CiliumCon is back at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026

Mark your calendars. On Monday, November 9, CilliumCon kicks off at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City. It’s the eighth time the event has run, and this year’s agenda goes straight at the problems that show up when AI and GPU workloads push Kubernetes networking past what it was built for.

Why now?

AI and GPU workloads are stretching Kubernetes networking, and this year’s CiliumCon agenda covers the problems that start to appear at that scale.

Security is part of the story too. The same AI capabilities are changing the pace of vulnerability discovery, as models like Mythos have shown, and CVEs can now surface far faster than teams can patch them manually. That puts runtime security front and center, with Tetragon giving teams a way to detect and respond to threats as they happen.

Where it all began

CiliumCon began as a half-day co-located event at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam. It was created to give the growing Cilium community a dedicated space to connect, share production use cases, and align on technical roadmaps outside of the larger conference. It brings end users, maintainers, and contributors together to focus on production insights, eBPF enhancements, and community collaboration.

Why CiliumCon?

There’s no other event that goes as deep into Cilium, its sub-projects, and its eBPF foundation.

One stack, one foundation. The whole Cilium stack runs on eBPF, with Cilium handling networking, Hubble observability, and Tetragon runtime security. Sessions build on that shared base instead of treating networking as a general topic.

Built for scale. Cilium is the de facto CNI for the cloud native ecosystem, and as workload demand grows, users need to understand how to run it at scale and handle any new issues that come up.

What’s on the agenda

CiliumCon runs Monday, November 9, opening and closing with remarks from co-chairs Joe Stringer and Jordan Rife. In between, you’ll hear from end users and maintainers:

ESnet on IPv6-only ClusterMesh

OpenAI on debugging inference workloads with eBPF

Datadog on a fleet-wide netkit migration

Maintainer-led technical sessions on sidecarless mTLS and multi-cluster networking

Cloud native themes

CiliumCon lines up with two cloud native themes: Cloud Native AI and Security.

Cloud Native AI: Several sessions deal directly with networking and security constraints specific to AI and GPU workloads, from IPv6 addressing to RDMA policy enforcement to debugging inference traffic.

Security: The security sessions cover enforcement in the kernel, from sidecarless mTLS that authenticates pod traffic without app changes to Tetragon’s runtime policies. These matter more as vulnerabilities surface faster and AI clusters need the same isolation as any other workload.

What you’ll walk away with

You’ll leave with practical approaches to problems many teams haven’t hit yet, including:

Running Kubernetes on IPv6 only

What actually breaks during a large-scale CNI datapath migration

Enforcing network policy on RDMA traffic for AI clusters

Tracing packet loss in latency-sensitive workloads with eBPF

These takeaways come from real production use, so you’ll go home with real strategies you can put to work.

Who should come?

Platform and infrastructure engineers running Cilium, Hubble, or Tetragon in production. You’ll get the most out of it, especially if you’re weighing a CNI migration or networking changes to support AI workloads.

Engineers evaluating Cilium for the first time. Get an honest account of what adoption involves, plus tips and tricks from people who have already solved similar problems.

Contributors. Get face time with maintainers.

A working knowledge of Kubernetes networking and container orchestration is enough for most sessions. A few of the more advanced talks assume familiarity with specific Cilium features (ClusterMesh, netkit, existing NetworkPolicy behavior). Newcomers can get up to speed with the eBPF documentary, the Buzzing Across Space children’s guide to eBPF and its Cilium follow-up Buzzing Beyond Clouds, or Learning eBPF by Liz Rice.

Come meet the community

At CiliumCon, users get to tell maintainers what broke in production, and maintainers get to explain why it works the way it does, without waiting on a GitHub issue thread. It’s also an easy way for new contributors to meet maintainers in person, ask about a PR or a design decision, and put faces to the GitHub handles they’ve been working with.

Join us at CiliumCon on Monday morning, November 9, 2026, in Salt Lake City, as part of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026.

Register Now