As KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 approaches — taking place March 23–26 in Amsterdam — VMblog sat down with Sudeep Goswami, CEO of Traefik Labs, to discuss the cloud-native challenges keeping platform engineers and DevOps teams up at night, and how Traefik Labs is positioning itself to solve them.
The Three Arcs Reshaping Enterprise Cloud-Native Strategy
Goswami opened by framing the broader landscape facing enterprise cloud-native teams today around what he calls three simultaneous arcs: migration, modernization, and transformation. Migration encompasses the rehosting and replatforming of workloads — accelerated in large part by the VMware reset — along with cloud repatriation driven by data sovereignty requirements. Modernization involves the ongoing decomposition of monolithic applications into microservices, where VMs and containers increasingly coexist. And transformation is where AI enters the picture, as organizations look to integrate intelligence directly into their application stacks.
The Ingress-NGINX Crisis: A Clock That Stops at KubeCon
Perhaps the most urgent topic of the conversation is the retirement of Ingress-NGINX — the ingress controller that has powered more than 50% of cloud-native workloads. Support ends coincidentally at the close of KubeCon EU in Amsterdam, making this event a critical inflection point for the industry.
Goswami explained that while smaller, less complex Ingress-NGINX deployments can migrate to Gateway API with relative ease, large enterprises face a very different reality. Years of accumulated annotations and complex configurations make a wholesale re-engineering effort costly, risky, and — for many teams — simply not feasible on short notice.
Traefik Labs’ answer is what Goswami calls a “bridge” — a drop-in replacement for Ingress-NGINX that supports existing configurations without requiring teams to rewrite anything. At KubeCon EU, the company plans to announce coverage of over 90% of widely used Ingress-NGINX annotations, developed directly from enterprise customer feedback. According to Goswami, Traefik is the only vendor offering this level of drop-in compatibility — and it was made possible by early preparation, as the company anticipated the deprecation before the formal announcement at the previous KubeCon North America.
What Makes Traefik Labs Different
Beyond the Ingress-NGINX story, Goswami pointed to Traefik’s open-source foundation — over 3.4 billion downloads, 62,000+ GitHub stars, and 900+ contributors — as a key differentiator. Built on that foundation is a unified architecture that allows customers to start with open source, then incrementally add capabilities: API gateway, AI gateway, MCP gateway, and full API lifecycle management — all without binary architectural changes, and without breaking existing configurations.
The pitch is operating leverage: one architecture that handles virtualized workloads, containerized workloads, and AI workloads, deployable on-prem, in public cloud, sovereign cloud, or fully air-gapped environments.
What to Expect at the Traefik Labs Booth
At KubeCon EU, Traefik Labs will be running live demos of the Ingress-NGINX to Traefik migration, led by the company’s engineers and founder. Attendees can also expect conversations and demos around VMware migration at the application layer, expanded cloud-native routing, security and observability capabilities, and AI/MCP governance guardrails baked into the gateway layer.
The video also includes a brief live demo segment showing how Traefik’s Ingress-NGINX provider works in practice — uninstalling Ingress-NGINX from a cluster and seamlessly inheriting existing ingress configurations and annotations through Traefik, out of the box.
Watch the Full Interview Above
If you’re attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, make sure to visit the Traefik Labs booth to see the migration tooling and AI gateway capabilities in action.
VMblog’s official KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 coverage is ongoing. Watch and read additional interviews, demos, and event highlights.
Company: Traefik Labs
Back to: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026
