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2026#

IETF 126 (Vienna) — for a networking, security, and identity PM

A standards meeting, so the unit of value is the draft, not the talk. Maturity matters: below, WG-adopted / WGLC documents (BGP-LS BGP-only fabric, EVPN First Hop Security, WIMSE credentials, Merkle Tree Certificates, OAuth-SPIFFE) are the ones closest to changing implementations; the AI-fabric drafts from IDR/RTG/SPRING are mostly early individual drafts but backed by unusually broad operator/vendor coalitions. Two clusters dominate this cycle: AI backend networking (adaptive routing, entropy, lossless WAN) and workload/agentic identity (WIMSE maturing, agent delegation exploding).

  • in Vendor
  • 23 min read

Netdev 0x1A (Rome, 13-16 July 2026)

Netdev is the Linux kernel networking community's own conference, so the "vendor pitch" problem barely exists here — the filter instead is between mainline-relevant engineering and one-off experiments. This cycle is dominated by the AI backend fabric: RDMA multipathing in production at OpenAI/Microsoft scale, SRv6 as the host-controlled path primitive, pluggable congestion control, and encryption sliding down the stack into hardware (PSP in v6.18, MACsec under RoCE, kTLS on DPUs). The second big thread is the DPU/host split becoming a Linux netdev contract problem, including how Kubernetes learns to schedule on it.

Write-ups are grounded in the session abstracts; three (MRC/SRv6, PSP, MACsec-on-DPU) are additionally grounded in the published slide decks, which is noted per item.

AutoCon 5 (Munich) — Operator Program

AutoCon 5 is a network-automation operator conference, so nothing here touches optics, RDMA/lossless fabrics, eBPF/Cilium, or FIDO/SPIFFE directly. The value for this PM is in the physical-fabric and WAN automation war stories (EVPN/VXLAN, SRv6 backbones, an 800G pan-European migration), one genuinely strong network-security automation case, and the agentic-AI governance debate that dominated the leadership track. Picks below are grouped accordingly.

  • in Vendor
  • 18 min read

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

23 picks from a 569-session program (Amsterdam, 22–27 March 2026).

Sourcing note: the Sched program exposes titles, speakers and descriptions but no paper, slide or recording links, so every write-up below is from the session abstract only and no links are given. Where an abstract promises a demo or numbers without stating them, that is called out rather than guessed at.

IETF 125 (Shenzhen)

A standards meeting: the substance is in the drafts, and the signal is in what is moving toward adoption. This cycle is dominated by two waves: AI/ML Ethernet fabrics (adaptive routing, sub-100µs fast reroute, lossless DCN+WAN flow control, multicast for collectives) and agentic identity (OAuth transaction tokens, delegation chains, SPIFFE client auth, workload identity hints in TLS). Both are moving from individual drafts toward WG adoption.