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Shipwright at KubeCon India 2026

· 2 min read
Prateek Rathore
Prateek Rathore
Shipwright Contributor

Originally published on Prateek's blog.

Sayan Biswas and I hosted Shipwright's first CNCF Project Pavilion booth at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026! As a Sandbox project, we were eligible to showcase the community's work on Friday June 19, 2026, from 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM.

Sayan and Prateek at the Shipwright booth at KubeCon India 2026 Sayan & Prateek at the Shipwright booth, CNCF Project Pavilion

We hosted the table using a booth runbook I had prepared. Around 80 visitors came through in two hours. We logged 25 badge contacts and ran a live Buildah strategy demo. The pitch was structured: why the build tool landscape is fragmented, how Shipwright unifies it, and a demo to bring it home.

#1 question: "What is Shipwright?"​

Most visitors knew Docker, many had heard of Kaniko or Buildpacks, but few knew a project unified all of them. The pitch that worked: start with the evolution. Docker had a daemon and root problem, so Kaniko and Buildah appeared. Dockerfiles were too rigid, so Buildpacks and ko appeared. Then Shipwright came along to unify all of them under one Kubernetes-native API.

The demo that clicked​

I showed how a single Build YAML decouples what to build from how to build it. Swap the strategy reference (Buildah, Buildpacks, ko) and the same source builds with a completely different tool. That decoupling was the "aha" moment for most visitors.

Having attended the Buildpacks and Jib sessions earlier made these conversations richer. When someone already understood pack rebase or Jib's layered model: "Shipwright doesn't replace those tools. It gives your platform team a single API to offer all of them."

Who came by​

BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, Nutanix, HSBC, Eli Lilly, MassMutual, SLB, Carl Zeiss, CoverGo, and others, a strong mix of financial services, enterprise, and infrastructure companies. Several visitors expressed interest in contributing to Shipwright. We should follow up and onboard a couple of new contributors from this list.