KCD Washington DC 2026

KCD Washington DC

Sep 15, 12:00 – 11:00 PM (UTC)

In-person event

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About this event

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KCD Washington DC is a community-organized event assembling adopters and technologists from open source and cloud-native communities for education, collaboration, and networking. This is a fantastic opportunity to meet local peers, hear from industry experts, and dive deep into the latest in the CNCF ecosystem right here in our backyard. This year promises to be a fresh start for talks, workshops and sponsorship opportunities as we explore the surging influence of platforms and patterns in the AI economy.

Call for Sponsors (View Prospectus)

Ready to put your brand in front of the DMV tech community? This year, we’re introducing an exclusive, brand-new opportunity: Host your own 60-minute interactive workshop. It’s the perfect stage to showcase your unique message and deeply engage with a targeted audience.

💡 Double the Impact, Save 10%: We are once again co-located with DC State of the Stack (the newly rebranded DevOpsDays DC). Sponsor both events to unlock an automatic 10% discount and double your exposure.

Speakers

  • Bryan Oliver

    Thoughtworks

    Keynote · Principal Architect

  • Abhinav Dahiya

    Lyft

    Staff Software Engineer

  • Prudhvi Raju Mudunuri

    Guidehouse Digital

    DevOps & Platform Architect

  • Elad Hirsch

    TeraSky

    Head of Public Cloud & AI

  • Austin Abro

    Defense Unicorns

    Zarf Maintainer

  • Catherine Paganini

    Buoyant

    Head of Marketing & Community

  • Flynn -

    Buoyant

    Technical Evangelist

  • Sophia Solomon

    Elastic

    Developer Advocate

  • Sam Shannon

    FreeWheel (Comcast)

    Principal Platform Engineer

  • Jatin Jindal

    Broadcom

    Product Builder

  • Nabil Quadri

    Broadcom

    Product Leader

  • Vikas Grover

    Red Hat

    AI Platform Leader

  • Rohit Mishra

    Google Cloud

    Cloud Solutions Architect

  • Panneer Perumal

    Visa

    Chief Systems Engineer

  • Brian Teller

    Teller's Tech

    Founder & Podcast Host

  • Vipindas Aravindakshan

    Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

  • Bhavik Adhvaryu

    AWS

    Product & GTM Leader, AI Platform

  • Brandon Mitchell

    Independent / OSS

    OCI Maintainer & Docker Captain

  • Shuva Jyoti Kar

    Palo Alto Networks

    Sr Principal Engineer, Network R&D

  • Neel Shah

    StackGen

    Developer Advocate

When

When

Tuesday, September 15, 2026
12:00 PM – 11:00 PM (UTC)

Agenda

12:00 PMRegistration & Breakfast
1:00 PMWelcome
1:25 PMKeynote — Kubernetes Community Days 2026
2:00 PMHow kube-scheduler and ReplicaSet Quietly Undermine Karpenter at Scale
2:20 PMCompliance-as-Code Architecture: Automated Governance for Regulated Government Infrastructure
2:45 PMMorning Break
3:10 PMSession TBA: Awaiting Speaker Confirmation
3:35 PMWho's Calling? Agent Identity Before Agent Sprawl
4:00 PMLunch
5:00 PMAir-Gapped In-Cluster Registries the Easy Way
5:00 PMThe Kubernetes Service Mesh Debugging Escape Room (90-min workshop)
5:05 PMThe DevOps Metabolism: How CI/CD is Like the Krebs Cycle
5:15 PMKargo and Argo Rollouts in Production
5:40 PMAir-Gapped, Immutable, and Isolated: Surviving Ransomware in a Cloud-Native Ecosystem
6:05 PMFrom GPU Chaos to Cloud-Native AI: Running LLM Inference on Kubernetes
6:30 PMMCP from the Ground Up: From Conversation to Agentic Actions
6:55 PMPassports for Agents: Workload Identity for kagent with SPIFFE
7:15 PMAfternoon Break
7:35 PMThe AI-Generated Kubernetes Manifest Looked Fine
7:40 PMWhy we migrated from aws-auth ConfigMaps to Access Entries
7:45 PMArchitecting Production-Ready AI Platforms with Open Source Frameworks
7:50 PMWhat's Next for OCI Registries
8:00 PMSession TBA: Awaiting Speaker Confirmation
8:25 PMBuilding a Self-Service Platform for Stateful AI Agents
8:50 PMObserving AI Agents in Production: How We Built Tracing for MCP-Based Systems
9:10 PMClosing & Sponsors

Organizers

  • Matthew Cascio

    American Red Cross

    Governance & Strategy | CNCF Ambassador

  • Camille Clayton

    Organizer

  • Faheem Memon

    Freewheel / Comcast

    Principal Engineer

  • Jeffrey Ellin

    Solutions Architect

  • Ryan Wetzelberger

    FreeWheel, Inc

    Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

  • sandeep pokala

    American Red Cross. Sr. Principal Platform Architect

    Venue/Facilities Coordinator

  • Naveen Aadithya

    American Red Corss

    Senior DevSecOps Engineer / Solution Architect

  • Joe Thompson

    Clarity Business Solutions

    Consulting Engineer

Platinum

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Akuity

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Tremolo Security

Community Partner

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KubeEvents

Media Partner

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DevITJobs

Partner

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American Red Cross

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