Project Harbor at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 in Salt Lake City
Harbor team at KubeCon North America 2026
October 14, 2026
Orlin Vasilev
The cloud-native community is heading back to Salt Lake City, Utah for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026, running November 9–12, 2026 at the Salt Palace Convention Center. With 9,000+ expected attendees from 2,100+ organizations and 400+ sessions spanning Kubernetes, security, AI infrastructure, and platform engineering — this is the biggest gathering of cloud-native practitioners of the year.
Project Harbor will be there in full force. If you care about container registry technology, artifact management, software supply chain security, or simply want to meet the people building Harbor, this is your event.
Orlin Vasilev will kick things off on Monday with a Project Lightning Talk — five minutes, high signal, covering the latest progress and what’s on the roadmap.
“Lightning Harbor Update”
Monday, November 9 — 2:01 PM – 2:06 PM
Hyatt Regency | Level 4 | Regency Ballroom B-D
On Tuesday, Harbor has a full ContribFest block — 80 minutes of hands-on collaboration with maintainers. Whether you’ve been meaning to submit your first PR, want to pair on an open issue, or just want to understand how the codebase is structured, this is the place.
“Harbor ContribFest”
Tuesday, November 10 — 11:30 AM – 12:50 PM
Salt Palace | Level 2 | 255 A
Orlin Vasilev(SAP), Vadim Bauer(8gears)
No prior contribution experience required — just show up.
Wednesday brings the Maintainers Track session, where Orlin, Vadim, and Rani will walk through the project’s evolution, current state, and where Harbor is heading.
“Harbor Project – The Maintainers Session”
Wednesday, November 11 — 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Salt Palace | Level 2 | 251 A-C
Orlin Vasilev(SAP), Vadim Bauer(8gears), Rani Chowdary Mandepudi(ARM)
Come for the roadmap deep-dive, stay to ask the hard questions directly to the people making the decisions.
This one is particularly timely given KubeCon NA 2026’s focus on production AI infrastructure. On Thursday, Chenyu Zhang and Yan Wang will present a dedicated security session on using Harbor to distribute LLM weights and sandboxed AI agents.
“Securing the Agentic Future: Distributing LLM Weights and Sandboxed AI Agents via Harbor”
Thursday, November 12 — 2:40 PM – 3:10 PM
Salt Palace | Level 2 | 255 BC
Yan Wang(Broadcom)
Security | Beginner
If you’re working on AI model distribution, this is exactly the kind of real-world workload Harbor is increasingly being used for.
The Project Pavilion in Hall 5 (Cosmic Canyon) is where CNCF projects set up kiosks for the duration of the conference. Harbor will be there Tuesday through Thursday — stop by to meet maintainers, see live demos, and talk through anything from architecture questions to deployment troubleshooting.
Find Harbor at booth P-13B in the Project Pavilion during the following hours:
Tuesday: 3:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Wednesday: 1:55 PM – 5:00 PM
Thursday: 12:25 PM – 2:00 PM
Topics to bring to the kiosk:
You’ll find Orlin Vasilev, Vadim Bauer, Rani Chowdary Mandepudi, and Yan Wang at KubeCon NA 2026 across all of the above sessions and at the kiosk. Come say hello, challenge us with hard questions about Harbor’s roadmap, or just tell us how you’re using it in production.
We genuinely want to hear what’s working, what’s not, and what you wish Harbor could do.
The broader theme at KubeCon NA 2026 is production AI infrastructure — GPU scheduling, model deployment, agentic workloads, security, and cost management at scale. Harbor sits at the intersection of all of it: if you’re distributing AI models and container images securely, managing artifacts at scale, or enforcing software supply chain policies in a regulated environment, Harbor is the registry layer you need.
Key areas Harbor addresses:
If any of that maps to a problem you’re solving, find us in Salt Lake City.
KubeCon is not just a conference — it’s where the people building Harbor and the people running it in production meet face to face. Whether you’re a first-time attendee curious about the project, an existing operator with sharp feedback, or a potential contributor ready to dive in — the Harbor community welcomes you.
See you in Salt Lake City, November 9–12, 2026.
Register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 at the official event page.
Orlin Vasilev
Harbor Team