Two weeks ago, I attended ContainerDays 2026 as it made its London debut. Having already spoken in London last year at HashiDays 2025 (the session recording is available here), it was great to return to the city for a different cloud-native event. I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the speakers, and represent my team on stage. I'm happy to share my impressions of the event and what stood out to me.

The Agenda

ContainerDays 2026 featured roughly 90 talks across six rooms, so there were more than enough options to choose from. This read, of course, reflects my own bias: Other attendees might highlight different sessions (which is totally fine). I also have to plead guilty for missing most of the keynotes 😅 (including Kelsey Hightower's, which might have been another highlight). So this recap focuses mainly on the breakout sessions I attended personally. The featured sessions are listed in the end of this article.

AI everywhere

Over the last couple of years, AI-related talks have been pretty prominent on conference agendas, and this year's ContainerDays were no exception.

I personally enjoyed the talk about the standards for running AI on Kubernetes, presented by David Palilonis, Robert Kielty and Jake Pineda from CNCF (1). They offered practical insights into what it actually means to run AI workloads on our favourite orchestration platform. The talk covered standards, operational considerations, and looked at how to avoid reinventing the wheel (they definitely know what they're talking about 😉 ).

While not directly relevant to my current projects, two additional sessions stood out to me:

• Asaf Savich showcased komodor's AI-based SRE platform and showed how it can be used to fix crashing pods / workloads (2). Using real data from over one million Kubernetes incidents, the session provided lots of real examples and prevention strategies. What stood out to me was how many Kubernetes issues fall into predictable categories: from OOMKilled pods and image pull errors to configuration drift and cascading failures. It was interesting to see the platform dealing with identical error messages that hide very different root causes.
• Chai Tadmor and Benji Kalman (root.io) presented their solution for AI-based CVE fixing of base images, using CVE-2024-37370 in MIT Kerberos as a hands-on example. "Vibe Coding a Backport" (3) went beyond showcasing AI-generated patches. It walked through the full process: analyzing upstream fixes, adapting them to older codebases, and validating patch safety. Given how much legacy software still runs in production, this felt very relevant.

Sidenote: I did not visit many exhibitor booths (I was obviously busy attending as many talks as possible and preparing for my own 😀). Still, it was very noticeable that many vendors positioned AI as a core part of their services and solutions, rather than just an add-on.

Platform Engineers assemble

Luckily, there was a lot of interesting talks outside of the AI universe as well. Some of the sessions evolved around Platform Engineering and how to make it more efficient. A term that stuck with me was “Platform Obesity”, introduced in the keynote by Neil Cresswell (Portainer) (4). The idea describes bloated Kubernetes stacks that slow teams down instead of enabling them.

This talk combined practical approaches to avoid overcomplicating platform setups with a personal perspective on burnout and operational complexity. It argued for leaner, more sustainable platform designs that deliver business value without overwhelming the teams.

This was the only Platform Engineering-related talk I managed to attend, but it clearly addressed one of the big topics. Day two featured many more sessions moving in that direction.

Security sprinkles on top

Cybersecurity-related sessions are also a staple on conferences, and there were many to choose from (including my own). Thanks again to everyone who joined my session on securing Container Image Signing (5) and provided valuable feedback!

One of the most prominent sessions was Chainguard’s main stage talk by Wojciech Kocjan on how they build secure container images, using Wolfi as their base (6). Most of us have probably used these at some point, so it was definitely worth attending.

Another one worth mentioning was Mario Fahlandt's (Kubermatic) session on how open source initiatives help improve software supply chain transparency (7). With the Cyber Resilience Act putting more focus on dependency visibility, it showed a centralised, GUAC-based view of CNCF project SBOMs. I definitely picked up some new tools and concepts!

Supply chain integrity and trust has also become increasingly relevant in the context of AI-assisted development. We recently explored this topic in our article on AI-generated scripts and supply chain risks.

Software developers as the backbone

It's great to have secure and “AI-hardened" infrastructure, but what about the actual workloads running on it? ContainerDays featured a few talks that focused on (cloud native) application development rather than containers themselves.

I joined a session on using Google’s pprof for application profiling, including a live demo highlighting some of its key features (by Aryan Mehrotra and Umang Mundhra) (8).

There was also a talk on integrating WebAssembly (WASM) with Kubernetes, and its potential advantages compared to traditional container runtimes (by Frederik Pietzko) (9). Even though making Kubernetes cluster setups WASM-ready seemed somewhat complex, it was interesting to see what possibilities it might bring in the future.

One exhibitor that stuck with me was MetalBear, the team behind mirrord. This tool allows you to connect from your local machine to cloud/ containerized workloads. By doing so, you can test run local changes in the cloud before pushing them. I really enjoyed the demo, and think it's a neat tool that I'll definitely keep in mind.

See you in Germany

I hope you enjoyed this quick take on my personal view, my favourite sessions, and highlights at the ContainerDays 2026. I decided to not dive deeper into the venue or organisation process. Guess you'll need to attend the next London Edition and find out yourself 😉

Instead, I tried to focus on the professional side and the trends that caught my eye. Overall, I had a great time at the event, received great feedback on my session, and really enjoyed connecting with some amazing new people.

If you want to join the ride, keep in mind that ContainerDays will come back to Hamburg in September 2026!

Cheers and see you next time,
Rene 

Featured Sessions at ContainerDays London 2026

1. Cloud Native AI: The Standard for Running AI on Kubernetes
   David Palilonis, Robert Kielty, Jake Pineda (CNCF)
2. Why Your Kubernetes Cluster Will Fail: Lessons from 1 Million Real-World Incidents
   Asaf Savich (komodor)
3. Vibe Coding a Backport: Deep Dive into Backported Patch Generation
   Chai Tadmor, Benji Kalman (root.io)
4. Cutting Platform Obesity: Leaner, Smarter Kubernetes Journeys
   Neil Cresswell (Portainer)
5. Securing Your Kubernetes Supply Chain with Container Image Signing
   Rene Schach (shiftavenue)
6. How We Build Secure Container Images at Chainguard – Inside Wolfi, SBOMs and Automated Software
   Wojciech Kocjan (Chainguard)
7. Solving Supply Chain Security Together: How Open Source Helps You
   Mario Fahlandt (Kubermatic)
8. Real-Time Production Debugging: Utilizing pprof for Performance Diagnostics
   Aryan Mehrotra, Umang Mundhra (gofr.dev)
9. Exploring WASM on Kubernetes
   Frederik Pietzko