7 min read

October 2026

A photo of 5 people grouped together in front of the Cloud Native Day Poland sign. From left to right: Svitlana, Marcus (Me), Julia, Kasper & Adriana.
I had lots of fun with friends, new and old, at Cloud Native Days Poland!

👋 Intro

Welcome to the October edition of CloudNative.Now - a monthly newsletter that covers all that has been happening in the cloud native world in the past month!

What a busy month! 😩

This month I had way more travel than I'd have liked. Past Marcus didn't realise that both KCD UK and Cloud Native Days Poland were the same week when I agreed to talk at both. 😅 But even though it was a very full-on week (traveling London→Edinburgh→Amsterdam→Warsaw→London) it was a whole lot of fun!

KCD UK was back up in beautiful Edinburgh again - such a lovely city! I always love KCD UK. It's nice to be able to catch up with a lot of old friends. 💙 Also had a great opportunity to chat with Rory and Iain who gave me some great ideas for a new version of mine and Márk's "Kube-Oddities" talk!

Next up was CND Poland but before that I had a long layover in Amsterdam due to a cancelled flight! 😒 But this ended up turning into an adventure! I had Adriana with me as a travel buddy, also heading to CND Poland, and it turns out the William was on the same flight as us heading home and invited us back to his for a home cooked lunch! You cannot say no to an Italian offering to cook for you!

Cloud Native Days Poland was incredible! Such a well run event, amazing turn out, lots of great talks. I really enjoyed Julia's "Uninstrumented" keynote - a beautiful talk mixing together her career journey with OTEL monitoring. I recommend looking out for the recording when available! 👀

And, because that wasn't enough, it seems that while I was travelling the entire InfoSec world was on fire! Each time I landed and pulled up my social feeds I learnt about some new security incident or CVE! 😳 It's a really wild time right now. Job security for my InfoSec friends I guess but wow they all need a holiday I think!

As always, you’re invited to subscribe to the email newsletter or add the RSS feed to your favourite feed reader to make sure you don’t miss anything! And please help to spread the word and recommend this to your friends and network if you find the content useful! 💙

If you have any feedback or have any links you’d like to suggest please reach out on Bluesky or Mastodon! 💬

📰 News & Articles

  • Announcing the 2026 Steering Committee Election Results - Chris Short
    The 2026 Steering Committee Election is now complete. The Kubernetes Steering Committee consists of 7 seats, 3 of which were up for election in 2026. Incoming committee members serve a term of 2 years, and all members are elected by the Kubernetes Community.
    The Steering Committee oversees the governance of the entire Kubernetes project. With that great power comes great responsibility. You can learn more about the Steering Committee’s role in its charter.
  • Announcing the Workload Conformance Working Group - Nabarun Pal
    We are excited to announce that the Kubernetes community now has a Workload Conformance Working Group. The working group is writing a shared standard for how workloads behave at runtime on Kubernetes. To get it right, we need input from the people who build those workloads and from the people who run the clusters they're deployed on.
  • gVisor is being donated to CNCF - Etienne Perot & Jing Chen
    Google is donating gVisor to the CNCF, where it will enter Sandbox status. The project will transition to a maintainer-based governance model with org-based voting, and Ant Group, Modal, and Tines have committed to joining as maintainers alongside continued contributions from OpenAI, Tencent, and NVIDIA.
  • Seccomp for Kubernetes workloads: from RuntimeDefault to application profiles - David Flanagan
    Record, review, and roll out application seccomp profiles for Kubernetes, with errno compatibility, logging, distroless verification, and new-node handling.
  • Which hat am I wearing right now? - Mario Fahlandt
    Neutrality is quietly the hardest part of open source. It gets tricky the moment someone pays your salary — and staying honest about it takes more effort than anyone admits.
  • Scaling Kubernetes Workloads with Node Swap - Ocean Xie & Yuan Wang
    Memory is often the first hard limit a Kubernetes cluster hits. Nodes run out of RAM long before they run out of CPU, and the new wave of agentic AI workloads makes this worse. These workloads demand large memory footprints to start up and run untrusted code, then sit idle waiting for the next prompt. That idle but resident memory is expensive, and it caps how many pods a node can hold. This is where swap helps.
  • The Shift to cgroup v2 in Kubernetes: What You Need to Know - Paco Xu
    In Linux, cgroups (control groups) are a kernel feature used for managing system resources. Kubernetes uses cgroups to allocate resources like CPU and memory to containers, ensuring that applications run smoothly without interfering with each other. With the release of Kubernetes v1.31, support for v1 cgroup management moved into maintenance mode. Support for v2 cgroup management has been stable since Kubernetes v1.25.
  • Why Is My Kubernetes Job Still Pending? Tracing Kueue Admission with Headlamp - Utkarsh Raj, René Dudfield & Kevin Hannon
    Trace why a Kubernetes Job managed by Kueue is still pending by following its admission state and queue relationships in Headlamp.
  • A Proxmox provider for KubeVM, and what real Proxmox taught it - Margus Heinmaa
    Building a KubeVM provider for Proxmox VE: how an in-memory fake passed every test, why the real cluster cloned a VM twice, and the bug it exposed in the KubeVM core.
  • Why Kubernetes autoscalers keep fighting each other (and why the solution must be autonomous) - Nikhil Kurup
    Kubernetes autoscalers often fight each other. Learn why decoupled control loops fail and why clusters need unified, autonomous sizing.
  • Kubernetes Grace Period: Why the Shortest Timeout Wins - Vikas Yadav
    Kubernetes grace periods are not always the real shutdown window. Learn how Supervisor timeouts can stop workers before the grace period expires.
  • Retrospective: Running a Minimal Homelab Whilst Living with the In-Laws - Simon Weald
    Simon retraces his experience running a minimal homelab on a spare laptop that was meant to last a couple of months but ended up operating for over a year while living with his in-laws.

🔒 Security

🧑‍🏫 Tutorials, Videos & Podcasts

🧰 Tools

  • flux9s GA: Flux cluster state, from the terminal - Dan Guns
    flux9s, a K9s-inspired terminal UI for Flux, has reached GA. This post covers where it came from, how the Flux Operator's web UI shaped it, and how it grew to cover the whole Flux Operator ecosystem.
  • CiliumHound - Andrew Luke
    CiliumHound is a tool that converts Kubernetes Cilium network policies into BloodHound OpenGraph JSON format for security visualization. It parses CiliumNetworkPolicy resources, extracts endpoint selectors, CIDRs, FQDNs, and service rules, then builds a graph with ingress and egress edges that can be uploaded directly to BloodHound.
  • virtrigaud - projectbeskar
    A Kubernetes operator for managing virtual machines across multiple hypervisors.
  • FTL: A new operating system for clouds
    FTL is a userspace OS that lets you build your own operating system as a library. It provides a minimal kernel interface that implements Linux system calls in userspace, offering VM-like container isolation without bare-metal requirements.
  • oxynote
    An open‑source technical wiki connected to the systems it describes.

🎤 Events and CFPs

Events

  • 🇪🇸 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe - 15th → 18th March
    Registration for KubeCon EU is now open! I expect this to be the largest KubeCon yet!
  • 🇯🇵 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan - 25th → 26th August
    The dates for next year's KubeCon Japan have been announced. Registration not yet available though.

💬 Social Post of the Month

Bluesky post from James Laverack with the text "Infosec today" and a photo of the meme: "What a week, huh?" / "Captain, it's Wednesday"
Yeah... security engineers have been quite busy this month

🤷 Misc & Fun

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That's all for this month!
Thank you for reading! 💙

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~ Marcus 👋