KubeCon Atlanta 2025 Part 3: Community at 10 Years - The Sustainability Question

CNCF celebrates 10 years with 300,000 contributors—but the people building it are burning out. The honest conversation about open source sustainability, plus what we learned in the technical breakout sessions.

👇 JUMP TO YOUR SECTION

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Introduction: CNCF at 10 Years
01:30 - The Burnout Crisis by Numbers
03:30 - Han Kang Tribute & Human Cost
05:30 - Technical Sessions: What We Learned in the Rooms
07:00 - CiliumCon: TikTok IPv6, 60K Node Clusters
08:30 - Supply Chain Security & in-toto Graduation
09:30 - Gateway API & OpenTelemetry eBPF
11:00 - Signs of Hope: Open Source Pledge
12:30 - Maintainer Survival Strategies
13:30 - Series Synthesis & Action Items

📊 KEY STATS:
• 60% of maintainers unpaid (Tidelift 2024)
• 60% have left or considered leaving projects
• 96% of companies depend on open source
• 66% drop in maintainer trust after XZ Utils backdoor

💡 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:
✓ Technical breakout sessions: CiliumCon, in-toto graduation, Gateway API, OpenTelemetry eBPF
✓ Open Source Pledge: Real numbers (Antithesis $110K, Convex $100K)
✓ Maintainer survival strategies from Kat Cosgrove
✓ Framework for auditing dependencies for maintainer health

🔗 RESOURCES:
📝 Full transcript & notes: https://platformengineeringplaybook.c...
💻 GitHub: https://github.com/vibesre/Platform-E...
🔗 Open Source Pledge: https://opensourcepledge.com/
🔗 Tidelift Maintainer Report: https://tidelift.com/
🔗 in-toto: https://in-toto.io/

📺 KUBECON 2025 SERIES:
• Part 1: AI Goes Native and the 30K Core Lesson
• Part 2: Platform Engineering Consensus
• Part 3: Community at 10 Years (this episode)

🎯 FOR PLATFORM TEAM LEADS, OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTORS, ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP
Platform team leads, open source contributors, and engineering leadership invested in community sustainability.

#KubeCon #CNCF #OpenSource #Kubernetes #PlatformEngineering #DevOps #SRE #Sustainability #Cilium #eBPF #OpenTelemetry #SupplyChainSecurity

Tags: KubeCon, CNCF, open source, sustainability, maintainer, burnout, Cilium, eBPF, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, supply chain security