Open Source Summit India 2026

Running global, self-managed k8s for stateful apps is notoriously complex. Most teams opt for managed platforms or VMs to mask the difficulty.

For platform engineers and SREs, this talk reveals how to confidently run mission-critical StatefulSets on bare-metal k8s. We share how we sustain 99.99% availability SLAs and sub-second recovery. We also explain why bare-metal drastically outperforms VM or managed setups by eliminating hypervisor overhead and granting direct hardware access.

We will dive into the architectural decisions behind:

Cluster-of-clusters: Scaling geographically with isolated regions.
Intent-driven placement: Hardware isolation for predictable performance.
Blast-radius containment: Limiting fallout via dedicated failure domains.
Automated recovery: Software, not humans at 2 a.m., handles failures.
Continuous reconciliation: Shifting operational burden to code.

This is not a "Kubernetes solves everything" pitch. It’s a candid, numbers-driven account of engineering a multi-region bare-metal k8s platform where performance and reliability are non-negotiable.

Kubernetes supports OIDC login, but in real life it often becomes painful: users can’t log in, TLS trust breaks with private Keycloak, usernames don’t match RBAC rules, and people end up sharing kubeconfigs or using long‑lived tokens.

In this talk I’ll show a practical way to run Kubernetes access with Keycloak: configure OIDC the right way, bind users/groups to Kubernetes RBAC, and use kubelogin (kubectl exec plugin) so tokens are short‑lived and refresh is handled automatically on the client side.
I’ll also cover the “boring” but important part: handling the Keycloak CA certificate so the login works from admin machines without manual steps.
You’ll leave with a clear checklist and a working “golden path” setup you can copy for your own clusters, that eliminate manual day‑2 steps while keeping security and auditability intact.

As India transitions from being the world’s largest consumer of open-source software to a leading creator of digital public infrastructure, a new mandate has emerged: Sovereign AI. To achieve true digital autonomy, Indian enterprises and public institutions must build AI ecosystems that protect data residency, reflect local context, and avoid vendor lock-in. But how do we practically build this sovereign stack?

This session provides an end-to-end technical blueprint for building enterprise-grade sovereign AI infrastructure entirely on open-source technologies. Using a homegrown, production-ready AI coding assistant as a practical case study, we will deconstruct the architectural layers required for AI independence. We will explore how to orchestrate scalable infrastructure with OpenStack, abstract complex multi-vendor GPU environments using Kubernetes, and deploy high-throughput inference for open-weight models using vLLM.

Beyond the architecture, we will discuss how Indian firms can adopt this open-source stack to implement highly secure, air-gapped environments, protect intellectual property, and empower local engineering talent to shift from consuming global AI to building it.

This talk presents an overview of FOSS United's mission to promote and support the FOSS ecosystem in India. The Foundation was registered in India in 2020 and is supported by thousands of volunteers nationwide throughout the year.

Our programs operate on three orthogonal directions-

- Individual creators and maintainers (by giving them a platform to talk about their work, or direct support)
- Communities (by either directly creating FOSS communities in India or supporting existing ones)
- Organizations (to adopt, acknowledge use of, contribute to, and create FOSS projects)

The talk aims to share insights into the programs we have developed to foster collaboration, innovation, and community engagement within the tech ecosystem. Attendees will learn about the challenges and successes of building FOSS communities, increasing awareness about open-source tools, and strengthening industry-academia-government partnerships. The session will also highlight the broader implications of these efforts on promoting digital inclusivity and shaping India's position in the global free & open-source landscape.

We will also showcase some Indian FOSS projects that have come out of the community!

Murphy's Law states, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." For an Open-Source project, this can be a daunting task. Imagine you are in between a major architectural change, trying to decouple a monolith and your community itself starts to decouple. This is what happened recently in our decade old community and we would like to share the raw behind-the-scenes of our journey, hoping it will be helpful for others who're going through the same.

Our story will portray, how we lost our veteran leaders and architects departing the community, placing an unprecedented load on the remaining maintainers to bridge a massive gap in expertise, institutional knowledge and maintain stability while executing a high-stakes architectural migration. We will also touch bases on how the GenAI can work as a double-edge sword when you are in short of contributors.

Key Takeaways:
1. Practical strategies for project survival when veteran institutional memory departs mid-migration.
2. Why Next.js was a strategic necessity and not just a nice-to-have upgrade.
3. Navigating the influx of high-volume, variable-quality contributions and managing the burnout.
4. Lessons on building a new leadership.

In October 2024, we announced floss.fund as a big experiment to fund critical Free/Libre Open Source projects globally, which in turn was the culmination of a series of ad-hoc funding attempts over the years. It is the first of its kind in India, and one of the few in the world.

Over the last year, some of the biggest FOSS projects globally applied to the fund - from devtools, programming languages, libraries, critical FOSS infrastructure, to humanitarian and social-impact projects, all via word of mouth and volunteer outreach.

While the experiment itself has done well, there have been many disappointments and learnings owing to legal and compliance-related challenges

In this talk, we will share our experience from running the program, what other projects and funders should know, and our plans for the future (making FLOSS/fund a community driven effort, pushing for the creation of an Indian sovereign FOSS fund)

We will also introduce funding.json - an open JSON manifest for describing FOSS funding requirements that we launched as an experiment with FLOSS/fund. It has been adopted by some of the biggest projects globally, and platforms like GitHub, f-droid, thanks.dev