KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 runs from November 9 to 12 at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, according to the event's official site, which expects more than 9,000 attendees from more than 2,100 organizations. A company-paid All-Access pass costs $2,278 before Utah sales tax at the late rate now in force.
This year the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's program has turned toward AI agents. A SaasBuzz count of the official schedule finds AI agents in 39 of the 190 sessions on the main topic tracks, or 21%, up from 17 of 200, or 9%, at the 2025 edition in Atlanta.
What to expect
Monday, November 9, is the day of co-located events. The schedule lists 11 hosted by the CNCF, including ArgoCon, BackstageCon, CiliumCon, Platform Engineering Day, Observability Day, Cloud Native AI + Inference Day and Agentics Day: MCP + Agents, a full-day event the organizer describes as dedicated to the Model Context Protocol, "an emerging standard for connecting AI models with external tools, data, and workflows." Keynotes, breakouts and the exhibit floor fill Tuesday to Thursday, November 10 to 12, with keynotes from 9 a.m. Mountain time each day.
The organizer frames the event around AI infrastructure. Its site promises "practical ways to tackle GPU scheduling, model serving, security, and more," and the CNCF's own account pitched the week on X as a gathering of the cloud native and AI infrastructure community.
Post on X by @CloudNativeFdn
Once a year, the entire cloud native and AI infrastructure community gathers under one roof. Join us live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 to connect with maintainers, catch keynote updates, and participate in hallway conversations. Register today: https://t.co/1tT7M1Ltdv
Three keynotes carry the agent theme most directly. On Tuesday at 9:32 a.m. MST, Google's Jaana Dogan, Tim Hockin and colleagues present Agent Substrate, which the session listing calls "a new project, built on and with Kubernetes" for running large numbers of agents securely. On Wednesday at 10:32 a.m., Viv Keswani, who leads Uber's machine learning platform, is scheduled to announce that Uber is open-sourcing Michelangelo AI, which the listing describes as its Kubernetes-native ML platform, "supporting over 5,000 production models and 45 million predictions per second." And Red Hat's Jessica Forrester gives a keynote on Tuesday titled "Sandbox Your Agents."
The speakers
Confirmed keynote speakers from the official keynote page, with titles and companies as the organizer lists them:
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of cloud and infrastructure, and Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of cloud and infrastructure, at the Linux Foundation, who open the event
Jaana Dogan, software engineer, and Tim Hockin, distinguished engineer, at Google
Viv Keswani, senior director of engineering at Uber
Warren Barkley, vice president of product management at NVIDIA
Idit Levine, CEO of Solo.io
Jorge Palma, principal PM lead for Azure Kubernetes Service at Microsoft
Jeff Hoffman, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's VP of container services
Kathryn Baldauf, software engineer at Apple, on Apple's open source container framework
Lucy Sweet, member of technical staff at Anthropic and co-lead of the Kubernetes Node Lifecycle Working Group
Robert Nishihara, co-founder of Anyscale
The keynote schedule also lists speakers from Meta, CVS Health, Broadcom, Heroku and Nutanix. Times are from the schedule on October 31, and the organizer can still change them.
The agent shift, counted
SaasBuzz downloaded the official 2026 schedule and the final 2025 schedule on October 31 and compared the three main conference days of each. The count covers the 12 topic tracks, such as security, observability and platform engineering, and leaves out keynotes, sponsor demos, theater talks and maintainer sessions. A session counts as being about AI agents if its title or description says "agentic," or says "agent" or "agents" alongside AI, LLM, MCP or model.
Measure | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
Topic-track talks | 200 | 190 |
In the AI track | 39 (20%) | 45 (24%) |
On AI agents | 17 (9%) | 39 (21%) |
Any AI term | 72 (36%) | 107 (56%) |
Keynote entries on agents | 4 of 25 | 12 of 34 |
Source: SaasBuzz count of the official KubeCon North America schedules, 2025 (Atlanta, November 11 to 13, 2025) and 2026 (Salt Lake City, November 10 to 12), downloaded October 31, 2026. The AI track was called "AI + ML" in 2025 and "AI Inference + Agentic" in 2026. "Any AI term" covers AI, ML, LLM, agent, inference, GPU, MCP and model serving. Keynote entries include opening and closing remarks.
The dedicated AI track grew by six sessions, but the bigger change is outside it: AI terms now appear in more than half of the talks across all 12 topic tracks, against about a third a year earlier.
What it means for teams running AI on Kubernetes
The schedule suggests the Kubernetes community now treats agents as a workload to run, secure and schedule, rather than a topic for one track. The listing for a Tuesday breakout led by Hockin says that "agents and agent-like workloads are becoming a predominant class of workloads on Kubernetes" but differ from traditional apps. Solo.io's keynote argues that the software wrapped around a model to run an agent will become the main way agents run on Kubernetes, and Red Hat's describes how a "problematic agent with too much access" can take down production systems.
For software buyers, that points to where the open source work is going: sandboxing, identity and scheduling for agents, built into the platform many companies already run. Uber's Michelangelo release, if it ships as the keynote listing describes, would give teams a platform tested at Uber's scale to study or adopt. The count has limits. It reads titles and abstracts, which speakers write to be picked, and the 2026 schedule can still change before the doors open.
Tickets and practical details
Prices on the registration page on October 31, at the late rate that runs to November 12, before Salt Lake City's 8.45% sales tax:
Pass | Corporate | Individual |
|---|---|---|
All-Access | $2,278 | $1,278 |
KubeCon only | $1,899 | $899 |
Source: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America registration page, October 31, 2026. Prices in US dollars, before tax. Students and faculty pay $275 for All-Access and $200 for KubeCon only.
All-Access adds the CNCF-hosted co-located events on November 9; the KubeCon-only pass covers the three main days and Monday's project lightning talks.
With tax, the corporate All-Access pass comes to about $2,470, by SaasBuzz's calculation. The early-bird price, which ended May 12, was $1,199.
The refund deadline passed on October 26; registrations can still be transferred to a colleague.
There is no livestream or virtual pass. The event FAQ says all sessions will be posted to the CNCF YouTube channel within two weeks of the event.
The venue is at 90 South West Temple, and the schedule runs on Mountain Standard Time, two hours behind ET.
What we'll be watching
Whether Uber publishes Michelangelo's code during the keynote, and under what license; what Google's Agent Substrate looks like in production; and how many vendors on the exhibit floor pitch agent sandboxes. Eighteen days after KubeCon closes, AWS re:Invent opens in Las Vegas on November 30; our AWS re:Invent 2026 preview has its dates, keynotes and prices.
