Kubernetes Community Days Toronto is happening on May 13th, 2026, bringing together over 350 developers, platform engineers, architects, leaders and IT professionals for a full day dedicated to cloud-native technology and open source innovation. As Toronto’s largest CNCF-supported Kubernetes event, attendees can expect a vibrant gathering focused on Platform Engineering, Kubernetes, and the broader Cloud Native ecosystem.
The event will be hosted at The Quay – Toronto Board of Trade on the downtown waterfront, with 25+ speakers and 20+ technical sessions, the event will showcase real-world production stories, best practices, and emerging patterns shaping today’s cloud-native landscape.
The program will feature a wide range of talk themes explore areas such as
These tracks encourage tangible takeaways through case studies, lessons learned, live demos, open source experiences, and stories from real organizational journeys.
Community values remain core — including Diversity & Inclusion sessions that highlight the voices of women and underrepresented contributors, mentorship culture, and the people shaping the future of open source.
Whether you’re a beginner looking to understand cloud-native fundamentals or a senior engineer tackling scale, automation, reliability, and emerging architectures, KCD Toronto 2026 is built to inspire, educate, and connect the community.
📣 Call for Proposals – What We’re Looking For
We welcome sessions that educate, inspire, and deliver actionable value to the cloud native community. Talks should be vendor-neutral, focused on learning rather than product promotion, and rooted in real-world experience, technical depth, or meaningful insight.
📝 Talk Formats
• Lightning Demos (10 min)
Short, focused presentations or quick technical walkthroughs showing a concept, tool, or idea in action. Ideal for emerging tech, experiments, or community projects.
• Talk (25 min)
Standard conference session. Deep dives, case studies, best practices, failures & lessons learned, architectural patterns, or ecosystem knowledge sharing.
• Workshops (50 min)
Hands-on, guided learning. Attendees should leave having built, configured, or practiced something tangible.
📂 Topics & Tracks
🏗 Platform Engineering
• Internal platform design, portals & golden paths
• IDPs, paved roads, workflow automation, self-service
• GitOps & CI/CD for platform operations
☸ Kubernetes & Cloud Native Operations
• Scaling clusters, HA, autoscaling, multi-tenancy
• Operators, controllers, cluster management
• Reliability engineering, performance tuning, SRE practices
🧠 AI / ML / MLOps / AIOps
• GPU orchestration & model serving on Kubernetes
• MLOps pipelines & model lifecycle management
• AI-powered operations & intelligent automation
🧱 Application Development & Developer Experience
• Cloud native app patterns, microservices, testing strategies
• CNCF tooling, frameworks, developer productivity
• WASM, serverless, event-driven architecture
🔒 Security & Supply Chain Integrity
• Zero trust, IAM, policy-as-code
• SBOMs, vulnerabilities, SLSA, artifact verification
• Runtime security, workload isolation
🔌 Connectivity & Networking
• Service mesh, multi-cluster networking
• Edge, telco, load balancing, eBPF
• Networking performance troubleshooting
🔍 Observability & Telemetry
• Metrics, logs, traces, alerts
• OTel adoption, dashboards, sampling strategies
• Observability-driven operations
🗄 Data, Storage & Streaming
• Stateful workloads on Kubernetes
• High throughput data pipelines
• Storage performance & distributed systems
🌐 Cloud Native Experience & Community
• Developer culture, scaling open source teams
• Startups, platform adoption journeys
• Failure stories & transformation learnings
🌱 Cloud Native Foundations (Beginner-Friendly)
• Kubernetes fundamentals
• Intro to CI/CD, networking, storage, security
• Hands-on getting-started sessions
🤝 Diversity, Mentorship & Community Growth
• Stories highlighting underrepresented groups
• Inclusive contributor onboarding
• Building equitable communities in tech
🔬 Research, Innovation & Emerging Tech
• HPC, AI/ML research, experimental architectures
• New protocols, kernel advancements, eBPF R&D
• Early-stage technologies shaping the future
Speaker Tips for a Strong Submission
✔ Practical, real lessons — not product pitches
✔ Clear learning outcomes for attendees
✔ Depth over marketing – show how, why, and what you learned
✔ Provide value for beginners → experts
✔ Demos and failures are highly encouraged
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