KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2025

As Generative AI reshapes the tech landscape, its tools and solutions often feel overwhelming and disconnected - like scattered elements waiting to be forged into something greater. What does a complete GenAI platform look like? And how does it differ from application-focused platforms many organizations already run?

We’ll guide you through a practical transmutation of your platforms to add GenAI features. We’ll first define the base elements needed to deploy LLM inference on Kubernetes. We’ll then blend key elements into the MVP stage, adding core enterprise AI components like an AI Gateway, shared interfaces via Dapr, and KServe-based deployment strategies. Finally, we’ll tackle advanced features - intelligent load balancing for LLMs, observability patterns, and cost optimizations.

More than a tools showcase, this session is packed with real lessons from enterprise GenAI platform engineers, to help transmute your platform into the philosopher’s stone for AI innovation.

Traditional service meshes often rely on sidecars, which can introduce added complexity and require application restarts. But things are changing. Modern service mesh is evolving into what we now call a service network—where the mesh dissolves into the infrastructure itself, becoming part of the infrastructure.

In this live demo, Lin will showcase how today's service mesh can be completely transparent to applications. She'll demonstrate how you can use gateways to implement Layer 7 traffic management and security policy enforcement, all while running her AI application that engages with and analyzes the audience's mood.

Migrating to Kubernetes offers numerous benefits, but few organizations start from "greenfields" circumstances. Many have critical services running on existing platforms, each leveraging unique capabilities. Transitioning these services to Kubernetes can be a complex and non-trivial challenge.

At Canva—a leading design and collaboration platform serving 220 million monthly active users—we recently undertook an ambitious project to migrate over 400 services from Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to Kubernetes (EKS). These services now span 15,000 pods across two clusters on a typical day.

In this talk, we’ll share the strategies, tools, and processes Canva developed to achieve a (mostly) seamless migration with minimal disruption to our teams and users. Whether you're planning your own migration or just curious about what it takes to migrate at this scale, this session will provide practical insights and lessons learned.

In the rapidly evolving world of cloud native technologies, new projects and paradigms are constantly emerging. To keep up with this momentum, platforms built on Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem must continuously evolve as well. Choosing technologies and architectures is no longer a one-time decision—it requires continuous reevaluation and adaptability. By embracing flexibility and continuously adopting better solutions as they become available, end-users can maintain the competitive edge. This session will highlight the importance of continuously evolving platforms within the open-source ecosystem and introduce the powerful extensibility of Kubernetes that enables such evolution. Attendees will gain insights into how to keep competitive through continuous evolution, and we'll explore the next actions of early adopters and the trends in the upstream Just as the sun continues to rise in the Land of the Rising Sun, the evolution of your platform will illuminate the path to a brighter future for you, your company and your country.

Sustainable growth of open-source projects requires both technological advancement and collaborative growth within a diverse community. How to create a community with vendor diversity that can collectively drive technological progress is a hot topic of concern today. It is increasingly clear that establishing the right governance structure and technical roadmap is critical during a project’s evolution.

KubeEdge, the industry’s first cloud-native edge computing open-source project, has grown from its launch in 2018 to achieving CNCF graduation this year. Over the past few years, KubeEdge has worked alongside multi-partners to implement practical applications in various fields, including satellite and smart vehicles, while fostering the robust development of multiple SIGs.

In this session, we will discuss the KubeEdge graduation journey, focusing on technical roadmap, community governance, and project maintenance. We will explore how to unite a diverse array of vendors within the community to advance our technological initiatives. Additionally, we will highlight the latest developments of KubeEdge in the fields of AI and robotics, aligning with current trends. Join us to explore how to build a mature, diverse, and technologically leading open-source community.

Finally, the first KubeCon Japan is here, but it is an only start point. Japanese communities and companies are collaborating in CNCF Japan Chapter “Cloud Native Community Japan (CNCF)” to accelerate cloud native momentum in Japan and expand collaboration with other communities like FinOps Foundation and LF AI. In the talk, achievements of CNCJ since KubeDay Japan and forecast will be introduced.

“Wa” is a traditional way of behavior embedded in most of Japanese, meaning harmony, behaving for others etc. Under the spirit of “Wa”, Let’s see project maintainer, local community leader, enterprise developer and business strategist in Japan and hear their opinions to facilitate collaboration with global community and increase contributions from Japan.

This session presents how open-source ecosystems can accelerate research and innovation in AI, highlighting the use of an AI-optimized, cloud-native supercomputing platform designed for the development and training of large-scale generative models. By leveraging cloud-native infrastructure and open-source technologies, the platform supports flexible model deployment, efficient orchestration, and rapid iteration—enabling continuous optimization. Within our research department, it plays a central role in several transformative AI initiatives, including the development of open-source large language models, and contributes to a range of open-source projects such as InstructLab, Data Prep Kit, MLBatch, Kqueue, PyTorch, vLLM, Kepler, SusQL, and Multi-NIC CNI.

With cloud-native technologies essential to maximizing these benefits, this highlights how active engagement with open source—not just as consumers, but as contributors—cultivates collaboration, unleashes AI infrastructure and platforms, drives sustainable innovation, and helps strengthen the broader community.

As you can see the CNCF landscape, the CNCF ecosystem is growing rapidly. You may wonder why. There are many reasons behind it, and there have already been many insightful presentations for some of them, but allow me to add one more. In this talk, insights through the observation of the actual state of the growing ecosystem are shared from the viewpoint of a Kubernetes contributor. From this talk, you'll come away with some hints on what we could do — whether as a company, a user, or a developer — to benefit from the CNCF ecosystem while improving it for even greater value.