6 min read

February 2026

A photo of me stood on a stage behind a podium with two screens positioned at either side of me. I am facing to the side and pointing at one of the screens while holding a microphone.
I enjoyed talking at ContainerDays London earlier this month

👋 Intro

Welcome to the February edition of CloudNative.Now - a monthly newsletter that covers all that has been happening in the cloud native world in the past month!

It's a relatively light edition this month - short month, slowness at the start of the year and folks waiting for KubeCon next month to make big announcements - but there's still plenty of 🔥hot🔥 posts included!

While this month seems to be have calm for some folks, I've been keeping busy!

Rejekts Amsterdam is coming along great! The org team are absolutely smashing it and I can't wait to see all their hard work pay off. The schedule is looking great, everything is falling into place and tickets are running out - I can't wait to see everyone there!

I also gave two talks at ContainerDays London this month, including a brand new one all about giving technical talks which I really enjoyed. Really hoping I have an opportunity to give that again as I got some fantastic feedback on how I can make it better! Unfortunately none of the talks were recorded though. 😞 Although, that's prob for the best as the conference had a real problem with noise in the venue.

KubeCon is just around the corner and my week is going to be jam packed - I'm hoping to catch up with as many people as I can while there so please do come find me:
✨ Saturday: Cloud Native Rejekts
✨ Sunday: Maintainer Summit - I’m looking forward to diving deep into the technical discussions with the brilliant minds building our cloud native tools.
✨ Monday: Co-located Events - I’ll be exploring a few different events, but most likely Platform Engineering Day. Let me know if you're going!
✨ Tuesday: KubeCon kicks off! Also, don’t miss Kuberoke in the evening, the #1 party of the year! 🎶🎤 (get your ticket while you can!)
✨ Wednesday: I’m giving my first-ever KubeCon talk with my awesome friend Márk Sági-Kazár. Come find us in Hall 7 Room A at 11:45am for some fun ‘Kube Oddities’! Really looking forward to this!
✨ Thursday: KubeCon wraps up. If I haven’t had a chance to connect with you yet, I’ll be focusing on the hallway track and catching up with everyone this day.

If you'd like to catch up at KubeCon or any of the events around it, feel free to reach out to me on any of my socials. 👋 If you're looking for things to do in the evenings there are a whole bunch of 🎉parties🎉 going on, be sure to check out conf.party for all the fun happening throughout the week.

As always, you’re invited to subscribe to the email newsletter or add the RSS feed to your favourite feed reader to make sure you don’t miss anything! And please help to spread the word and recommend this to your friends and network if you find the content useful! 💙

If you have any feedback or have any links you’d like to suggest please reach out on Bluesky or Mastodon! 💬

📰 News & Articles

  • Why the OpenTelemetry Batch Processor is Going Away (Eventually)
    An analysis of why the OpenTelemetry community is moving away from the in-memory batch processor in favor of exporter-level batching. This post explains the architectural limitations of memory buffering during Collector restarts, the resulting risk of data loss, and how persistent storage in the exporter-level approach provides better durability for production telemetry.
  • Treat the edge like infrastructure, not an exception  - Manuel Gawert
    A look at why you should be treating edge computing as infrastructure and not an exception compared to the rest of your infrastructure.
  • Introducing Node Readiness Controller  - Ajay Sundar Karuppasamy
    In the standard Kubernetes model, a node’s suitability for workloads hinges on a single binary "Ready" condition. However, in modern Kubernetes environments, nodes require complex infrastructure dependencies—such as network agents, storage drivers, GPU firmware, or custom health checks—to be fully operational before they can reliably host pods. This project introduces a declarative system for managing node taints, extending the readiness guardrails during node bootstrapping beyond standard conditions.
  • 📗 Cilium: Up and Running - Isovalent
    A new book from the folks at Isovalent, including my dear friend James Leverack, about operating Cilium and leveraging it to its fullest. It's available in bookshops now, or you can download it free from Cilium - or, if you're going to be at KubeCon Amsterdam you have a chance to pick up a signed copy!
  • Self-hosting my websites using bootable containers  - Yorick Peterse
    A very, very details article that covers all about investigating and implementing containers as a bootable application for hosting their website.
  • Kubernetes Ingress NGINX Shutdown: Migration Guide  - Monika Chauhan
    Kubernetes Ingress NGINX shuts down March 2026. Learn security risks and Gateway API migration strategies from Kubernetes Steering Committee.
  • Red Hat takes on Docker Desktop with its enterprise Podman Desktop build  - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
    Red Hat is betting a commercially supported Podman Desktop can lure corporate developers away from Docker Desktop.
  • State of AI-Assisted Development in CNCF Projects - cncf
    This initiative empowers the CNCF projects to move from ad-hoc experimentation to confident adoption by surveying real-world AI tool usage across CNCF projects and delivering a practical, vendor-neutral guide for secure integration.
  • Heroku Is (Finally, Officially) Dead - Will Vincent
    Analyzing the official announcement of the end of Heroku and reviewing hosting alternatives in 2026.
  • ArgoCD to Flux  - Vlad Mocanu
    Migrating from ArgoCD to Flux — the why, the how, and what I learned
  • Announcing H2 2026 KCDs
    The next batch of Kubernetes Community Days from around the world has been announced including five new locations!

🔒 Security

🧑‍🏫 Tutorials, Videos & Podcasts

  • A Beginner's Guide to Kubernetes  - Arsh Sharma
    Learn the fundamentals of Kubernetes. Understand core resources like Pods, Deployments, Services, and more.
  • 📺 Cilium Explained: eBPF-Powered Kubernetes Networking  - Whitney Lee
    Why is Cilium one of the most widely adopted Container Networking Interfaces (CNIs) in production Kubernetes environments? What does it do differently?
  • 📺 Secure your Kubernetes applications with Chainguard  - Kubernetes Bytes
    In this episode Bhavin talks to Adrian Mouat, Dev Rel at Chainguard about all things Kubernetes Security. They discuss CVEs, the different vulnerability databases, and how platform engineers can use Chainguard images to protect against CVEs.

🧰 Tools

  • node-readiness-controller - kubernetes-sigs
    This repository contains a Kubernetes controller that manages node taints based on multiple readiness conditions, providing fine-grained control over when nodes are ready to accept workloads. See above for the announcement post for more details.
  • TOPF - Talos Orchestrator  - PostFinance
    TOPF is managing Talos based Kubernetes clusters. It provides functionality for bootstrapping new clusters, resetting existing ones, and applying configuration changes.
  • homelab: A K8s homelab on public VPS. Built to learn from — or fork and make your own.  - tograu
    A personal Kubernetes homelab built with Ansible (IaC) and Argo CD (GitOps), running on VPS infrastructure. It's designed to be rebuilt, not to never fail.
  • K8s Games - Rohit Ghumare
    Deploy pods, fix CrashLoopBackOff, type real kubectl commands — all in a 3D simulation that runs in your browser. No install needed.
  • Announcing Kyverno 1.17!  - Charles-Edouard Breteche
    Kyverno 1.17 is a landmark release that marks the stabilization of our next-generation Common Expression Language (CEL) policy engine.
  • Announcing Flux 2.8 GA  - Stefan Prodan & Matheus Pimenta 
    Flux v2.8 comes with Helm v4 support, bringing server-side apply and enhanced health checking to Helm releases.

🎤 Events and CFPs

Events

  • 🎉 Conf.Party - KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe
    Find all the parties, socials and meetups in and around KubeCon in Amsterdam
  • 🇳🇱 Cloud Native Rejekts Europe 2026  - 21st March, 2026
    Rejekts is the best kick-off to your KubeCon week. If y'all are going to be in Amsterdam on the 21st be sure to grab a FREE ticket now while you still can! The schedule is looking great! 💙
  • 🇨🇦 KCD Toronto 2026  - 13th May, 2026
    Join the inaugural KCD Toronto 2026, the biggest event in Toronto for the cloud-native and Kubernetes community.
  • 🇷🇴 Cloud Native Days Romania  - 18th - 19th May, 2026
    Cloud Native Days Romania is coming in May and the early bird tickets are still available at €99 for corporate or €49 for individuals! Be sure to grab this fantastic price before they go up March 15th!

CFPs

💬 Social Post of the Month

Flux v2.8 is out! This release marks the General Availability of Helm v4 features such as server-side apply and enhanced health checking. ❤️ Big thanks to the Helm maintainers for their work on Helm v4 and for collaborating with us to ensure a smooth integration with Flux!
Huge new release from Flux

🤷 Misc & Fun

  • I Made An ESP32 On-Call Beeper  - Kyle Tryon
    A fun personal project from Kyle about building an on-call beeper (pager). I'd really love to see something like this as swag from one of the KubeCon sponsors (hint hint Incident.io 😉)
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That's all for this month!
Thank you for reading! 💙

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~ Marcus 👋