The week of June 15th saw a flurry of in-person activity in the Indian open source and cloud native space. Mumbai played host to a series of events by the Linux Foundation: Indian editions of the MCP Dev Summit, OpenSearchCon, Open Source Summit and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2026. I was at the latter two events; here are 3 quick highlights, from the circle-of-friends POV!
#1 Ubuntu, the foundation for innovation in the open
Open source is unquestionably central to India’s digital future, and Ubuntu serves as a foundational layer in this ecosystem. A compelling example came from NPCI, which highlighted the open-source technologies underpinning UPI, the world’s largest real-time digital payments system. Ubuntu forms a core part of this technology stack.
#2 Learn to build chiseled rocks: super lean, Ubuntu-based container images
Is container jargon and the ever-growing ecosystem of container tools leaving you in a whirl? In my “Recipes and Runtimes” session on the Open Source 101 track at this year’s Summit, I took the audience on a journey from the foundational building blocks of containerization—concepts such as chroot and namespaces—to creating hardened, production-ready container images, all through analogies borrowed from the world of baking.
Along the way, we dissected naive Dockerfiles, explored multi-stage builds, unpacked the principles behind distroless images, and got hands-on with modern tooling such as Rockcraft and Chisel. Rockcraft is an open source tool for building Ubuntu-based, OCI-compliant container images (“rocks”), while Chisel enables developers to carve out precisely the filesystem components an application needs. Together, they make it possible to build smaller, more secure, and more reproducible container images.
The video from this session is yet to be published, but you can check out a shorter talk of mine from earlier this year at FOSSASIA, where I speak about how I was able to achieve more than a 50% reduction in size of a popular self-hosting image from Dockerhub, using Rockcraft + chisel.
#3 Ops is the talk of the town. Have you checked out Juju and 12-factor charms yet?
Operating software at scale is a very real challenge today. It is no wonder then, that software operators—automations for operations and lifecycle-management of an app—featured heavily across sessions and discussions at both KubeCon and Open Source Summit. One session highlighted the challenges behind building prod-ready, robust kubernetes operators, for instance. Project booths and tables, specifically open source databases such as etcd, OpenSearch and Valkey, called for more community support in building operators for the databases.
Juju is an open source orchestrator for software operators called charms. With the catalog of these open source charms, you can deploy popular databases, observability tools and more across different substrates—on kubernetes or VMs, on public cloud or bare metal—and integrate them seamlessly. And if you plan on creating an operator for a web app of your own: 12-factor charms offer a great, quick launchpad!
Bonus…
Guess who greeted me on the Mumbai metro as I left the conference venue on the last day: the circle of friends, of course!
Want to be a part of the open source for India conversation? Join us at UbuCon India this November
UbuCon India is happening in Bengaluru this November, and the call for proposals is currently open! Submit to speak at the event, or simply follow the Ubuntu India circle on LinkedIn to get your tickets and attend the event!