your LLM development journey, equipping you with the tools and knowledge to navigate the complexities of building production-grade LLM systems.

Kubernetes Operators are revolutionasing cloud-native application management—but when designing an operator, should we go one CRD per operator or manage multiple CRDs within a single operator? How does cascading CRDs impact reconciliation, dependency handling, and performance?

In this talk, we'll dive deep into real-world use cases to explore the trade-offs between these approaches. Whether we are building custom Kubernetes controllers or optimising cloud-native infrastructure, this session will help one make the right design choice for scalability, maintainability, and performance.

Kubernetes-native development is exhilarating—until complex workflows, slow feedback loops, and steep learning curves slow you down. Teams often spend days or weeks setting up environments, managing dependencies, and debugging microservices. GitLab found that nearly 44% of organizations take over two months to onboard new developers—precious time lost in today’s fast-paced tech world.
This session shows how we cut environment setup from days to minutes, slashed feedback loops by over 90%, and reduced onboarding time by 50%.
The secret? A powerful blend of CNCF tools—Kind and DevSpace—combined with simple lightweight Node.js and Bash/PowerShell scripts, We have automated environment provisioning, code synchronization, and cluster management so that developers can focus on shipping features.
Discover how to integrate Kind and DevSpace for a seamless workflow with real metrics and tips. Developers, architects, and DevOps can streamline Kubernetes, speed onboarding, and boost iterations.