Why organizing KCD Warsaw 2025 was not that easy

When we opened our KCD Warsaw 2025 conference, I told a joke on stage that was actually true:

“You think Kubernetes is hard? Try organizing your own KCD conference.”

Indeed, this has been an interesting and challenging adventure. It’s not as easy and simple as it might look.

Here are three reasons why it was sometimes difficult:

🔵 We are volunteers with day jobs

All KCD conferences are supported by CNCF and are non-profit events. In most cases, they are organized by a group of volunteers.
We put a lot of energy and time into preparing our KCD, all while managing our day jobs and other responsibilities. Sometimes we had to skip meetings, postpone ideas, or even abandon them due to lack of time.

There are no tangible incentives when organizing a KCD conference. All we had was our passion and energy, which are precious and limited resources we had to manage carefully.

🔵 Non-profit does not mean careless about money

Yes, it’s a non-profit conference, which means we had to raise money just to cover our expenses.
This didn’t make it easier. We still had to manage our budget, be frugal, and deal with uncertainty. Our suppliers didn’t care if we were non-profit—it was just business for them.

Learning how to balance our cash flow was one of the most challenging aspects of organizing the conference, especially since no one on our team had ever been responsible for finances before.

🔵 Little Experience.

It was our first KCD, and for most of us, the first conference we had ever organized. We are technical people—engineers and architects—with little or no experience in this, so we had to learn as we went.

For me personally, it was very gratifying to extend my skills beyond my technical expertise, but it was still a challenge. Getting sponsors, venue, catering, sales, marketing, finances, booking speakers’ dinner, and after-party—we had little experience and prior knowledge. But we did it anyway. If you have your “why,” you can find the “hows” and “whats.” There was plenty of good stuff too. Here are my top three things that helped us:

🟢 Support from CNCF.

Our conference was supported by CNCF. We received some financial aid, but more importantly, we got guidelines and templates. These were very helpful, as they answered many questions and provided a scaffolding for the conference.

We also used tools provided by CNCF. We really enjoyed working with Sessionize for managing talks, and we used Bevy to maintain our site and sales. The latter was somewhat challenging, but we managed to learn to use it quite efficiently.

🟢 Kubernetes and CNCF.

Trust is crucial. Kubernetes and CNCF are well-known brands, which made it easier for us to find sponsors and attract people to our conference.

There are quite a few IT conferences in Poland, but none are so focused on the Cloud Native ecosystem. The support from CNCF was a major factor and a sort of assurance that this would be something special. And indeed it was!

🟢 Energy and passion.

The magic ingredient of our conference was the energy and passion of my co-organizers. It was our fuel that helped us get through all the ups and downs—and there were a few.

Most of us had never met before we formed the group. It was sometimes challenging, yet rewarding, to get to know each other better. And the final reward was the day of the conference and the amazing feedback we got from people!