Cloud native development increasingly means thinking beyond the application itself. How much infrastructure should developers need to understand? Where should platforms remove complexity? And what changes when AI agents become part of the development workflow? Application developers will find those questions throughout KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 . The Application Development + Delivery track is an obvious starting point, but your path may also take you through Platform Engineering, Security, Observability, AI Inference + Agentic, Maintainer Track sessions, and CNCF project communities.
View the tracks + schedule . Cloud native is increasingly shaping what happens before and after code is written. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon gives application developers a chance to see how developer platforms, delivery workflows, observability, security, and AI-assisted tooling are changing the way applications move from a laptop into production.
It is also a chance to meet the communities building the tools developers use every day, understand the infrastructure decisions happening behind the abstractions, and bring a developer perspective into conversations about what the next generation of cloud native platforms should look like. You do not need to arrive with a perfectly defined cloud native strategy. Start with the part of building and shipping software that feels harder than it should, then use the conference to explore how other teams are approaching it.
If you want to attend Monday’s CNCF-hosted co-located events, choose an All-Access Pass ; the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Only Pass does not include them. For developers focused on developer experience and internal tooling, BackstageCon offers a full day centered on the open source framework for building developer portals. If AI-assisted development is becoming part of your work, Agentics Day: MCP + Agents explores real-world implementations and emerging patterns around agents, tools, data, and Model Context Protocol.