Crossplane is heading to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City, November 9 to 12.
Platform engineering is evolving. Engineers are no longer the only ones acting on infrastructure. Pipelines and AI agents act on it too. Crossplane makes that possible. It turns infrastructure and applications into APIs, so engineers, pipelines, and agents all work through the same contract, under the same policies.
Whether you're just getting started with Crossplane or running it in production, there is something on this schedule for you.
Find Us at the Project Pavilion
Stop by the Crossplane kiosk in the CNCF Project Pavilion (Kiosk #P-7A) during Solutions Showcase hours:
- Tuesday, November 10: 10:45 AM - 7:00 PM MT
- Wednesday, November 11: 10:30 AM - 5:00 PM MT
- Thursday, November 12: 10:30 AM - 5:00 PM MT
Meet Crossplane maintainers and community members, see what's new in Crossplane v2, and explore how to build control planes for both applications and infrastructure. Bring your questions. If you want to know where the project is headed, start here.
Crossplane Sessions at KubeCon NA 2026
Start Here: The Crossplane Maintainer Track
Maintainer Track: Crossplane: The Cloud Native Framework for Platform Engineering
Wednesday, November 11 | 2:20 PM MT | Salt Palace, Level 2, 250 A-C
Adam Wolfe Gordon & Jared Watts, Upbound
New to Crossplane or catching up on the latest? Start with this session. Adam and Jared, two of Crossplane's core maintainers, will introduce the project, walk through key features, and share what's coming next. Bring your questions for an open conversation with the maintainers.
Get Involved With the Project
How the CNCF Project Maturity Journey Makes Projects Stronger
Monday, November 9 | 9:15 AM MT | Salt Palace, Level 2, 250 A-C
Jared Watts, Upbound & Cortney Nickerson, Nirmata
Crossplane is a CNCF Graduated project. Jared and Cortney will talk about what moving through the CNCF maturity levels asks of a project, and how that process makes projects and their communities stronger.
ContribFest: Crossplane Contribfest: Start Your Journey to Crossplane Function Maintainer
Wednesday, November 11 | 11:00 AM MT | Salt Palace, Level 2, 255 D
Yury Tsarev, Upbound
Want to contribute to Crossplane? This hands-on ContribFest is your on-ramp. Yury will help you get started with Crossplane functions and take your first steps toward becoming a function maintainer.
End-User Stories: Crossplane in Production
Project Lightning Talk: What Changes When Crossplane Adoption Gets Real
Monday, November 9 | 11:59 AM MT | Hyatt Regency, Level 4, Regency Ballroom B-D
Mitchell Davis, American Family Insurance & Jared Watts, Upbound
What happens when Crossplane moves from a pilot to the backbone of a platform? Mitchell and Jared will share what changes as adoption grows at American Family Insurance. A short talk with real lessons for any team scaling Crossplane.
End User Talk: The Operator Calls Are Coming from Inside the Namespace
Tuesday, November 10 | 2:50 PM MT | Salt Palace, Level 1, 151
Justin O'Leary, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Justin brings an end-user view from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia on running Kubernetes operators in a demanding healthcare environment, and what his team learned along the way.
Four Resources, One Object: Surviving Gateway API After Ingress NGINX
Thursday, November 12 | 11:00 AM MT | Salt Palace, Level 2, 255 BC
Sitesh Pattanaik, AWS
Moving off Ingress NGINX means moving to Gateway API, where one familiar object becomes several resources. Sitesh will show how to make that migration manageable for your teams.
Tutorial: The Most Boring Talk at KubeCon - And the One That Will Save Your Job
Thursday, November 12 | 11:00 AM MT | Hyatt Regency, Level 4, Regency Ballroom A
Lev Andelman, TeraSky; Regina Voloshin, Octopus Deploy; Cortney Nickerson, Nirmata; Julie Gunderson, UoP
Practitioners from four organizations lead a hands-on tutorial on the unglamorous platform work that keeps production running. Boring by design, and worth your time.
AI Meets Platform Engineering
One Recipe, Five Clouds, One Query: Portable GPU Configuration with a Queryable Audit Layer
Tuesday, November 10 | 11:30 AM MT | Hyatt Regency, Level 2, Salt Lake Ballroom C
Christopher Haar, Upbound & Yuan Chen, NVIDIA
GPU infrastructure is hard to keep consistent across clouds. Christopher and Yuan will show how one configuration recipe can run across five clouds, with an audit layer you can query to see exactly what is running where.
Platform Engineering after the AI Hype: Why IDPs Must Become Intent-Driven
Tuesday, November 10 | 12:20 PM MT | Hyatt Regency, Level 2, Salt Lake Ballroom C
Daniel Bryant, Syntasso
Once the AI hype settles, what should internal developer platforms look like? Daniel makes the case for intent-driven IDPs, where teams describe what they need and the platform works out how to deliver it.
Choose Your Own Adventure: The Saga of Serving LLM Inference
Wednesday, November 11 | 4:10 PM MT | Salt Palace, Level 1, Hall DE
Viktor Farcic, Upbound & Whitney Lee, Datadog
Whitney and Viktor are back with their interactive format, and this time the adventure is serving LLM inference. The audience picks the path. Expect live demos and honest trade-offs at every turn.
Party with the Community: From Crossplane to Modelplane
Kick off KubeCon week with the Crossplane and Modelplane communities on Monday, November 9. Join us at Quarters Arcade for arcade games, snacks, drinks, and good conversations with practitioners, contributors, and cloud native builders.
- When: Monday, November 9, 5:30 to 8:30 PM MT
- Where: Quarters Arcade, 5 E 400 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84111
The party is free for KubeCon attendees. Registration and a KubeCon badge are required, and capacity is limited, so register early. Register here.
See You in Salt Lake City
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America runs November 9 to 12 at the Salt Palace Convention Center. The Crossplane community will be there all week, from Monday's lightning talk and community party through the maintainer track and the final sessions on Thursday.
Stop by Kiosk #P-7A, catch a talk, or join us at Quarters Arcade on Monday night. Whether you're just getting started with Crossplane or running it in production, we'd love to connect.
Come find us, ask hard questions, and share what you're building. See you at KubeCon!