CNCF Toronto Q3 Meetup - Hosted by Index Exchange

*[REGISTER AT THIS LINK](https://ocgroups.dev/cncf/group/s9pq6mz/event/xb3qdb4)*

Join Cloud Native Toronto on the evening of September 16, 2026 for food, friends, open source conversations, and great views — thanks to our hosts at [Index Exchange](https://www.indexexchange.com/).

Community page: [https://ocgroups.dev/cncf/group/s9pq6mz](https://ocgroups.dev/cncf/group/s9pq6mz)

*[REGISTER AT THIS LINK](https://ocgroups.dev/cncf/group/s9pq6mz/event/xb3qdb4)*

Agenda 5:45 PM - 6:10 PM EDT Welcome & Opening Remarks – CNCF Toronto Team + Index Exchange

SPEAKERS Jason Hadi Marino Wijay Michael Foster

6:30 PM - 6:45 PM EDT AI-powered OTel triage, right in your terminal

Setting up OpenTelemetry correctly is hard. Environment variables, SDK dependencies, collector config, endpoints: each with its own way to go wrong. In this demo, I'll show otel-checker and gcx (Grafana CLI) instrumentation check on a deliberately-broken OTel setup. You'll see it enumerate the findings, then turn them into a single prioritized plan covering every issue at once, either synthesized by Grafana Assistant (on a Cloud context) or aggregated locally from the explanation docs bundled with the checker (works offline, on OSS, on Enterprise).

SPEAKERS Marylia Gutierrez

6:45 PM - 7:00 PM EDT Secure, Stateful, and Serverless Agents on Kubernetes

Traditional Kubernetes pod-per-agent deployments fail at scale: running untrusted agents poses security risks, while idle agents waiting on LLM/MCP or user feedback waste massive cluster resources. In this talk, we introduce Agent Substrate, an open-source runtime that achieves high-density agent multiplexing (up to 30x oversubscription) on Kubernetes. Substrate combines gVisor/microVM kernel-level sandboxing with sub-second suspend and resume capabilities, preserving full volatile RAM and filesystem state across hibernation cycles without overloading the K8s API server. We will demo how Substrate rapidly hydrates and hibernates stateful agents, and show how Kagent layers on top, providing the control plane, abstractions, and UI required to orchestrate diverse harnesses (coding agents like Codex/Claude and framework agents like ADK/LangGraph) in a secure, serverless environment.

SPEAKERS Jet Chiang

7:30 PM - 7:50 PM EDT Rethinking Identity, Trust and Security in Cloud-Native AI

As AI moves from isolated models to autonomous agents embedded within cloud-native environments, traditional approaches to identity and security are being challenged. AI agents can increasingly access APIs, invoke tools, interact with workloads and make decisions with limited human intervention. This session aim to explore how engineering teams can rethink identity, authorization, observability and trust for AI-native applications by addressing questions around agent identity, least privilege, workload interactions, runtime visibility and containment. The discussion will provide practical considerations for building secure, resilient cloud-native AI systems without slowing innovation.

SPEAKERS Olivia Abi-Bayo

7:50 PM - 8:05 PM EDT Dude, where did my tokens go?

Many organizations are rapidly building GenAI capabilities into their products, and thus providing better outcomes for their end-users. However, the operational cost of these new capabilities is not trivial. At the same time, many organizations have the need to implement safety checks on the GenAI queries of their users or the responses their users get. Therefore, we need robust observability of these new application capabilities. With the proliferation of frameworks, libraries and SDKs for building GenAI capabilities, it's very difficult to keep up with the instrumentation, such that we can build robust observability solutions. Moreover, developers building GenAI capabilities to their applications often have to use the programming language of their existing application code base. Therefore, even if we kept up with instrumentation for a certain programming language, for example…