KubeCon EU 2026 just wrapped in Amsterdam. 10,000+ engineers, 15 co-located events, and three themes that dominated every hallway conversation: agentic infrastructure, sovereign cloud, and the EU Cyber Resilience Act.
Issue #2 of The Control Plane breaks down what matters and what you can ignore.
How Swisscom Built a Sovereign Kubernetes Platform in 9 Months
The CNCF published Swisscom’s sovereign Kubernetes stack as an official reference architecture. It’s the first peer-reviewed blueprint proving a full sovereign cloud can run on open-source components, no hyperscaler required.
In the deep dive, we walk through the full architecture: KubeOne for cluster lifecycle management, KubeVirt for VM-as-a-Pod virtualization, KKP for multi-tenant cluster provisioning, Kyverno for policy guardrails, and the custom “glue” operators Swisscom built to make it all work. We also cover why Swiss data protection law (nFADP) made automated guardrails a legal necessity, not just good engineering.
Also in this issue
MCP is the new API. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol showed up in sessions across every track at KubeCon. Argo CD, Linkerd, Flux, OpenCost, and Lima all announced MCP support. We cover the adoption wave and why “Shadow MCP” is already in the OWASP Top 10.
War Story: When a “Medium” CVE becomes CVSS 9.6 Critical. A vulnerability in kcp’s virtual workspace isolation was initially scored as Medium. Then the maintainers realized a single compromised tenant could take over every other workspace.
Kubermatic Releases. KKP v2.30.0 ships with Kubernetes 1.35 support, a GPU Machine Type Selector, and full Gateway API support. kcp v0.30.1 rebases on Kubernetes 1.34.2 with cross-workspace ValidatingAdmissionPolicy. KubeLB v1.3.5 adds WAF support and an Ingress-to-Gateway API migration tool.
Control Plane Radar. Curated reads on the CRA enforcement timeline, DRA going GA for GPU scheduling, the Swisscom CLOUD Act analysis, and the contrarian case against European sovereignty.
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