Call for Speakers
KCD Toronto 2026
13 May 2026
The Quay, 100 Queens Quay E 3rd Floor, Toronto, ON M5E 1V3 Toronto, Canada
kcdtoronto.ca/
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
- AI/ML and GPU workloads on Kubernetes,
- MLOps & AIOps
- Platform engineering and internal platform design
- Connectivity, Service Mesh, and Edge Computing
- Observability
- Performance
- Data Storage
- Security across cloud-native environments
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 Speakers
29 Dec 2025
16 Feb 2026
📣 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