5 KubeCon India Talks I’m Really Looking Forward To
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon came to India for the first time last year, and it was amazing! India ranks fourth globally in CNCF contributions (with over 11,500 contributions) and third for the number of committers. So it’s no surprise that a lot of us were thrilled to finally have a KubeCon here. Over 3,000 people attended, and the event featured 93 sessions.
This year, KubeCon is coming back to Hyderabad on August 6–7, and it’s expected to be even bigger. That means more people, more sessions… and way more talks to choose from.
Even after attending several KubeCons, the sheer number of talks still overwhelms me. So I usually go through the agenda and pick out the ones I’m most excited about. In this blog, I’m sharing my top picks, just in case you’re also feeling a bit lost and want to make sure you don’t miss some great sessions.
Scaling AI Like a Pro-PepsiCo’s LLM Deployment Strategy on Kubernetes for AI-Driven Business Impact
Speakers: Praseed Naduvath & Dhanashree Shetty, PepsiCo
One of my favorite things about KubeCon is hearing real-world stories from large enterprises. It’s one thing to read about a tool or pattern online and another to hear how a big company actually puts it into practice, at scale. That’s why this talk from PepsiCo really stood out to me.
They’re going to walk through how they deployed multiple 70-billion-parameter LLaMA models on Kubernetes (yes, that’s billions with a B). I’m especially interested in the bits about how they manage GPUs, optimize performance, and balance costs while still staying responsible with AI. These are real challenges every team working with LLMs is facing right now, and hearing how a massive organization like PepsiCo tackled them is going to be insightful for sure.
Scaling ML Smarter: Optimizing Kueue & Volcano With Adaptive Scheduling
Speakers: Nikunj Goyal, Adobe & Aditi Gupta, JioCinema (formerly Disney+ Hotstar)
Okay so I’ll admit that I have no clue what Kueue or Volcano are. But one of the best things about attending conferences like KubeCon is the chance to explore technologies I wouldn’t normally come across in my day-to-day work. So I’m making space in my schedule for this talk.
From the description, it sounds like these projects are doing some interesting work in improving how ML jobs are scheduled on Kubernetes, especially when it comes to making better use of GPUs. I’m curious to see how adaptive scheduling actually works and what kinds of results teams like Adobe and JioCinema have seen from it. Even if I don’t end up using these tools directly, I know I’ll walk away learning something new about how ML workloads are managed on K8s, which is why I picked this session.
Security: The Thing That Everyone Loves To Hate
Speakers: Bhavani Indukuri (Zscaler), Sonali Srivastava (InfraCloud), Ram Iyengar (The Linux Foundation), Anusha Hegde (Nirmata)
Security is one of those things no one wants to deal with, until something breaks. And when it does, it’s usually a mess. That’s what makes this panel so relevant. I like the promise of this talk that they’re not just going to throw around buzzwords, but instead focus on actual experiences: what worked, what didn’t, and how to make security a more natural part of the dev process.
Also, I’m a big fan of panels in general. You get a mix of perspectives, and it’s even better when the speakers don’t fully agree (which I hope happens in this panel :P) because that’s when the interesting discussions take place. This panel has a pretty diverse lineup, and I’ve heard Ram speak before, he usually throws in some good humor, so I’m really looking forward to this one.
Lessons from Running a CNCF Community: Mistakes, Wins, and Growth
Speakers: Kemila De Silva (Aeturnum Inc.) & Chamod Perera (Circles)
Talks like these remind me of how global and grassroots the Kubernetes community really is. Not every place has a huge tech scene or loads of resources, but communities still find a way to thrive and that’s something worth celebrating.
KCD Sri Lanka’s journey sounds inspiring, from online events with big-name speakers to packed in-person meetups. I’m really looking forward to hearing how they pulled it off, what challenges they faced, and what they learned along the way. If you’re interested in community building or just enjoy feel good stories of people making things happen, this one should be on your list too.
Running Databases Efficiently at Scale - Case Study of Flipkart’s Local PV Journey on K8s
Speakers: Yashpal Choudhary & Akif Ahmed Khan, Flipkart
This talk feels like a natural pair with the PepsiCo one. Flipkart is one of India’s biggest e-commerce platforms, so hearing how they run large, performance-heavy databases on Kubernetes is going to be super relevant, especially as more teams try to move stateful workloads to K8s.
What really caught my eye was the mention of Local Persistent Volumes and how they’re using them across 1,000+ stateful nodes. That’s a crazy amount of infrastructure! I’m hoping to pick up some lessons on storage performance, dynamic provisioning, and maybe even rethink how I think about running databases on K8s altogether.
Come Say Hi at KubeCon if You’re Attending!
So those were my picks and I hope they help you make your own KubeCon schedule a little easier. There are tons of great sessions this year, and it can definitely get overwhelming, so maybe this gives you a place to start from!
I’ll be in Hyderabad from August 5th to 7th for KubeCon, and if you’re around, I’d love to meet! Whether you want to chat about mirrord, developer experience, or just nerd out about developer tooling, I’m always up for a good conversation :)
And yes, I’ll be carrying a bunch of cute MetalBear stickers. So if you’re a fan of collecting stickers, don’t be shy, come say hi and grab a few!
