Had a wonderful time with the local Kubernetes DC community at Kubernetes Days DC 2025 earlier this week. This local event has been graciously hosted at the American Red Cross HQ (next to DAR Constitution Hall on 17th) for several years: this was the 5th meeting.
There were both short and long presentations and live demos, including in the Keynote by Lin Sun, where she talked about the next 10 Million Kubernetes Users and how AI will be a part of the conversation. The demo showed a quick agentic interaction troubleshooting what else .. Kubernetes! Lin convinced the AI to submit a PR to resolve a Port Mapping issue and solve the configuration problem .. pretty neat!
A couple highlights from other presentations:
- We heard from CISA (we were in DC after all): https://learning.cisa.gov/
- Peter from Percona entertained with Best K8s Practices to run DB on K8s (for the same reason as apps: avoid Cloud lock-in)
- Ricardo (AWS) presented on Kubernetes Event Drive Automation (KEDA) https://keda.sh/ , which uses 'scalers' (internal data sources) to trigger horizontal scaleout / in using Karpenter to create / destroy cluster nodes.
- Chaos engineering - using Pixie for instant observability. As an eBPF hobbyist, I will be taking a look at this.
- Zarf (by OpenSSF) - bundle everything for an air-gapped install. Also has a nice SBOM Viewer I may use standalone. - https://openssf.org/projects/zarf/
- Erica presented on dynamic permission changes, based on who you know!? Used a tool called OpenFGA that looks interesting.
Looking forward to reviewing some of these on the kcddc YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@kcddc
I definitely recommend checking it out, the CNCF provides plenty incentives, and while there are relatively few vendors, they are all there to help you solve your current problems.