KubeCon India

What to Watch at KubeCon India 2026: gRPC MCP Transport, Agent Sandboxes, and Sovereign AI

2026-06-17·KubeCon India
KubeConPreviewgRPCMCPKubernetes

Google building gRPC transport for MCP. Alibaba Cloud agent sandboxes. Sarvam AI's sovereign infrastructure. The talks to catch June 18-19.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India starts tomorrow. Based on the schedule and our research across 55 conference transcripts, here's what matters most.

Must-Attend: gRPC Transport for MCP (June 19, 12:00)

Pawan Bhardwaj from Google is building a production-grade gRPC transport for the Model Context Protocol. This would replace the current JSON-RPC/SSE transport with high-performance streaming.

Why this matters: Current MCP transport is fine for demos but doesn't scale for enterprise workloads. gRPC gives you multiplexing, backpressure, protobuf efficiency, and native streaming. This is foundational infrastructure for MCP at scale.

Agent Sandboxes on Kubernetes (Already Presented at KubeCon EU)

Alibaba Cloud's Open Cruise Agent project introduced sandbox lifecycle management for AI agents on Kubernetes: pending, running, pause, resume, checkpoint, complete. Compatible with E2B and MCP protocols.

Key insight: regular Kubernetes pods can't handle agent sandboxes. You need checkpoint/restore, state management, and cost control for agents that might be idle for hours but need to resume with full context.

Sarvam AI — India's Sovereign AI ($1.5B Valuation)

Building India's AI infrastructure on the CNCF stack. Sovereign AI means: data stays in India, models trained on Indian languages, infrastructure controlled by Indian entities.

The Governance Stack

From our cloud-native research, the 8 tools that form the agent governance stack: - **OpenTelemetry** — trace every agent tool call - **Grafana + Prometheus** — dashboards for agent performance - **OPA + Kyverno** — policy enforcement for what agents can do - **Falco** — runtime security detection - **Talos** — hardened OS for agent infrastructure

All CNCF projects. All open source. All being adapted for the agent era.

We'll be on the ground capturing slides and talks. Follow for real-time coverage.

Horacio de la Cruz attended KubeCon India 2026 at Jio World Convention Centre, Mumbai. He captured and analyzed conference slides using SlideScanner v1.8, a custom AI-powered tool he built during the conference.