AMSTERDAM — March 23, 2026 — at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, platform teams from leading global enterprises will demonstrate how AI is being applied inside production infrastructure environments using Crossplane and Upbound.

Sessions featuring global enterprises, including Allianz Technology, Millennium bcp, Raiffeisen Bank International, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and Datadog, will demonstrate how AI is moving into governed production environments. 

Spanning regulated banking, hybrid cloud platforms, and internal developer platforms, these deployments reinforce a clear principle: AI in infrastructure succeeds when built on deterministic, policy-enforced control planes. For organizations moving from experimentation to operational scale, these examples offer a blueprint for production readiness.

Over the past year, Upbound has strengthened the operational foundations supporting these deployments. Enhancements in API consistency, governance enforcement, usage visibility, and enterprise licensing have reduced friction between experimentation and production deployment. These operational advancements are critical, as AI systems require predictable interfaces, consistent signals, and observable outcomes.

“AI is accelerating software development, but infrastructure must evolve to support machine actors safely,” said Bassam Tabbara, Founder and CEO of Upbound. “We believe intelligence belongs inside the control plane, where policy, reconciliation, and observability already exist. That’s how AI becomes real in production.”

Session Highlights at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

Deterministic Foundations at Enterprise Scale

API-Driven Infrastructure as Code: Kubernetes APIs as the Contract Bridge Between Teams
Florian Hopfensperger (Allianz Technology) & Yury Tsarev (Upbound)

Allianz Technology will share how its infrastructure-as-code platform, powered by more than 1,000 Kubernetes control planes, enables development teams to consume infrastructure through clearly defined API contracts. The session highlights how structured interfaces create clear boundaries between teams while supporting autonomy at enterprise scale.

Intelligent Control in Regulated Environments

From Alert Fatigue to Self-Healing: Building AI-Enabled Control Planes in Banking
Nuno Guedes (Millennium bcp) & Yury Tsarev (Upbound)

Millennium bcp will demonstrate how AI-enhanced composition functions assist with alert triage and scaling decisions within strict compliance guardrails in a regulated multi-cloud banking environment.

From GitOps to AIOps: Evolving RBI's Kubernetes Platform with Crossplane and Sharded Kargo
Gabor Horvath & Ewald Überall (Raiffeisen Bank International)

Raiffeisen Bank International will share how they evolved from advanced GitOps to AI-assisted automation, combining Crossplane abstractions, sharded Kargo pipelines, and AI-driven pull request and deployment risk analysis across regulated European environments.

Infrastructure as a Product

From Projects to Products: The Sociotechnical Journey Behind Sony’s Internal Cloud Platform
Eugenia Bergman & Hagen Tonnies (Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Sony Interactive Entertainment will present its transition from infrastructure as projects to infrastructure as products, applying product thinking to CRDs, controllers, and Crossplane to deliver a consistent API-driven platform experience across hybrid environments.

AI Meets the Internal Developer Platform

Choose Your Own Adventure: AI Meets Internal Developer Platform
Whitney Lee (Datadog) & Viktor Farcic (Upbound)

In this interactive session, attendees will guide an application from idea to deployment using AI tooling layered onto a Crossplane-powered internal developer platform, exploring models, agents, and Model Context Protocol integrations in a live demo environment.

Together, these sessions demonstrate how platform teams are embedding AI within deterministic, policy-enforced infrastructure systems across global enterprises.

About Crossplane

Crossplane is a CNCF-Graduated open-source project that extends Kubernetes into a universal control plane for infrastructure. Built on Kubernetes’ reconciliation model, it enables declarative infrastructure management through consistent, policy-enforced APIs.

Crossplane is adopted by more than 1,000 organizations worldwide, with over 100 million downloads, 11,000+ GitHub stars, and one of the most active contributor communities in the CNCF ecosystem, supporting production deployments across financial services, gaming, retail, and global enterprise cloud platforms.

About Upbound

Upbound is pioneering infrastructure platforms for the AI Era, serving Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers across more than 100 countries. The company empowers infrastructure and platform teams with Intelligent Control Planes based on Kubernetes and Crossplane that provision, operate, and adapt so platforms are ready for both humans and AI agents.

Upbound is the creator and primary maintainer of Crossplane, the popular open-source framework for building cloud-native control planes, with over 100 million downloads and adoption by more than 1,000 organizations in production worldwide.

A Series B startup backed by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital, and Intel Capital, Upbound has raised $69 million to date. For more information, visit www.upbound.io.

Press Contact:
Annie Talvasto
Senior Manager, Product Marketing & Community, Upbound
press@upbound.io