KubeCon Mumbai 2026: What It Meant for Midships

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026 in Mumbai was a natural stop for Midships. As we deepen our commitment to open-source IAM - Keycloak - being in the room with the CNCF community at this moment in our journey was exactly where we needed to be.

The event's theme was Agentic AI, and while the keynotes were wide-ranging, what we're taking home is something more practical: sharper thinking on the technologies we're already using, a clearer view on the ones we're adding to our stack, and new relationships that will shape how we build.

Technologies Midships Is Already Using

Prometheus + Cert Manager + Helm are core to both our Ping Accelerator and Keycloak Accelerator. At KubeCon, an AI-focused technology organisation ran Prometheus and Thanos at national scale, while a leading mobility platform held 200,000 requests per second on the same combination of Istio, Prometheus, and Cert Manager - which reinforces our belief in this stack being capable of enterprise-grade deployment, and hence an integral part of our accelerators.

Istio is already part of our Keycloak Accelerator. Seeing a high-scale mobility platform run their entire service mesh on Istio in production - at the kind of throughput that tolerates no margin for error - is something we're glad to see the industry arriving at. We've been there.

Helm + Argo CD for GitOps-based delivery was front and centre across multiple keynotes, with one AI platform running it across roughly 20 components at scale. Helm templating is central to how we deliver our accelerators, and GitOps as a pattern is one we continue to build deeper into our practice.

Technologies Midships Is Now Actively Evaluating

Redis as a session layer for Keycloak was the most immediately actionable topic from the Keycloak solution showcase. The pattern - using Redis as a fast intermediary between the application tier and Keycloak's Infinispan/Datagrid session store - reduces pressure on the distributed cache and delivers a predictable, low-latency read layer at high session volumes. This reinforces what we've been saying about session volume management and Redis being the right candidate for high-throughput Keycloak deployments - good to see the broader community arriving at the same conclusion.

Litmus Chaos for chaos engineering is something we're now actively looking at. A major online retail platform's approach - treating chaos engineering as a core reliability discipline rather than an afterthought - resonates strongly with us. In IAM, a failure isn't abstract. It's immediate, visible, and affects every user in the system. Proactively testing failure scenarios before production does it for you is a discipline we're bringing into our practice.

HAMi + DRA for GPU multi-tenancy on Kubernetes are technologies we're tracking closely as AI workloads become a growing part of our clients' infrastructure conversations. The ability to virtualise a single GPU into isolated slices with independent memory budgets - and have Kubernetes treat GPUs as structured, schedulable devices - is a capability that will matter as AI inference moves from experimentation to production in enterprise environments.

What the Keycloak Community Gave Us

The Keycloak solution showcase was where we had the most direct, practical conversations. Upgrade path management - n-1 and n-2 scenarios, rolling updates, greenfield versus in-place migration strategies - is something our clients navigate regularly, and having those discussions with engineers who've been through it in production was valuable.

We also built connections with people across the Keycloak community working through the same IAM challenges. That network doesn't come from documentation - it comes from being in the room.

Midships as a CNCF Partner

Building on its existing CNCF partnership, Midships marked another significant milestone at Mumbai 2026. We sat down with the CNCF team to map out how we contribute to open-source projects and how we use that relationship to bring the Keycloak Accelerator to more organisations working in the IAM namespace.

Midships is no longer just a consumer of the CNCF ecosystem - we're an active participant in it. That's a position we intend to make the most of.

In Summary

KubeCon Mumbai 2026 sharpened our thinking, expanded our network, and formalised our place in the CNCF community. Our growing focus on Keycloak has always been about building with a community that moves fast, shares openly, and raises the bar for everyone. Mumbai reminded us we're in good company.