Flagship event returns November 9–12 with sessions on production AI, platform engineering and cloud native security SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 7, 2026 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the full schedule for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 , taking place November 9-12 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
This year’s program introduces a new AI Inference + Agentic track alongside established platform engineering and security programming, reflecting the growing role of Kubernetes in running production AI systems and operating infrastructure at scale. As AI moves beyond experimentation and into production, the focus is turning to the infrastructure required to reliably support inference-heavy and agent-driven workloads at scale.
The CNCF Annual Cloud Native Survey shows that Kubernetes has become a foundational platform for production workloads, with 82% of container users running it in production and 66% of organizations using generative AI workloads relying on it. As AI systems place greater demands on underlying platforms, the need for scalable, production-grade infrastructure and efficient inference has never been more urgent.
“AI is quickly becoming one of the largest compute workloads the industry has ever seen, and the shift from training models to running them in production is where the real engineering challenge lives now,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, CNCF. “Kubernetes wasn't built for AI, but this community has spent years hardening it for exactly this kind of distributed, always-on workload. This year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America program brings together the people actually solving that problem in production.