KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 landed in London, bringing together thousands of cloud-native engineers, maintainers, and enthusiasts. As a local Distributed Systems Engineer deeply embedded in the Kubernetes ecosystem, attending in person was both energizing and insightful. A central theme emerged across sessions: Kubernetes is rapidly evolving beyond microservices, adapting to support batch workloads, AI/ML training, HPC scenarios, and global-scale multi-cluster deployments. This shift isn’t just technical - it’s reshaping the cloud-native landscape and redefining how we think about workload orchestration, scheduling, and autoscaling. Kubernetes may not have been built for these new frontiers - but it’s catching up fast…