KubeCon Europe 2025 Retrospective
Reflections from attending my SIXTH KubeCon
As I write this post, I am sitting at Heathrow airport after what can only be described as a whirlwind week that was the first KubeCon of 2025, KubeCon EU, which took place in London, England. The following is a recap of my personal experience at KubeCon London.
Climbing in London
If you follow my work, you know that I love bouldering and try to climb at the local bouldering gym whenever I visit a new city. I was unable to boulder in Salt Lake City because I was 2 weeks into recovering from a nasty ankle sprain (from bouldering). But now, 6 months after spraining my ankle, I’m back at it again, and was able to visit not one, but two bouldering gyms in London.
The first gym I went to (the day that I landed, no less), called The Castle Climbing Centre, was recommended to me by my team captain, Penny Scully, who is an even more avid climber than me. As the name implies, the gym is located inside a castle, and has a great mix of roped routes and bouldering problems. There’s even an outdoor bouldering area. The Castle Climbing Centre was a bit out of the way from where I was staying, but since I arrived on a Saturday, it was the perfect day to check it out before the madness of KubeCon began. Also, it was SUCH a cool and unique experience, and TOTALLY worth the trek. I also dragged a friend with me, Marino Wijay, with whom I co-presented later in the week.
The second gym I went to was called Rise Climbing, and it was located about 1 km or so from the ExCeL Centre, where KubeCon was being hosted. Given that I was staying nearby, it was super convenient to pop in there for a quick 1 hour bouldering session before the start of the busy conference day. Fun fact: some of the boulders at this gym were set by IFSC Bouldering World Cup Winner, Sohta Amagasa. I did one of the easier ones that he set. 😁
You can check out some of my bouldering vides from the week on my Instagram.
Pre-KubeCon: Cloud Native Rejekts
This was my second time attending Cloud Native Rejekts–my first one not as a speaker. I have to say that it was fun to attend as a non-speaker. Rejekts has a much more chill vibe compared to the frenzy that is KubeCon. It’s also quite a bit smaller, and much cozier. As a result, it’s a great way to catch up with folks who you would normally see at KubeCon, but who will most likely be too busy running around in a frenzy to stop by for a chat.
Also, my co-worker, Henrik Rexed, was speaking at Rejekts, so it was nice to be able to attend his talk to show support. Henrik, by the way, is an excellent presenter, and his slides are always a ton of fun. I definitely recommend catching one of his talks.
PS: The venue was GORGEOUS!!
KubeTrain Party
Dynatrace and Isovalent hosted a KubeTrain arrival party on March 31st, and I popped into that for a bit, after Rejekts was done. It was a ton of fun, and I was reunited with my teammates, Andi Grabner (aka “Mr. Dynatrace”), and Henrik Rexed. A few other folks also rolled into town that day whom I hadn’t seen at Rejekts, so it was nice to catch up. Also, the party featured a signature cocktail called the “Dyna-Tai”, which was quite good.
KubeCon Main Conference
Co-located Events
KubeCon itself started on Wednesday, April 2nd; however, on Tuesday, April 1st, the conference venue was host to a number of co-located events, including Observability Day, Platform Engineering Day, OpenFeature Summit, OpenTofu Day, ArgoCon, BackstageCon, and others. Like Rejekts, co-located events are always a great way to catch up with friends before the madness of KubeCon sets in.
I was fortunate enough to speak at my fourth Observability Day, this time with fellow Torontonian, Marino Wijay, who was my co-speaker at Platform Engineering Day in Salt Lake City last fall. Our talk, Putting the Experience in UX: The Importance of Making Data Accessible, in which we spoke about using OpenTelemetry outside of the confines of traditional technology, to provide better insights and visibility into workflows such as employee onboarding, emergency room visits, and hiring. I had originally crafted the talk proposal with one of my good friends, Tim Banks. Unfortunately, they were unable to travel to KubeCon. As a result, Marino took his place, and he and I crafted the talk together. I hope we made Tim proud!
PS: Since my ankle is about 95% healed, I was able to wear my sparkly conference shoes once again. They hurt like a muther#$@!, but wow, did I feel awesome in them. 😁
Ambassador Breakfast & Kickoff
As a CNCF Ambassador, KubeCon always kicks off with the Ambassador Breakfast at 07:30, during which time we get to hang out with fellow Ambassadors, eat (duh), and take a group photo before walking over to the opening keynotes as a group.
The production level of the keynotes always blows my mind. Having been on the main stage at Dynatrace’s Perform conference in February 2025, I had a taste of just how much time and effort goes into putting on a slick, well-executed production. Mad respect to the folks behind the scenes who make all the magic happen.
I love that a number of the keynotes this time around had a focus on Observability, with talks from Honeycomb’s Christine Yen, eBay’s Vijay Samuel, and Dah0’s Kasper Borg Nissen. It’s been really cool to see how much Observability has taken a bigger and bigger role in a number of conferences. For example, this year’s ScALE (Southern California Linux Expo) had a dedicated Observability track for the first time ever. KubeCon has a dedicated Observability track, and the Observability Day co-located event now has two tracks. Observability is definitely here to stay!
OpenTelemetry Observatory & Humans of OTel
The OpenTelemetry Observatory was back in the Solutions Showcase for a fourth time, and so were our Humans of OTel interviews. Shot over two days, we were able to interview a great bunch of folks. I wanted to give a huge shout out to our various OTel practitioners and contributors who came out for the interviews. Also a huge shout out to my co-interviewer, Reese Lee, and to Henrik Rexed, who lent us his filmmaking and production talents to help make this top-notch! I can’t wait to share the interviews once Henrik and I are done doing all of the editing in the next couple of weeks. I’ll post a link here as soon as the video is out.
Last KubeCon, we also introduced the Humans of OTel livestream, in which Reese Lee and I interview an end user and someone from OTel leadership. This time around, we had Grafana’s Marylia Gutierrez (former end user and current OTel approver and maintainer) and Honeycomb’s Austin Parker (OTel Community Manager) as our guests.
Marylia shared her experiences in going from being an end user, in her former role at Cockroach Labs, to OTel approver and maintainer, in her current role at Grafana Labs. She also talked about the localization work that she’s doing, in helping to translate the OTel docs into Portuguese as part of a larger effort to make the OTel docs available in a variety of languages.
Austin talked about OTel’s past, present, and future, and shared some of the latest and greatest project updates (see below).
OpenTelemetry Project Updates
I’ve tried to make a point of attending the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project updates since KubeCon EU in Amsterdam, back in 2023. I still remember attending that project update, because we were all crammed into a small conference room. It was hot, stuffy, and people were overflowing into the hallway. This time around, there was a big room to match the big audience. Some highlights:
Project growth:
- Contributions have seen a steady growth since the project’s inception in 2019
- The project has seen 1000+ contributions across different organizations (fun fact: Dynatrace has been one of the top contributors since the project’s early days)
Graduation status:
- Graduation prerequisites have been fulfilled, so it’s only a matter of time before the project achieves graduated status with the CNCF. Who knows…maybe we’ll see an announcement at one of the upcoming KubeCons this year! 🤞
Certification & education:
- The OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) is in beta, and will be in GA (general availability) soon!
- Available for FREE: the Linux Foundation has a Getting Started with OpenTelemetry course
Surveys:
- One of the End User SIG’s mandates is to share end user feedback with the various project SIGs. We’ve achieved this by partnering with project SIGs in the last year to help put out surveys to the OTel community. These help drive SIG roadmaps for the coming year. A huge thanks to the 551 responses that we’ve had across 6 surveys since March 2024.
Other updates:
- The OTel Collector now supports profiling with the
service.profileSupportfeature gate, supported by 12 components! - At the KubeCon NA OTel Project Updates, an announcement was made about introducing an OpenTelemetry is introducing a user-facing logs API. This is now part of the OTel Specification. The Logs Bridge API will coexist with the Logs API.
- The OTel Collector has 43 new components, and a number of core modules have been marked as 1.x.
Two Talks!
In addition to my Observability Day talk, I also had not one, but TWO talks at the main conference.
The first of my talks took place on Wednesday, April 2nd, and was called, How Green is My OpenTelmetry Collector? In this talk, Nancy Chauhan and I explore using the CNCF’s Kepler project to tune the OTel Collector to lower its overall carbon footprint. I met Nancy last year at KubeCon EU in Paris. As an active member of TAG Environmental Sustainability and founder of Women in Cloud Native, she was the perfect partner for delivering this talk with! A huge thanks to everyone who came out to see the talk. We were slotted as the last talk of the day, so I always appreciate it when people stick around that late for a talk. 💜
My second talk took place on Thursday, April 3rd, and was called, OTel Me How to Get My Open Source Community Taken Seriously. This time, my co-speaker was my OTel ride-or-die, Reese Lee. I’ve been fortunate to co-speak with Reese a number of times over the past couple of years: at KubeCon, Open Source Summit, Observability Day, and All Things Open. She’s a wonderful talk partner because we think and work the same way. Also…not gonna lie…her cat, Taco, makes THE BEST slide model. Our talk was about building out community for the OTel End User SIG. She and I are maintainers of the SIG, alongside Dan Gomez Blanco. We really wanted to highlight the things that make the OTel community special, and how we keep that community going through the OTel End User SIG. Like Wednesday’s talk, this talk was near the end of the day, so again, super grateful for the folks who made it out. I was pleasantly surprised to see a number of OTel contributors attending the talk, which totally made my day!
Final Thoughts
If you’ve been keeping count, that was 3 talks in 3 days, plus 2 days of Humans of OTel recordings, and a livestream recording. Between that, and the mad rush between ScALE and KubeCon to write 3 talks and learn Kepler, I was absolutely EXHAUSTED.
After KubeCon, I flew my 16-year-old daughter into London to take a long weekend to explore and hang out and decompress from the chaos of the week. I’d been to London twice before, and both times I didn’t get to really see anything. So it was a treat to be able to do some proper sightseeing with my daughter.
Overall, I had a lovely week and was grateful to meet up with and hang out with so many good friends. I’m looking forward to taking it a bit easy, compared to the harried frenzy of the last several months.
I’ll be speaking again at KubeCon Japan in mid-June, so if you’re around for that conference, please come and say hello! I will also have Geeking Out Podcast stickers, featuring our capybara mascots, Melanie and Penelope.
I unfortunately will not be going to KubeCon NA in Atlanta, nor will I be planning any further travel to the US in the foreseeable future. As a Canadian, I simply do not feel safe going there, given the recent political climate.
I will now leave you with a rare photo of both our rats, Katie and Buffy. On a sad note: Buffy died while we were away. We miss her dearly. 😭
Until next time, peace, love, and code. ✌️💜👩💻
