Call for Proposals — DMCON 2026

Call for Proposals is open.

DMCON 2026 is the fifth edition of Kerala's cloud-native and DevOps conference, run by the DevOps Malayalam community.

Saturday, 14 November 2026
Gokulam Park, Kochi

We're looking for talks from people who build, run, break and fix real systems.

Not product demos.
Not recycled conference-circuit material.

The things you learned the hard way, this year, in production.

If you've never spoken at a conference before, this is the one to start with. A meaningful share of our stage every year goes to first-time speakers, and we'll help you get your talk ready.

Submissions close 5 October 2026.

What we're looking for

Good DMCON talks tend to have one of these at their centre:

Something that broke

An incident, a migration that went sideways, a design decision you'd make differently now.

Post-mortems make excellent talks.

Something you built

An internal platform, a tool, a pipeline, a workaround that became permanent.

Tell us how it works and what it cost.

Something you decided

A trade-off with no clean answer — buy vs. build, managed vs. self-hosted, the boring tech you chose over the exciting one.

Something you learned

A hard-won technique, a misunderstanding you had to unlearn, a concept explained better than the docs do.

The common thread: specificity

A talk about your Kubernetes upgrade, at your scale, with your actual numbers beats a general talk about upgrade best practices, every time.

Tracks

Pick the closest fit when you submit. If your talk straddles two, choose either — we'll sort it out.

Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

Internal platforms, golden paths, self-service infrastructure, CI/CD at scale, and what actually makes developers faster.

Kubernetes & Cloud Native Operations

Running Kubernetes in production, multi-cluster, service mesh, operators, edge cases, and the CNCF ecosystem in practice.

Observability & Reliability

SRE practice, incident response, SLOs that mean something, tracing, logging at scale, and cutting through alert noise.

Security & Supply Chain

DevSecOps in real workflows, supply chain security, secrets management, policy as code, and compliance without theatre.

AI in Infrastructure

AI-assisted operations, running inference workloads, GPU scheduling, and what AI tooling actually changes about infrastructure work — including where it doesn't.

Cloud Economics & Architecture

FinOps, cost optimisation, multi-cloud and hybrid decisions, migration stories, and architecture at different scales.

Open Source & Community

Maintaining projects, contributing, building communities, and the human side of engineering work.

Session formats

What makes a strong proposal

We review proposals, not reputations.

Submissions are read with the same attention whether you've spoken fifty times or none.

Do

• Write an abstract someone can understand without knowing you or your company.
• Say clearly what the audience will be able to do or think differently afterwards.
• Include real detail — numbers, versions, scale, constraints.
• Mention what went wrong, not just what worked.

Don't

• Submit a product pitch. Vendor talks are a sponsorship conversation, not a CFP one, and we reject them regardless of who submits.
• Rely on a title alone. "Kubernetes at Scale" tells us nothing.
• Promise a live demo as the entire talk.
• Submit the same abstract you've given at four other conferences this year.

Who should submit

Engineers, SREs, platform and infrastructure people, security folks, architects, and open source maintainers — from Keralam, from across India, from anywhere.

We particularly want to hear from people who are not usually on conference stages:

• Engineers at small companies and startups
• People early in their careers
• Anyone doing interesting work at unglamorous scale

Some of the best talks at past DMCONs came from people submitting for the first time.

First-time speakers

Say so in your submission.

If your proposal is selected, we'll pair you with someone from the community to help shape the talk and rehearse it before the day.

What speakers get

• A ticket to DMCON 2026 [confirm — free ticket or comped registration]
• [Travel/accommodation support: state exactly what you offer, or say plainly that you can't cover it. Vague language here costs you good speakers from outside Kochi]
• A professionally recorded talk, published on our channel
• Access to the speakers' room and the community that's been running this for five editions

We're a volunteer-run, community-funded conference.

We'll be upfront about what we can and can't cover.

Timeline

Every submitter hears back, selected or not.

No silent rejections.

How we review

Proposals are reviewed by the DMCON programme committee — practising engineers from the DevOps Malayalam community, not a marketing team.

We read for:

• Relevance
• Specificity
• Whether the talk will teach the room something

Speaker affiliation doesn't get you in and doesn't keep you out.

Sponsorship doesn't buy stage time.

Questions

For CFP-related questions, reach out to:

[email protected]