KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Amsterdam postponed due to COVID-19 concerns

Coronavirus outbreak means Amsterdam event is postponed until the summer while Shanghai conference is cancelled

The Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has postponed one of its largest EMEA events, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, which was due to take place in Amsterdam between March 30th and April 2nd, beacuse of concerns over the Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak. It is now planned for July or August. CNCF has also cancelled the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit Shanghai in July 2020 citing "uncertainty around travel to China and our ability to assemble the speakers, sponsors, and attendees necessary for a successful event".

Registered delegates will be automatically updated to July/August. Those unable to attend in the summer can cancel their registration on the Cvent website where they will be refunded in full, CNCF says. However, they will need to cancel hotel bookings themselves. The event's 180 sponsors will be contacted shortly and offered a rebooking or possibly a refund, says CNCF.

Before the announcement one sponsor told Computing they believed KubeCon would be cancelled or postponed but thought the Linux Foundation was waiting for official travel restrictions from the Dutch goverment for insurance reasons. However, no such advice has been forthcoming and the organisation appears to have come to the conclusion that running the event at this time would be infeasible. "The health, safety, and wellbeing of our attendees and staff are our highest priority," CNCF says.

A number of major technology events have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Among the first was Barcelona's Mobile World Congress which was normally attended by 100,000 people. Google, Microsoft and Facebook have also cancelled their annual events.

The event KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is focused on the Kubernetes ecosystem and regularly attracts thousands of delegates and hundreds of sponsors. The most recent event, which took place in San Diego, California attracted 12,000 attendees while 8,000 turned up to the Barcelona conference last May. Containers are a key architectural choice for deploying enterprise applications in the cloud, and Kubernetes is becoming the de facto way of orchestrating and managing the containerised apps.