What happens when 700 t-shirts disappear in hours, your voice slowly gives out, and you end up walking what feels like a hall of fame of cloud native legends? KubeCon Amsterdam, that's what.
Day 0: Arrival
Made it to Amsterdam. The "I am Amsterdam" sign outside the RAI convention center is iconic, and standing in front of it felt like a proper welcome to the city and to the week ahead.
I was there to $git it done with the Traefik Labs team, and none of that happens without the kind of support that often goes unnoticed. A big thank you to Cristina Romero Cano for making this possible.
The energy was already tangible from the moment I landed. People I follow and learn from on LinkedIn were converging on the same place. Tech Leads, open source contributors, community builders, all heading to the RAI. The conversations hadn't even started yet and the excitement was already very real
I was looking forward to two things above all else: the conversations around the booth, and the chance to visit the different CNCF projects that make my daily work easier and better.
Day 1: It Begins
Seven hundred t-shirts. Gone. In hours.
That pretty much sets the tone for Day 1 at KubeCon.
The booth was buzzing from the start with an energy that's genuinely hard to describe unless you've been there. Customers, open source users, contributors, all stopping by to talk about Traefik Labs, share what they're building, and ask what's coming. What stood out most was learning just how critical Traefik has become to people's infrastructure. Hearing that directly from users is something no metric can replicate.
Day 1 also meant running into some incredible people:
- Josh Blakeley, essentially the person who hired me and introduced me to the Cloud Native world. Seeing him at KubeCon felt like coming full circle.
- Antonio Berbén, big laughs always. The kind of energy every event needs.
- Diana Todea, finally meeting in person after following her work for so long. She is doing genuinely awesome things for the community.
- Yacine Kheddache and Laurent Broudoux from Microcks, they are everywhere and making an impact at every turn.
We had only just started and it was already awesome.
Day 2: The Migration Stories
Day 2 started with a moment I tried to capture: a quiet spell at the booth where I could actually step back and take it all in. Those moments don't last long at KubeCon, but they're worth pausing for.
The conversations on Day 2 had a clear pattern. Two types of people were stopping by the Traefik Labs booth, and I turned it into a little mental framework:
The Thank Yous. These were people who had recently migrated from Ingress NGINX to Traefik and just wanted to share how smooth it went. Some of them described it almost as anticlimactic, in the best possible way. Zero downtime. No rewrites. Things just worked.
The Stressed Out. These were people still in the thick of it, dealing with complex migrations, tangled specs, waiting on Gateway API support that wasn't quite there yet, wondering if the grass was really greener on the other side.
The beautiful thing that kept happening organically? The second group would meet the first group right there at the booth. And watching the stress visibly melt away when someone heard from a real peer, not a sales pitch but an actual user, that Traefik is a genuine drop-in replacement for Ingress NGINX... that was one of the best parts of the whole event.
No complex rewrites. No migration headaches. Keep it simple.
Day 2 also brought deeper conversations with in-depth demos of the product including the AI Gateway, MCP Gateway, and API Management layer. Voice already semi-gone by the end of it. Worth it.
Day 3: The Final Push
The show didn't stop. The conversations kept rolling, and honestly, the last day of KubeCon often has some of the best networking because everyone has had two days to warm up.
The booth kept its energy. The community kept showing up. And I kept meeting people I had followed online for ages but never met face to face.
There's something special about that, putting a real handshake and a laugh to the names and faces you see in your feed every day. KubeCon really is like a walk of fame for cloud native.
The People That Made It
Networking is not a side effect of KubeCon, it is KubeCon. Here are some of the people that made this week unforgettable:
Former colleagues and friends like Josh Blakeley. Community builders doing extraordinary work like Diana Todea, Carol Valencia, and Antonio Berbén. Founders of genuinely exciting projects like Yacine Kheddache and Laurent Broudoux from Microcks (yes, also competitors, and still great people to share a room with 😄). Hugo Guerrero from Kong, who kept the competitive spirit fun.
Some of the content creators and cloud native educators I had been following for a long time finally became real people this week: Artem Lajko, Nana Janashia, and Julia Furst Morgado. Meeting people whose work you've learned from is a particular kind of KubeCon magic.
Shoutout also to the booth neighbors who made the floor more fun: Nicoleta Dana Grosu and Raúl Torrecilla from Elastic, great people to share a wall with.
The Traefik Labs Team
None of this happens without the team. A massive thank you to every one of them for the energy, the support, and the unforgettable times at the booth:
Sudeep Goswami, Emile Vauge, Gérald Croës, Immánuel Fodor, Landry Benguigui, Harold Ozouf, Michaël Matur, and Dylan Rodgers.
Showing up to KubeCon as a team and representing something you genuinely believe in, that's a privilege.
Wrapping Up
The KubeCon hangover is real. Battery fully drained. But it was absolutely worth it.
The thing that sticks with me most isn't the number of t-shirts distributed or the demos delivered. It's the conversations. The person who migrated from Ingress NGINX six months ago and stopped by just to say thank you. The engineer who was stressed about a migration and left with a completely different perspective. The community connections that turn from LinkedIn follows into actual friendships.
Thank you to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) for another incredible event. See you at the next one. 🙏
Traefik Labs · The Only Drop-In Replacement for Ingress NGINX · Zero-Config Migration · Gateway API Ready · Global Enterprise Support · 60K+ GitHub Stars · 3.4B+ Downloads
