Open Source Summit India 2026

Bare-metal developers pride themselves on simplicity, control, and understanding every line of code. Then along comes Zephyr—with device trees, Kconfig, west, and layers of abstraction—and suddenly, even blinking an LED feels complicated. So… is Zephyr actually scary?

In this talk, we take a practical and honest look at why Zephyr often feels overwhelming to bare-metal developers, what’s really going on under the hood, and whether that complexity is justified. Through side-by-side comparisons and live examples, we map familiar bare-metal concepts to their Zephyr equivalents and uncover where the fear comes from—and where it disappears.

This isn’t a “Zephyr is better” talk. It’s about understanding trade-offs, choosing the right tool, and making the transition without losing your mental model.

By the end, you’ll see that Zephyr isn’t replacing bare metal—it’s structuring the complexity you were already managing.

Modern platform teams are overwhelmed by reactive operations where manual escalation, delayed remediation, and siloed automation take over. This session presents Event-Driven Platform Engineering as a framework for the design of platforms from ticket-driven systems to autonomous control loops. With the aid of Kubernetes controllers, event streams, policy engines, and real-time telemetry, platforms can identify, decide, and act without recourse to human intervention. We will also look at how events from observability systems, CI/CD pipelines, policy violations, and runtime signals can be transformed into actionable triggers for automation that powers scaling, remediation, governance enforcement, and developer workflows. The talk presents a reference architecture consisting of Kubernetes operators, Prometheus metrics, event brokers, and policy-as-code frameworks for developing self-adaptive internal developer platforms. Attendees will gain a structured approach to designing event-native platforms such as MTTR reduction, SLA compliance, continuous guardrails enforcement, and developer experience enhancement that align with open-source cloud-native environments.

Modern server infrastructure is frequently limited by proprietary UEFI firmware—a slow, unauditable "black box" that introduces security risks and operational bloat. This session presents a transformative alternative: a lean, open-source boot stack pairing coreboot with LinuxBoot to achieve rapid boot times .
We will explore the technical synergy between these two powerhouses. coreboot handles the critical "early wake-up" of silicon—including DRAM, CPU, and PCI initialization—before handing control to LinuxBoot. By embedding a minimalist Linux kernel directly into the firmware flash, LinuxBoot replaces complex UEFI DXE phases with battle-tested upstream drivers. Attendees will learn the conceptual foundations of the u-root Go-based userland for flexible networking and storage logic, alongside the kexec system call for seamless transitions to the production OS. This session provides a roadmap for building vendor-neutral, high-performance infrastructure from the reset vector up.

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.

This session presents the challenges which Telco service providers have in moving towards Autonomous Networks and adopting GenAI, AgenticAI - especially for OSS and Network Operations. This presentation highlights how some of the challenges can be solved using LFN projects and benefits to Telco Network Service Providers