In April, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon kicked off its 2025 world tour in London. With more than 13,000 attendees, KubeCon EU reaffirmed its reputation as the go-to forum for cloud-native developers and platform engineers. This year’s milestone included the celebration of the CNCF’s 10th birthday and the 11th anniversary of Kubernetes, underscoring the profound impact of these technologies on the global tech landscape.
From insights into observability and platform engineering to groundbreaking advancements in security and AI/LLM integrations, the conference offered a wealth of knowledge. For Dynatrace, it was an exciting opportunity to showcase our innovations, collaborate with the open source community, and contribute to discussions shaping the future of cloud-native computing.
Here’s a breakdown of the biggest highlights, emerging trends, and key Dynatrace sessions from KubeCon EU 2025.
Highlights from KubeCon EU 2025
For observability watchers and cloud-native fans, KubeCon EU didn’t disappoint.
1. The unstoppable growth of cloud native
With 9.2 million cloud-native developers worldwide and events expanding from India to Japan and North America, cloud-native technology is scaling faster than ever. The CNCF annual report reveals how essential cloud-native applications have become to industries everywhere.
2. Observability takes center stage
Observability dominated the keynote conversations this year. It’s no longer a “nice-to-have”—it’s a must-have for cloud-native environments. The industry recognizes the need for more basic education around observability, as it becomes crucial for identifying, monitoring, and resolving issues.
3. Kubernetes meets AI and large language models (LLMs)
Kubernetes has solidified its role as the platform of choice for deploying AI models and LLMs. These models demand efficient resource utilization and continuous monitoring to deliver accurate results.
To learn more about how to observe AI and LLMs using Dynatrace, check out our recent Observability Lab, AI and LLM Observability.
4. Platform engineering simplifies Kubernetes complexity
A key trend this year was the rise of Platform Engineering as the ultimate solution to tame Kubernetes complexity. By abstracting away the complex parts of managing K8s, platform engineering enables quicker and more reliable adoption throughout the organization .
5. Security and compliance for cloud-native apps
The EU’s Cyber Resiliency Act brought renewed attention to the importance of security and compliance. Across sessions and keynotes, there was a consensus that these concerns are now everyone’s responsibility, not just security teams.
6. Making observability explainable
One of the most inspiring takeaways came from eBay’s keynote on simplifying observability. They showcased how leveraging LLMs can make complex observability data more understandable, a philosophy that resonates deeply with how Dynatrace’s Davis CoPilot™ simplifies explanations for our users.
Event livestreams
Dynatrace organized two live streams, both pre-and post-KubeCon with cloud native experts to get all the insights about the conference.
Henrik Rexed, Principal Product Manager at Dynatrace, hosted three renowned cloud-native thought leaders on his Is It Observable? Channel, discussing KubeCon EU London and sharing the latest updates. Watch and listen to what Lin Sun, Abdel Sghiouar, and Mauricio Salatino had to say here on YouTube: Observable Live Coding: KubeCon Kickoff.
Make sure to catch the livestream recording of our Dynatrace open source experts Adriana Villela, Alexandra Oberaigner, and Henrik Rexed sharing their insights and takeaways in the Ask Me Anything session on the Dynatrace YouTube channel.
Dynatrace at KubeCon EU 2025
Dynatrace plays a great part in the exciting developments of cloud native. At KubeCon London, 11 Dynatrace innovators presented sessions and posters covering cloud-native technologies and how Dynatrace is helping to shape the future. Here’s an overview of our contributions to the event.
OpenTelemetry
Putting the Experience in UX: The Importance of Making Data Accessible
Adriana Villela (Dynatrace) and Marino Wijay (Kong Inc.) discuss the importance of making data accessible to all organizational roles, not just IT-focused teams. Using real-life examples, they highlight how a positive experience with data can spark curiosity, unlock new insights, and drive innovation across departments like sales, marketing, finance, and HR.
Customize Your Own OpenTelemetry Collector
Evan Bradley (Dynatrace) and Pablo Baeyens (DataDog) show you how to customize your own OpenTelemetry Collector with the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder (OCB). This tool, developed by the Collector maintainers, lets you include the exact components you need or create your own for unique use cases. The session explores OCB basics, building release pipelines, publishing Docker images, applying hotfixes, and using custom components—plus real-world examples of OCB in action.
How Green Is My OpenTelemetry Collector?
Adriana Villela and Nancy Chauan explore the environmental impact of telemetry and how it contributes to the tech carbon footprint. They introduce the Kepler project, which tracks power consumption metrics in Kubernetes clusters. The session covers what Kepler is, how to deploy it, and a demo on optimizing OpenTelemetry Collector power usage, offering actionable insights for reducing energy consumption and costs.
Smooth Scaling with the OpAMP Supervisor
Evan Bradley (Dynatrace) and Andy Keller (observIQ) show how the OpAMP protocol simplifies managing OpenTelemetry Collectors with seamless remote configuration and control. This session, led by experts from Dynatrace and observIQ, will cover integrating OpAMP into Collector distributions using the new OpAMP Extension and Supervisor. Gain insights into its architecture, features, and see a live demo showcasing centralized configuration, monitoring, and updates.
OTel Sucks (But Also Rocks!)
This talk by Juraci Paixão Kröhling (OllyGarden) and Daniel Dyla (Dynatrace) dives into OpenTelemetry’s challenges and successes, covering SDK configuration improvements, collector performance issues, and evolving semantic conventions. With real-world insights, it offers an honest yet hopeful look at OTel’s growth—perfect for anyone navigating its complexities or appreciating its strengths.
OTel Me How To Get My Open Source Community Taken Seriously
Learn how to build and grow an open source community with Reese Lee (New Relic) and Adriana Villela (Dynatrace). In this session, they’ll share insights from their work with the OpenTelemetry (OTel) community, including strategies for collaboration, driving contributions, and demonstrating business value. Attendees will also hear about key lessons and practical tips to strengthen their own open source projects.
OpenFeature
OpenFeature’s Positive Impact on Confidence at Dynatrace
Simon Schrottner and Todd Baert (Dynatrace) dive into how Dynatrace adopted OpenFeature to address challenges with their fragmented feature flag system, such as unclear use cases and legacy flags. By integrating OpenFeature with OpenTelemetry, they improved feature flag observability, providing Site Reliability Engineers with actionable insights to assess potential impacts confidently. This shift is enhancing their workflows and benefiting the broader developer community.
OpenFeature Updates from the Maintainers
Learn about the latest updates in OpenFeature as presented by Thomas Poignant (Adevinta), Lukas Reining (codecentric AG) and Alexandra Oberaigner (Dynatrace). This session covers new developments like code generation, event tracking, OTEL semantic conventions, distributed flag evaluation, and future plans. Join the discussion and get your questions answered!
Type-safe Feature Flagging in OpenFeature
Learn how to improve feature flagging with OpenFeature, a vendor-agnostic API, in this talk by Michael Beemer (Dynatrace) and Florin-Mihai Anghel (Google). They address common challenges like typos and stale flags in traditional SDKs and demonstrate how the OpenFeature CLI creates type-safe accessors to enhance reliability and the developer experience.
Platform engineering
DORA Metrics in Practice
Learn how to leverage DORA metrics like deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate to enhance engineering performance. This talk by Danielle Cook, CNCF Ambassador, and Andreas Grabner (Dynatrace) shares insights from Dynatrace’s Internal Development Platform, Juno, covering observability best practices, standard interfaces, and actionable strategies to measure and improve your Software Delivery Lifecycle. Perfect for those curious about or already using DORA metrics!
Cloud-native security
Catch More Hackers with Koney
This poster session by Mario Kahlhofer (Dynatrace) and Matteo Golinelli (PhD Student) showed how Koney, a Kubernetes operator, enhances cloud-native app security with honeytokens and deception policies. It automates trap setup, rotation, and teardown, using eBPF to detect and alert on unauthorized access.
To observability and beyond
KubeCon EU 2025 demonstrated that technologies like AI, LLMs, and Kubernetes are reshaping how we think about observability, security, and operational efficiency. At Dynatrace, we’re thrilled to be a part of this transformation, offering AI-powered observability and security that enables teams to innovate faster while staying secure and compliant.
For more great Dynatrace highlights from KubeCon EU 2025, see KubeCon EU 2025 retrospective: Reflections from my sixth KubeCon.
Watch for us at future KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events across the globe in 2025 and beyond!
Looking for answers?
Start a new discussion or ask for help in our Q&A forum.
Go to forum