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OpenFeature at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026

· 5 min read
Jonathan Norris
Jonathan Norris
Director Software Engineering at Dynatrace, OpenFeature GC Member

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 kicks off next week in Salt Lake City, November 9-12, and the OpenFeature community will be there. Whether you want to catch a talk, chat with maintainers at our kiosk, or join us for an evening out, here's everything you need to know.

Sessions at KubeCon​

OpenFeature maintainers, contributors, and adopters are presenting four sessions this year:

How We Are Enabling Feature Flagging At Scale​

SpeakersJuan Bernal (CVS Health)
DateWednesday, November 11
Time14:20 - 14:50 MST
LocationSalt Palace, Level 1, Grand Ballroom ACE

CVS Health's DevEx team needed feature flagging for a large engineering organization and found that the options were either expensive vendor platforms or limited home-grown tools. Juan shares how they built a standardized, open source flagging platform on OpenFeature, how they collaborated with the project along the way, and their plans to bring that work to the open source community.

Hope Is Not a Rollout Strategy: Balancing (AI) Quality, Cost, and Risk Through Experimentation​

SpeakersTodd Baert (Dynatrace)
DateThursday, November 12
Time11:50 - 12:20 MST
LocationSalt Palace, Level 2, 255 EF

Shipping AI features responsibly is an experimentation problem. Todd covers the three axes of quality, cost, and risk, and walks through a reference loop using OpenFeature, flagd, and OpenTelemetry that you can build next sprint.

OpenFeature Update from the Maintainers​

SpeakersJonathan Norris, Todd Baert (Dynatrace)
DateThursday, November 12
Time13:50 - 14:20 MST
LocationSalt Palace, Level 2, 251 D-F

This year the project reached a major milestone: platforms like Cloudflare, Google Cloud, Dynatrace, and Datadog now build their feature flag products directly on OpenFeature. We'll dig into what that means for adopters and the ecosystem, then cover the rest of what's new across the SDKs, flagd, and OFREP. Bring your questions.

OpenFeature as a Control Plane for OpenTelemetry​

SpeakersSimon Schrottner (Flagsmith), Juliano Costa (Dash0)
DateThursday, November 12
Time15:30 - 16:00 MST
LocationHyatt Regency, Level 4, Regency Ballroom CD

What if telemetry verbosity could adapt automatically? Simon and Juliano combine OpenTelemetry and OpenFeature to control instrumentation at runtime, switching between lightweight traces and deep diagnostic telemetry without redeploying, and show how OpenTelemetry semantic conventions can act as a standard control surface.

Visit Our Kiosk​

Stop by and chat with OpenFeature maintainers at our kiosk in the Project Pavilion (Solutions Showcase, Level 1, Hall 5, Cosmic Canyon Zone).

Kiosk Number: P-15A

Schedule:

We'll be there to answer questions, demo the latest features, and hear how you're using OpenFeature in your organization.

Meet the Community​

A number of OpenFeature maintainers and contributors will be in Salt Lake City throughout the week, and we're organizing informal meetups and getting together for the evening parties. If you'd like to join or help coordinate, hop into the #openfeature-kubecon channel on the CNCF Slack. It's a great opportunity to connect face-to-face with the people building the project.

What's New in OpenFeature​

A lot has happened since KubeCon EU 2026. Our mid-2026 update covers it in depth, but here are some of the highlights:

  • Platform-native feature flags: Datadog, Vercel, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, Mixpanel, and Octopus Deploy all shipped feature flag services built on OpenFeature.
  • New vendors in the ecosystem: ConfigDirector, Feat, Featureflip, Featurevisor, Pendo, Rollgate, Superposition, and Switchbox shipped their first OpenFeature providers.
  • Specification v0.9.0: the largest specification release in over two years.
  • Isolated API instances: SDKs such as .NET and Ruby now support isolated API instances alongside the global singleton.
  • C++ SDK: the new C++ SDK continues to mature with regular releases.
  • OFREP server-sent events: the OFREP ADRs adding SSE support and updated caching behavior have been accepted.

We're looking forward to seeing you in Salt Lake City. If you haven't registered yet, there's still time:

Register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join the CNCF Slack to connect with the community. See you in Salt Lake City!