Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The reason why I like writing recap articles is because AIs don’t have enough context to write them for us. You have to be there, in person, listen to sessions, interact in the hallways with the community, and absorb as much new knowledge as possible. That’s what I did last week in Amsterdam at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe ‘26. Well, at least I tried to. Let me break down what I consider the most interesting topics were last week.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 recently brought the cloud native community to Amsterdam. We were there all week bouncing between the booth, a Braintrust event with engineering leaders from across the community, and more hallway conversations than we can count. One talking point dominated the week: AI is shipping code faster than most engineering orgs can govern it. It also became clear that we weren't the only ones talking about this challenge.

On March 18, Jensen Huang took the stage at NVIDIA’s GTC conference in San Jose for a keynote that ran well over two hours — covering everything from CUDA’s 20-year history to humanoid robots that may one day wander Disneyland. But buried inside the spectacle was a remarkably clear-eyed articulation of the economic forces now bearing down on every enterprise that builds on cloud infrastructure.

Early in his career, Kelsey Hightower made a bet. The load balancer his team was running was consuming too much memory, and he was convinced he knew the fix. He told his manager: “If it doesn’t work, fire me. But I think I can make it work.” The fix was HAProxy. It was a story he shared publicly for the first time at HAProxyConf 2025, where he delivered a keynote address, “The Fundamentals.”

Every year, NVIDIA GTC offers a glimpse into the future of computing. But this year felt different. The conversations from the past few days point to something bigger than faster GPUs or larger models. The industry is shifting its mindset entirely. GTC 2026 made it clear that the goalposts for AI haven't just moved, they’ve been uprooted. We’re past the point of talking about "faster chips." Everything points to a total shift in the industry's DNA.

RSAC 2026 Conference is right around the corner, and we're unveiling new security capabilities at Booth N-5285. Book a 15-minute slot if you want an in-person walkthrough!

This post highlights the biggest Cisco AI Summit takeaways that came up again and again in Cisco Live conversations, and what they mean for teams operating AI in production. If you are following the broader AgentOps movement and the rise of agentic workflows, Fabrix.ai’s point of view is grounded in a core idea: AI agents create value only when they can be operated safely and consistently. A good starting point is here: Fabrix.ai’s approach to agentic.

The energy at Cisco Live EMEA in Amsterdam (February 9-13, 2026) was primarily driven by groundbreaking AI announcements, & the event provided Fabrix.ai an opportunity to strengthen our strategic position alongside Cisco and Splunk ecosystems. The event’s focus on AI, highlighted by the recent Cisco AI Summit, emphasizes a clear market direction in which Fabrix.ai is perfectly poised to accelerate innovation.

Last week, members of the VictoriaMetrics team, including myself, spoke at three very different but equally important community events: FOSDEM in Brussels, Cloud Native Days France in Paris, and CfgMgmtCamp in Ghent. Each event drew a different crowd with its own expectations, making them a good way to see where open source observability stands today and how VictoriaMetrics is adapting to real-world needs. The talks we gave were snapshots of the problems we are actively working on.