The autonomous infrastructure conversation is going global, and it's kicking off in Amsterdam, at the Amstel Boathouse.
If you've been in the Kubernetes trenches long enough, you know the drill: fleets get bigger, configs get messier, and at some point the YAML starts managing you instead of the other way around. The promise of "just automate it” has been in the ecosystem for years. KubeAuto Day is the event that's actually trying to cash that check.
Organized by community champions from Cast AI and co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, KubeAuto Day Amsterdam on March 23 is the first stop of what's shaping up to be a genuinely global practitioner-focused event series.
After Amsterdam, it heads to São Paulo on May 28, then Mumbai right before KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India, and later to the US alongside FinOps X and KubeCon North America. The goal is simple: bring the autonomous infrastructure conversation to the communities living it every day - platform engineering and DevOps teams, Application Developers, ML/MLOps practitioners, SREs - wherever they are.
The event runs two parallel tracks across a full day at the Amstel Boathouse: the Kube Room for talks, firesides, and panels, and the Auto Room for workshops and deeper practitioner sessions. And, of course, it ends with the after-party, giving practitioners a chance to network.
What's on the Agenda
The day is built around one core question: now that Kubernetes runs basically everything, how do you stop it from running your life too?
Kelsey Hightower opens with a fireside titled "From 'The Hard Way' to 'The Invisible Way'", a direct callback to his legendary Kubernetes the Hard Way guide, and a provocation that a truly mature platform should eventually disappear from view. Engineers focus on application logic; the platform handles the rest. It’s going to be a very interesting conversation.
From there, the agenda gets into production war stories from some genuinely interesting corners of the industry. Michael Walorski (DKB) shares two years of running Crossplane in production at a regulated bank, how they built a GitOps-driven platform strategy for audit-ready cluster lifecycles across dozens of teams, and what a rigorous evaluation of autoscaling technologies actually looks like when compliance-by-design is non-negotiable. Filipe Revez & Pedro Cachaldora (Millennium bcp) tackle one of the least-solved problems in cloud-native platforms: achieving the highest possible availability across multiple regions and clouds without paying for idle infrastructure, with a practical, open-source-first approach to multi-region architecture that balances resilience, performance, and cost without vendor lock-in.
We are thrilled to be joined by Janakiram MSV, an internationally recognized architect and analyst at the intersection of Cloud, IoT, and AI. In his talk, 'Agentic AI Meets Kubernetes,' Janakiram will explore how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) standards are transforming Kubernetes into the ultimate substrate for autonomous systems, moving beyond simple orchestration to a truly self-driving infrastructure.
Kim-Norman Sahm (Cast AI) will tackle the GPU shortage head-on with a lightning talk on building multi-cloud Kubernetes to route around capacity constraints, a very 2026 problem that isn't going away soon.
The midday Conversation Between CTOs: Daniel Gebler (Picnic) and Leon Kuperman (Cast AI), skipping the slides entirely. Two operators in senior seats will be talking openly about what automation looks like at scale and where it still falls short.
The AI Panel pulls together voices from MintyCode, Aethir, and Cast AI to cut through the hype on AI-driven infrastructure.
The rest of the day keeps the bar high: Andrew Martin (ControlPlane) on the GPU infrastructure crunch; Dario Tranchitella (CLASTIX) on a multi-tenancy solution born from a very personal outage story; Jeremy Murray (Stack8s) on what infrastructure looks like when you stop being locked to the big three hyperscalers; Abdel Sghiouar (Google Cloud) on Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator; Rey Lejano (Red Hat) on cluster management; Ian Miell (Container Solutions) on making compliance something the platform handles rather than something engineers chase; and Dedy Kredo (Qodo) on the AI code review layer your Kubernetes stack is probably missing.
In the Auto Room, the parallel track kicks off with a deep dive into the evolving world of engineering and infrastructure. Mauricio Salatino starts by questioning the state of Cloud Native Developer Experience in the Age of AI, exploring how swarms and coding agents are reshaping workflows and how developers can achieve a 10x speed boost without skyrocketing cloud costs. Shifting from software to the "silent killer" of reliability, Ciprian Focsaneanu and Ivaylo Papratilov will provide a concrete blueprint for finding and fixing Invisible Storage Bottlenecks in Kubernetes, uncovering the complex triple-correlation between Linux metrics, cloud limits, and Kubernetes signals. Finally, Marino Wijay reminds us that even in 2026, Networking Is Still Hard, stripping back the layers of the stack to explain everything from packet flow and DNS to how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is redefining connectivity in the era of AI.
The Bigger Picture
The thread running through everything is what practitioners are calling "complexity shifting down", moving operational burden out of developer hands and into the platform layer itself. The maturity of autonomous operations isn't defined by what a system can do, but by how much toil it absorbs. That's the KubeAuto Day thesis, and the lineup of speakers from Millennium bcp to Google Cloud and Red Hat suggests it's resonating well beyond the startup ecosystem.
The global series format is deliberate. KubeAuto Day is being built around the moments when the community already comes together, whether that's practitioners travelling to major industry events in Mumbai and Salt Lake City, or regional ecosystems like São Paulo that have their own thriving infrastructure community and deserve their own dedicated space. The goal is to meet practitioners where they are, and turn those gatherings into something more than a conference hallway conversation.
KubeAuto Day Amsterdam runs March 23 at the Amstel Boathouse, the day before KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe kicks off at RAI Amsterdam.
Full agenda and registration available here.
