More Than a Warm-Up: Start KubeCon With a Colocated Event
When people think about KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, they often picture the keynote halls, the packed project pavilion or the flood of hallway conversations that define the week. But increasingly, some of the most impactful learning and community moments happen before the main conference even begins — through colocated events and project-specific gatherings.
In 2025, colocated events are more than just warm-ups. They’ve become essential starting points for everyone. Whether you’re a first-time attendee to the upcoming North America event in Atlanta interested in Cloud Native University Day or a seasoned practitioner looking to anchor their KubeCon experience around specific trends, technologies and communities, you’ll find what you’re looking for in this year’s diverse colocated events schedule.
A Culture of Shared Learning
At the heart of the cloud native ecosystem is a culture of community. The technologies, including containers, microservices, service meshes and increasingly, AI, move fast! But the pace of innovation is sustainable because of the communities that form around it.
Conferences like KubeCon are no longer just about tools and code; they’re about people sharing experiences, best practices and even lessons from failures. Colocated events in particular help create intimate settings where practitioners can ask questions, exchange insights and connect deeply with the maintainers and contributors who shape the projects.
Policy as Code and the Rise of KyvernoCon
One example of this community culture in action is the KyvernoCon, a colocated event dedicated to Policy as Code and Kubernetes governance. After a successful virtual KyvernoCon earlier this year, the community is bringing the momentum to KubeCon North America with its first in-person colocated event.
Policy as Code has emerged as a critical practice for enterprises navigating the complexity of Kubernetes at scale. It enables teams to define, enforce and audit rules across clusters in a consistent, automated way, helping organizations balance developer freedom with security and compliance requirements.
By dedicating a day to this topic, KyvernoCon highlights the importance of building trust in automation and demonstrates how the open source community is tackling one of the most complex yet common problems in cloud native adoption: how to scale safely without slowing innovation.
GitOps Gains Ground: FluxCon Arrives
Alongside policy, GitOps continues to grow as a cornerstone of cloud native operations, and like Kyverno, the GitOps community will be hosting a virtual event for global members that can’t attend the in-person FluxCon and ArgoCon events at KubeCon. With declarative infrastructure stored in version control and reconciled automatically, GitOps provides a model for reliable, auditable and collaborative infrastructure management.
This year, the first FluxCon colocated event makes its debut, spotlighting one of the most widely adopted GitOps engines in production. The timing couldn’t be better. Enterprises are shifting from experimentation to enterprise-wide GitOps strategies, integrating policy engines, supply chain security and multicluster management into their workflows.
FluxCon is more than a technical showcase; it represents a milestone in how community-driven projects evolve into de facto standards through collaboration, cross-pollination and shared practices.
Platform Engineering Day: The Big Picture
Colocated events also create space for connecting the dots across specialized communities. That’s where Platform Engineering Day comes in.
Platform engineering has quickly become a defining trend in cloud native, as enterprises seek to standardize and scale developer experiences without losing the flexibility that Kubernetes and microservices promise. By weaving together practices like GitOps, Policy as Code, observability and service mesh, platform engineering teams create internal platforms that balance governance and agility.
Piggybacking off of the widely read Platform Maturity Model, Platform Engineering Day provides a venue for practitioners to step back from individual tools and examine how these components fit together in real-world environments. It’s a reminder that cloud native success depends not just on individual projects, but on the platforms that integrate them into sustainable systems and how sharing learnings can help the community at large.
The Project Pavilion: Where Journeys Converge
Of course, no KubeCon journey is complete without a stop at the project pavilion. For new attendees, this is the best way to explore the landscape in one place. For returning practitioners, it’s a reunion of sorts and a chance to catch up with maintainers, learn what’s new, meet Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassadors and discover projects you might not have encountered yet.
Conversations in the project pavilion often spark connections that later blossom into contributions, collaborations or even entirely new projects created by the community for the community.
Where To Begin
If you’re new to KubeCon, starting with a colocated event can provide a structured entry point. Instead of being overwhelmed by the scale of the main conference, you’ll spend a day immersed in one topic, meeting others who share your interests, and leaving with context that makes the broader event easier to navigate.
If you’re a returning participant, colocated events are where you’ll deepen your expertise, share your story and help shape the next chapter of cloud native adoption.
Either way, these gatherings represent the best of what makes the CNCF ecosystem thrive: open collaboration, shared learning and communities that grow stronger together.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 is taking place Nov. 10-13 in Atlanta, Georgia. Register now.
