Lexi Nadolski reviews Microsoft’s technical engagements at KubeCon NA 2025, featuring major open source collaborations and direct support for cloud-native development and Azure customers.

Microsoft’s Project Pavilion Presence at KubeCon NA 2025

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA (Atlanta, Nov 10-13, 2025) highlighted the open source, cloud-native community’s growth. Microsoft played an active role in the Project Pavilion, supporting several CNCF projects and deepening technical collaboration in secure, scalable, and portable application development.

About the Project Pavilion

The Project Pavilion is a vendor-neutral zone focused on open source collaboration. Microsoft used its presence to:

  • Strengthen community-driven innovation
  • Advance secure and scalable cloud-native technologies
  • Support practitioners building across multiple clouds

Technical Highlights: Microsoft-Supported Projects

containerd

  • Explored solutions for large OCI artifact handling (AI model workflows, often 500+ GiB)
  • Discussed experimental non-unpacking workflow to accelerate AI training workloads
  • Collaboration included Docker, NTT, ModelPack; updates on nerdbox, erofs snapshotter

Copa (Copacetic)

  • Attracted users from regulated industries (federal, financial)
  • Covered application-level and OS-level patching, CI/CD patterns, in-cluster image patching, runtime support (Podman)
  • Identified documentation gaps and future roadmap items

Drasi

  • Hosted its first in-person showcase post-launch
  • Engaged incident management and observability vendors interested in change-driven architectures
  • Gained new community contributors on Discord and GitHub

Flatcar Container Linux

  • Discussed bare metal provisioning, GPU support for AI workloads, automated build/test processes
  • Previewed Flatcar on AKS, drawing interest from government and finance sectors
  • Highlighted usability and independence from OS-level APIs

Headlamp

  • Gained visibility as a Kubernetes sub-project
  • Booth enabled collection of feedback on team usage patterns and needs

Inspektor Gadget

  • Showcased tcpdump gadget, Prometheus metrics export
  • Invited community to contribute at upcoming contribfest

Istio

  • Technical discussions: multicluster support, ambient mode migrations, Gateway API, operational/performance benefits
  • Notably, Azure customers praised Microsoft’s investment in Istio for service mesh infrastructure

Notary Project

  • Focused on supply chain security: signing, verification workflows, integrations with Azure and Kubernetes
  • Conversations shaping improvements for Notary Project and Ratify; reinforced Microsoft’s commitment to secure software distribution

Open Policy Agent (OPA) - Gatekeeper

  • Explored policy enforcement best practices, Rego/CEL authoring, managing large policy sets in Kubernetes
  • Emphasized simplification and management

ORAS

  • Engaged developers on OCI artifact management (AI/ML models, metadata, backups, multi-cloud workflows)
  • Azure Container Registry usage was a frequent topic

Key Technical Themes

  • Secure artifact signing and verification connected to Azure (Security, Azure)
  • DevOps patterns in CI/CD, patching, policy enforcement (DevOps)
  • Discussions of AI/ML model workflows, bare metal GPU support (AI, ML, Azure)
  • Use of Kubernetes service mesh and related open source projects by Azure customers (Azure, Security)

Conclusion

Microsoft’s KubeCon NA 2025 engagement reinforced its active contribution to cloud-native innovation and security, especially for Azure users. Teams exchanged technical insights, gathered feedback, and supported projects essential for modern infrastructure. Anyone interested in contributing to these efforts can contact project communities or reach Lexi Nadolski (lexinadolski@microsoft.com) for details.

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