Over 12,000 attendees streamed into the ExCel Arena for the second day of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, enjoying yet another sunny day in London and primed to hear real world stories of cloud innovation. Here’s a quick recap of the day’s keynote speeches.
A four-person panel keynote – Mind the Gap: Bridging cloud native innovation with real world use – took a deep dive into how cloud native has fundamentally changed the way some very large companies are doing business. Panelists from HSBC, Peptone, Spotify and Apple outlined the challenges they faced, and the successes they found with cloud native. A couple of examples:
From HSBC: “We’re currently servicing around 600 million discrete hits a day, with over 7000 services in production, with thousands still to migrate from the legacy platform, all running in only a dozen or so clusters. Our clusters are very stable, but change can still be a pain point. To mitigate those issues during upgrades, we run our clusters in a blue/green pair and rehydrate clusters from etcd backups, cutting traffic over only when we’re happy that everything in the upgraded cluster is stable.”
FromSpotify: “There’s been tension in how we balance internal priorities with external ones. But ultimately, this is a virtuous cycle. If we hadn’t open sourced Backstage, we’d likely still be living with our previous, more complicated backend system. In five years, we’ve gone from basically just a thin framework for building an IDP, to a better Backstage than we could have built on our own. Now, we’ve taken that further, to create the best IDP for the future.”
Katie Gamanji, senior field engineer at Apple, talked about Open source in Apple’s private cloud compute. At Apple, private cloud compute helps scale AI operations. Keeping privacy in mind, Apple ensures encryption is end to end. Swift libraries work with the community for open source. And gRPC and Swift teamed with private cloud compute are what enables it all.
The Top End User Award was given to Ant Group.
Gabriel Quennesson, Michelin’s container as a service tech lead, and Arnaud Pons, container as a service product architect, spoke about Driving innovation at Michelin: How we scaled cloud & on-prem infrastructure while cutting costs. The company was misaligned with its previous vendor’s strategy, while at the same time all of Michelin was embracing open source. And of course the team wanted to remain attractive to top tech talent. Switching to Kubernetes – and doing it themselves – brought platform costs down 44% and upgrade leadtime down 85% all while doubling their Kubernetes footprint.
Discussing CNCF at 10: Navigating challenges, embracing opportunities were Joseph Sandoval, principal product manager at Adobe, Liz Rice, chief open source officer from Isovalent at Cisco, and Katie Gamanji, senior field engineer with Apple. They walked the audience through the history of the last ten years.
And Hans Kristian Flaatten, lead platform engineer NAV and Audun Fauchald Strand, principal software engineer, NAV, shared their Adventures of building platform as a service for the government, which is a public PaaS in Norway with 81 member organizations that provides speed and agility to developers.
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