We are currently accepting technical proposals for our main stage.

Speaking at Kubernetes Austin is highly competitive. We hold a strict technical bar because our members expect production-grade insights, not introductory overviews. If you have an architectural breakthrough, a deep open-source contribution, or a painful "war story" from a production outage, we want you on our stage.

📐 The Selection Process

To protect our community's time, every submission goes through a formal peer-review process. The Program Chair and our Technical Committee evaluate all proposals against a strict assessment rubric. We grade submissions based on engineering rigor, architectural impact, and immediate value to the Silicon Hills tech community.

To increase your chances of selection, ensure your proposal fits one of our four core tracks:

1. The Onboarding: "Zero to One" implementations helping junior/mid-level engineers grasp core concepts.
2. The Deep Dive: Advanced internals, complex debugging, cluster scaling challenges or post-mortem deep dives.
3. The Visionary: The bleeding edge of cloud native. Emerging CNCF Sandbox projects, AI/ML infrastructure, eBPF innovations, and next-generation tech.
4. The Strategy: High-level system design, managing technical debt, enforcing compliance, mastering Kubernetes FinOps, and designing resilient enterprise platforms.

💡 Suggested Technical Topics (but not limited to)

We want to hear exactly what you are building. We are actively seeking proposals covering:

• Kubernetes in Production: Multi-cluster federation, Edge deployments, and Hyperscale challenges.
• Financial-Grade Resilience & Disaster Recovery: Active-Active multi-region federation, chaos engineering in production, and architectures achieving near-zero RPO/RTO.
• Zero-Trust & Advanced Identity: Workload identity at scale (SPIFFE/SPIRE) and deep runtime security using eBPF (Cilium, Tetragon).
• Cryptography & Regulated Compliance: Architectural patterns for FedRAMP or DoD IL4/IL5, FIPS-compliant clusters, and automated Policy-as-Code (Kyverno, OPA Gatekeeper).
• Data on Kubernetes (DoK): Managing stateful workloads, database operators, and persistent storage at scale.
• Cloud Native Security & Supply Chain: Achieving SLSA Level 3+, cryptographic image signing (Sigstore/Cosign), and enforcing SBOMs at the admission controller level.
• Platform Engineering: Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs), Software Delivery, and Serverless architectures.
• AI/ML on K8s: GPU scheduling, ML infrastructure, inference optimization, and Kubernetes Batch Workloads.
• GitOps & Infrastructure Automation: Fleet management (ArgoCD/Flux) and defining infrastructure via Crossplane.
• Kubernetes FinOps: Cost visibility, workload rightsizing, and dynamic node provisioning.
• Advanced Networking & Observability: Service Mesh, Container Networking (CNI), Telemetry, and advanced monitoring at scale.
• Emerging Tech: Wasm, Bare Metal integrations, and the broader Open Source ecosystem.

🛡️ The Golden Rule: Vendor Neutrality

Technical integrity is our absolute priority. Kubernetes Austin is an engineering forum. It is not a marketing channel. Presentations must be vendor-neutral. Any proposal that resembles a proprietary product pitch or includes "Book a Demo" will be automatically rejected. We strictly prioritize open-source architectural patterns and unbiased engineering discussions attendees can take home and implement on the next day.