The best B-side conference in tech
What an incredible kickoff to KubeCon week here in Amsterdam! 🇳🇱
I am super excited and honored to have been your Co-MC alongside the amazing Julia Hahn for Cloud Native Rejekts 2026. For those who do not know, Rejekts is the ultimate “B-side” conference — where some of the absolute best, highly technical presentations get a second opportunity to shine right before the massive 15,000-person KubeCon kicks off.
We hosted a full house of 300+ brilliant minds at the beautiful Miro office, and the energy was unmatched.
Full house at the Miro office. The full schedule and the talks I introduced are in my longer write-up.
What we covered
Deep technical talks
The talks at Rejekts are not your typical conference fare. These are the sessions that push boundaries — sometimes too technical, too niche, or too experimental for the main stage. That is what makes them brilliant:
- Kubernetes internals and complex networking — with folks from Cisco and Isovalent presenting cutting-edge work on eBPF, service mesh, and network observability
- AI and Machine Learning workloads — how the Cloud Native ecosystem is adapting to handle GPU scheduling, model serving, and AI infrastructure at scale
- Platform Engineering patterns — real-world stories from teams building Internal Developer Platforms, not vendor pitches
- Security and supply chain — practical approaches to securing the software delivery pipeline
The networking deep dive in practice: Tomasz Tarczyński testing a ClusterIP service on a kind cluster, then following the packet through iptables.
Community and connections
Every day, companies face the same challenges: How do we make developers more productive? How do we leverage AI securely? How do we build platforms that teams actually adopt?
Rejekts brings the best engineers in the world together to share ideas, discuss lessons learned, and figure out the future of this technology. The hallway track conversations were just as valuable as the talks — catching up with community champions like Artem Lajko, Pepijn Oomen, and dozens of others who make the Cloud Native ecosystem what it is.
Rolf, one of the attendees I filmed on Saturday, gave his reason for coming: to learn and mingle, and to find out what is top of mind for practitioners so he would be prepared for KubeCon.
Why Rejekts matters
Cloud Native Rejekts is entirely community-driven and volunteer-organized. There are no massive corporate sponsors dictating the agenda. The talks are selected purely on technical merit and community value.
This matters because:
- Diversity of perspectives — you hear from individual contributors, not just vendor evangelists
- Technical depth — speakers can go deep without worrying about keeping it “accessible for sponsors”
- Real community — people bond differently at a 300-person event than at a 15,000-person conference
- Second chances — some of the best KubeCon talks started as Rejekts presentations
As Artem Lajko wrote: “The real ROI is the relationships we build.” That captures the Rejekts spirit perfectly.
Co-MCing with Julia Hahn
Checking in on the second room during the morning sessions.
Julia Hahn was the perfect co-host. Her warmth and humor kept the energy high throughout a full day of talks in two parallel tracks. Co-MCing a 300+ person event is no small feat — you are managing transitions, keeping time, reading the room, and making sure every speaker feels supported.
Julia made it look effortless. If you see her at KubeCon, tell her she was fantastic.
What MC-ing Taught Me
Being a speaker is about delivering one story well. Being an MC is about connecting every story, keeping the room alive, respecting the schedule, supporting speakers, reading the audience, and creating space for the hallway track where the real magic happens.
A few lessons I will take with me:
- Energy is contagious — your enthusiasm sets the tone for every speaker who follows
- Brevity is respect — nobody came to hear the MC talk
- Names matter — pronounce them correctly, every single time
- Timing matters — the schedule is a promise to speakers and attendees
- The hallway is part of the program — protect break time fiercely
- Community is built in the spaces between talks — not during them
What is next: KubeCon EU 2026
Rejekts was just the warmup. KubeCon EU 2026 starts tomorrow with 15,000 attendees descending on Amsterdam. I will be speaking about Multi-tenant GPUs on Bare Metal OpenShift AI — a topic that sits right at the intersection of the AI and Kubernetes conversations we had at Rejekts.
If you are in Amsterdam this week:
- Come to my KubeCon talk on GPU multi-tenancy
- Check out the side events guide for everything happening around the conference
- Join the Kuberoke party on Tuesday night
- Meet the Cloud Native leaders shaping the ecosystem
See you out there. Let us make this the best KubeCon yet. ☁️⎈
Follow me for updates throughout KubeCon week. And if you are building AI workloads on Kubernetes, check out the Packt workshop on March 28th — use code LUCA30 for a discount.
