KubeCon Europe London 2025 – 20 companies you should check out

If you’re heading to KubeCon, you’re probably looking for more than just swag and sticker packs. You want to see what’s new, what’s solving pressing problems, and honestly, what’s worth your time, right? If yes, then this list is for you.

Kubernetes is great, but running and scaling it? That’s where things get interesting. From managing infrastructure and optimizing performance to securing workloads and making deployments less painful, platform engineers like you are the ones handling the tough challenges.

That’s why I put together this list of 20 companies you should check out at KubeCon. Not just the big names you already know but the ones bringing fresh ideas to platform engineering. Some are redefining observability, some are fixing the pain points in CI/CD at scale, and others are making security something you don’t have to babysit.

Just a heads up, this isn’t a generic list of vendors. These are companies that:

• Deal with the kinds of real-world problems platform teams face every day.
• Bring fresh thinking instead of just repackaging old ideas.
• Actually make cloud-native infrastructure less chaotic to work with.

So, if you’re walking the expo floor and wondering, “Where should I stop first?” this list is for you. Let’s get into it!

And yes — we’re starting with Northflank (that’s us, had to plug ourselves).

You’ll find teams solving very specific pain points, rethinking parts of the stack we’ve all struggled with, and, in some cases, quietly building the next wave of platform tooling. Let’s take a closer look.

Northflank is a platform built for engineers who don’t want to fight their tooling. For example, if you’ve had to manually integrate CI/CD, networking, and databases, just to get a basic service up and running, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Northflank helps bring together CI/CD, container orchestration, databases, networking, and multi-cloud support in one place. The good news is that you no longer have to orchestrate across five different services just to ship a microservice.

If you’re the one responsible for making deployments less painful or spinning up environments quickly for your team, Northflank’s setup will feel like a breath of fresh air. It supports Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), handles multi-region deployments, and automates the infrastructure work you usually have to script or babysit. It’s the kind of tool that helps you move faster without giving up control.

NetBird gives you a simpler way to connect distributed environments without the overhead of managing VPNs. It’s built on top of WireGuard and handles peer discovery, NAT traversal, and key rotation for you. No manual configs or IP whitelisting needed.

If you're managing services across clouds, self-hosted systems, or even developer laptops, NetBird creates a private mesh network that lets them talk to each other securely. Everything is encrypted, and access is managed centrally, so you’re not chasing down credentials or debugging why traffic isn’t flowing.

And if you're deploying microservices with Northflank or running workloads across multiple environments, NetBird makes it easy to keep them connected behind the scenes without opening up unnecessary ports or relying on public endpoints.

It’s open source, easy to self-host, and works with the tooling you already use.

Root helps secure your infrastructure before it’s deployed by scanning Terraform and Kubernetes manifests for misconfigurations and policy violations. It plugs into your pipeline and flags risk early.

If you're thinking about how to shift security earlier in the process, Root helps you do exactly that. It scans your Terraform and Kubernetes configs before anything goes live, plugs into your pipeline, and flags misconfigurations or policy violations right inside version control.

So, while others react to issues after they hit production, you’re already catching risks upstream and keeping your infrastructure secure by default.

Tetrate builds on top of Istio to bring service mesh to enterprise production environments without the usual stress. If you're dealing with service-to-service communication, security policies, or multi-cluster setups, you know how much overhead it takes to maintain all of that consistently.

Tetrate simplifies application networking and security by making service mesh more production-ready. You get workload identity, fine-grained access control, observability out of the box, and support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

If you’re managing a growing network of microservices, Tetrate gives you a cleaner way to handle service communication, apply consistent policies, and route traffic across clusters without duct-taping together multiple tools.

Stackit is a European cloud provider built on data sovereignty and compliance. If you work with teams that operate under strict data protection requirements like GDPR, Stackit provides a path that doesn’t require making trade-offs between compliance and flexibility.

It gives you a full IaaS and PaaS experience while keeping infrastructure hosted in sovereign data centers. As a platform engineer, you know it’s about having more control over where and how your workloads run, without giving up modern tooling or scalability.

If you're building for organizations that care deeply about data residency, Stackit gives you the flexibility to meet compliance needs without locking yourself into outdated infrastructure choices.

Synadia is the company behind NATS, a lightweight, high-performance messaging system designed for modern distributed systems. If you're building event-driven architectures or need low-latency pub-sub communication between services, NATS gives you a clean, scalable way to do that.

Synadia Cloud builds on top of the NATS protocol and offers global connectivity, security features, and operational tooling for teams that want messaging infrastructure without running it themselves. For Kubernetes users, NATS integrates well through Helm charts and operators.

If your stack relies on real-time communication or service decoupling, Synadia makes that easier without locking you into a heavy messaging broker.

StormForge helps platform teams manage one of the more annoying parts of Kubernetes: right-sizing. Getting resource requests and limits right is critical, but it’s often based on guesswork or time-consuming tuning.

StormForge uses machine learning to optimize how workloads request CPU and memory based on actual usage patterns. This means fewer overprovisioned clusters and fewer scaling surprises.

If you're managing multiple environments or trying to keep cloud costs under control, you already know how painful it is to constantly tune resource requests by hand. StormForge brings structure and automation to that process, so you're not stuck tweaking CPU and memory limits every time traffic shifts.

Chainguard focuses on securing the software supply chain by making sure the container images you run are signed, verified, and built using minimal, trusted components. This matters more than ever if you're responsible for what gets deployed in your environment.

It fits naturally into CI/CD pipelines and works well with platforms like Northflank. You can ensure that what you build is what you run and reduce the surface area for security risks without disrupting your workflows.

If you're taking supply chain security seriously, Chainguard gives you verifiable guarantees for your container infrastructure without forcing you to change how you work.

Infisical helps platform teams manage secrets in a way that actually fits into modern pipelines. It’s open source, self-hostable, and integrates with Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, and other tools you already use.

Managing secrets across multiple environments and cloud providers is usually painful. Infisical makes it easier by giving you a central place to store and rotate secrets with built-in access controls and audit logs.

If you're deploying with Northflank or any other CI/CD platform, Infisical gives you the security layer for your environment variables and API keys without needing to duct-tape a solution together.

Depot speeds up Docker builds by offloading them to remote, cached environments. If you’ve watched build minutes disappear while waiting on images to compile or cache layers to settle, Depot gives you those minutes back.

It works with existing Dockerfiles and plugs into CI systems, so you don’t need to refactor your build pipelines. If you're supporting dev environments or maintaining internal tooling, you know how important fast feedback loops are. Depot helps you speed things up without burning extra compute.

And if you pair Depot with a platform like Northflank, you get faster pipelines without giving up reproducibility or control over your build environment.

SigNoz gives you full observability in a single open-source platform: metrics, logs, and traces, all tied together and stored in ClickHouse. If you're trying to consolidate monitoring tools or avoid SaaS lock-in, SigNoz is worth looking into.

It supports OpenTelemetry out of the box and integrates easily with Kubernetes. The UI is clean, the performance is reliable, and you control where your data lives.

If you’re running workloads on Northflank or any other managed K8s setup, SigNoz gives you full observability without handing your telemetry to a third party.

Rootly automates incident response workflows so teams can focus on resolution instead of manual coordination. It plugs into your existing stack and helps formalize incident creation, status updates, and on-call routing with minimal effort.

If you manage Slack threads, Google Docs, and status updates during high-pressure incidents, Rootly takes that weight off your shoulders. It standardizes the entire flow and can even trigger automated actions through Runbooks so your team can focus on fixing the issue, not coordinating the response.

If you want incident response to feel less reactive and more like a process your team can trust, Rootly gives you the framework to do that.

PerfectScale gives you a handle on your Kubernetes costs without forcing you to dig through dashboards or export spreadsheets. It analyzes usage patterns and provides recommendations for how to right-size clusters across environments.

The platform connects directly to your infrastructure, watches how workloads behave over time, and flags overprovisioned resources or underutilized capacity. If you're tired of guessing or relying on static limits, PerfectScale gives you clear, actionable recommendations that help reduce waste and improve performance.

And if you're responsible for keeping Kubernetes costs in check without spending your day buried in metrics, it gives you meaningful visibility and clarity to make smarter scaling decisions.

Scarf helps you understand how your open-source projects are being used, something that’s often hard to track. If you maintain internal tooling or contribute to OSS, knowing who’s downloading, using, or sharing your packages can shape how you support them.

Scarf works at the edge of distribution: registry traffic, downloads, referrals, and more. It’s like Google Analytics for your container images or CLIs.

If you're maintaining shared tooling or building out your developer platform, Scarf gives you that missing layer of insight to understand adoption and make better decisions about where to focus next.

Traefik simplifies traffic management across services and clusters by handling ingress, routing, TLS, and more through a declarative, Kubernetes-native approach. It supports multiple protocols, dynamic service discovery, and zero-downtime reloads.

If you're deploying microservices or APIs, Traefik saves you from manually managing NGINX or HAProxy configs. You get a proper control plane for your traffic that works smoothly with CRDs and integrates with service meshes when you need it.

You can pair Traefik with a platform like Northflank if you're managing services across multiple environments or need a centralized way to handle ingress outside of what Northflank already provides.

KubeDB handles the lifecycle of databases within Kubernetes: provisioning, backups, scaling, failover, and more. It supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, and others, all with custom resources that align with Kubernetes-native workflows.

If you're running your databases off-cluster or maintaining them with manual scripts, KubeDB gives you a cleaner way to manage everything inside Kubernetes. You define what you need in YAML, and it handles provisioning, scaling, backups, and failover without all the usual operational overhead.

And if you prefer to keep stateful services inside your Kubernetes control plane, KubeDB lets you do that without breaking the patterns you're already using.

Kubiya acts like a chatbot for your infrastructure. It connects to your systems and lets developers or platform teams trigger actions in natural language, like provisioning a dev environment or restarting a pod, all through Slack or a CLI

It’s powered by AI and tightly scoped permissions, so users can safely self-serve tasks. That means fewer interruptions for platform engineers like you and faster internal workflows overall.

If your team is scaling fast and you’re looking for ways to offload common platform requests, Kubiya gives you automation with a human-friendly interface.

SigLens provides ultra-fast log analytics and observability designed for massive data volumes. It’s optimized for speed, low storage cost, and real-time search performance.

You can ingest logs, metrics, and traces from your Kubernetes clusters and search them with low latency. It’s designed to be cost-aware at scale, making it a great option for teams that want to run observability in-house without ballooning costs.

If you're working in a high-volume environment or managing noisy workloads, SigLens gives you a log pipeline that stays responsive even when everything else feels like it’s pushing the limits.

VictoriaMetrics is a fast, scalable time-series database that’s compatible with Prometheus and supports long-term retention at low resource cost.

It’s ideal for setups where metrics volume is high but infrastructure budget is tight. It works as a drop-in backend for Prometheus and integrates with Grafana and other monitoring tools.

If you’re maintaining custom observability stacks or scaling beyond what vanilla Prometheus handles well, VictoriaMetrics is a smart addition.

Testkube makes it easier to run tests directly in Kubernetes as part of your deployment lifecycle. If you’re writing integration, performance, or E2E tests, you can trigger and manage them like native Kubernetes jobs.

It supports multiple testing tools, integrates with CI/CD platforms, and keeps test results visible across your environments.

If you're building paved paths and reusable delivery workflows, Testkube lets you bring testing into the platform itself without relying on external test runners.

That’s the list. If you’re walking the floor at KubeCon or scanning through projects from home, a few of these might spark ideas or even solve a problem you’ve been quietly ignoring for weeks. If it’s better builds, clearer observability, or infrastructure you can rely on, there’s something here worth checking out.

Let us know which ones you’re looking to test in your stack!