India's first heritage city, Gujarat's first KCD

In 2017, while I was finishing my SSC, the news came on television that Ahmedabad had been named India's first World Heritage City. Not a heritage site, of which India has plenty. A whole city, the first in the country. UNESCO announced it that July 2017.

I remember it landing differently than most news does, because I was born here. My mother had me in Ahmedabad in the early 2000s, so this was not a fact about somewhere else. It was a fact about the place I walk around in.

The city has carried more than one name, and people still argue about it. Around 1094 a Solanki king, Karnadev, founded a settlement called Karnavati near the older town of Ashaval. Three centuries later, in 1411, Ahmed Shah founded Ahmedabad beside it. The two lived side by side for about a hundred and sixty years, and historians still disagree about whether Ahmedabad simply is Karnavati or was always the newer town next door. That unresolved question is exactly why the renaming argument never quite dies.

I have a soft spot for cities whose names are arguments. I wrote about Garhwal recently, which takes its name from fifty-two forts that were folded into one kingdom. Ahmedabad has two names and no agreement. Garhwal has one name built out of fifty-two things. Both are places whose identity is a negotiation.

My mother was a teacher, and a housewife, and the toughest person I have known. She is retired now, mostly cooking food far better than anything I can buy, and I am doing my best to make sure the rest of her life is the easy part. Most of what I know about this city came from her, and from a large extended family on her side who never left it.

Here is the thing you actually need to know before you arrive. Ahmedabad is split in two. There is new Ahmedabad and old Ahmedabad, but nobody local says it that way. In Gujarati it is નદી ની આ બાજુ અને નદી ની પેલી બાજુ: this side of the river, and that side of the river.

Which is a game of relativity, obviously. This side depends entirely on where you happen to be standing. Ask two people from Ahmedabad which side is which and you may get two different answers, both correct.

The river settles it on a map, at least:

Same city now hosting KCD Gujarat 2026 on Saturday, 19 September 2026. It is Gujarat's first ever Kubernetes Community Day, backed by the CNCF: one full day, two tracks, and a room full of people who would otherwise only ever meet you on a Slack thread or a GitHub issue.

Whether this is your first time in Ahmedabad or your tenth and you somehow still missed all of this, here is what I would tell a friend flying in.

What the day actually looks like

Registration and breakfast open at 7:30, the first keynote is at 9:30, and the whole thing closes at 5:30 with a group photo. That is a long Saturday, and they feed you three times inside it: breakfast, lunch and high tea, all on site, all pure vegetarian. Tell them about a dietary need when you register and it goes to the kitchen.

Two halls run in parallel all day. Three keynotes open it:

• Hrittik Roy of vCluster and Surabhi Mishra of American Express, on control plane patterns for regulated platforms, under the best title on the schedule: Picking Ahmedabad Isn't Sovereignty.
• Atulpriya Sharma, CNCF Ambassador at Improving, on The Cloud Native Cooperative: How Amul Already Solved AI's Trust Problem.
• Sagar Utekar of CrowdStrike, a CNCF Ambassador, Docker Captain and Kubestronaut, on The State of Cloud Native in India: The Good, The Bad, and The Unspoken.

Something I enjoyed more than I should have: three of the accepted titles are Gujarat jokes. Amul is the cooperative every Gujarati grew up drinking. Kem Cho, OTel Collectors? is "how are you" in Gujarati. The Dandiya Defense to Poisoned Prompts is named after the stick dance. Whoever reviewed the CFP was enjoying themselves, and the speakers clearly did their homework on the host city.

Out of the rest, the ones I have circled: Ram Iyengar of the Linux Foundation on OpenCost and what Kubernetes actually costs you, Zespre Chang of SUSE on bridging bare-metal provisioning to KubeVirt, and, filed under titles that double as a warning, I Swear the Database Was Alive 5 Minutes Ago. There is a Women in Tech gathering at 2:30 in Hall 2. Thirty-three speakers in all, from Google, IBM, Red Hat, DigitalOcean, SUSE, Mastercard and a lot of places closer to home; the full list is here.

On formats, so you can pack accordingly: keynotes are 10 to 20 minutes, talks are 25 with five of that for questions, and the day ends in a lightning round of 10-minute slots. No workshops this year, so you can travel light and leave the laptop in the room if you want to.

Tickets are on KonfHub and go in tiers, so the price only moves one way. What you see at checkout is what you pay, GST and gateway fees included, and it covers every meal, a swag kit, a certificate and your badge. Non-refundable, but transferable if your plans move.

If you have not booked yet, RUSHABH25 takes 25% off at checkout. Between that and the tiers only ever going up, the cheapest this day will ever be is right now.

Getting here

Ahmedabad has its own international airport, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International, code AMD, and it is a direct flight from most Indian metros. If you would rather watch the country go past, Ahmedabad Junction takes trains from Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru.

The venue is Narayani Heights at Bhat, out on the Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar road, next to Apollo Hospital, which is the landmark every driver here will actually recognise. That location does you a favour: it is about 7 km from the airport and roughly twenty minutes by road, so if you fly in you are barely in traffic before you have arrived.

Ahmedabad Junction is the opposite story. It sits down in the old city, about 20 km south of the venue, so if you are coming by train, budget properly for that last leg. Ahmedabad is not a badly jammed city, but there is construction going on across various places right now and it will slow you down. Plan for 30 to 40 minutes including buffer, and re-route if it catches you.

One route nobody thinks of, mostly because people do not know we have one: the metro. Tapovan Circle is the closest station, about 3 km out, ten minutes in an auto for the last stretch. It runs direct from Sabarmati and Ranip, and if you are coming up from Kalupur you change at Old High Court. On a Saturday morning that beats the highway.

On where to stay, there are two honest answers. Bhat and the Gandhinagar highway stretch put you next to the venue and it is quiet, and the venue is itself a hotel, so the laziest option available to you is a room at Narayani Heights and a lift downstairs. Across the river, Navrangpura or Ashram Road put you next to the food and the old city, and cost you a commute in the morning. I would take the second one, but I live here and I am biased about the evenings.

Autos, Ola and Uber all work fine once you are on the ground. Autos will usually run on the meter across the river; for anything under three or four kilometres it is a hundred rupees or so either way. UPI works nearly everywhere, including at stalls you would not expect it to, but keep two or three hundred in cash for the old city, because one machine is always down.

On the weather: mid-September is the tail of the monsoon, so the question is not heat, it is whether it rains on you. Expect 33 or 34 in the day, 26 to 28 overnight, humidity around 71 per cent, sunrise at 06:26 and sunset at 18:40. Light breathable clothes, and one thing that survives a downpour. And if a Gujarati tells you to carry an umbrella that morning, carry the umbrella. The bulletin gives you a probability, અંબાલાલ કાકા gives you a community consensus, and the community has been right often enough to keep asking. For anyone who doesn't know Ambalal, he is one of the known figures in Gujarat, and when he says it rains, it rains, man. Google can't predict the rain the way he predicts it 🤣 Google needs a googly from him.

The thing nobody warns you about

Gujarat is dry. Has been since 1960, and it is not a technicality that everyone quietly ignores. There is no bar at the venue, none at your hotel, and none on Sindhu Bhavan Road.

If you want a drink, visitors from outside the state can apply for a temporary permit, and the larger hotels with a licensed shop on site will walk you through it. Do the paperwork properly and do not carry anything in across the border, because that is the part that turns into a genuine problem rather than an inconvenience.

The honest version, though, is that nobody here is drinking, so the whole social evening runs on something else. Chaas after a heavy lunch, soda at a stall at eleven at night, kulfi on the way home. Conference dinners in this city are people standing around eating, for four hours, entirely sober, and still being the loudest room in the building. It works better than you would think.

What to eat

When it comes to any city, locals are always welcoming and sweet, but when it comes to Gujarat, ohhh god, we eat sweet, we speak sweet, and we want sweet out of you. You are in the state that gave the world the Gujarati thali, and Ahmedabad takes it seriously. A proper thali here is a sit-down event, not a quick meal. The good places serve it unlimited, which sounds generous until you realise they mean it and you are being refilled for the fourth time with no way out. Go in hungry and let them. Waving them off early is the one mistake visitors make.

Three I would send anyone to: Gordhan Thal, Gwal Bhog, and Vishalla, which serves in an open-air recreated village and is worth going to for the setting alone. After those: Rajwadu, Agashiye at the House of MG, and Toran Dining Hall, all of which will do the same job on you.

Street food is the other half, and it is a morning-to-midnight thing here rather than an evening one. Breakfast is fafda jalebi, and the right place for it is Chandravilas in the old city, in the morning, not at four in the afternoon. Somewhere in the middle of the day there is khaman, gathiya, dabeli, vada pav and bhajiya, plus a few that never make it onto anybody's list: Shakti Sandwich, which has nothing to do with what you call a sandwich, Anjoy Frankie, and Puffiza if somebody in the group wants pizza and will not be talked out of it. And Manek Chowk turns into a night market once the jewellers shut for the day, which is a genuinely strange and lovely thing to watch happen. Law Garden is the classic evening stall strip.

For sitting still afterwards, Coffee Culture, Varietea and Mocha are the three cafes I would name if you want somewhere nobody moves you along. And nobody in this city finishes a night without something cold: Ashrafi Kulfi first, then Natural Ice Cream, then The Chocolate Room if you are still standing.

Beyond Gujarati, I pick by mood. South Indian sends me to Kovalam. Punjabi sends me to Jassi de Parathe. Italian is a different list again. If you want the rest of it, nudge me on LinkedIn or X and we can just go together. Genuinely, that offer is open, catch is first come first serve.

If you would rather not talk to anybody, that is completely fine and here is your list. Urban Chowk near Bopal is an open-air food court with a dozen options in one place. Ahmedabad One, also known as Alpha One Mall, and Palladium are the malls, and their food courts cover most cuisines under one roof. And Sindhu Bhavan Road, which everyone here shortens to SBR, is an entire road of outlets and the closest thing the city has to a single strip that will feed anyone.

That is really the point about food here. Whatever you eat, and whatever you do not, Ahmedabad has a version of it. Nobody arrives here and goes hungry. I am a little veg kinda guy, so I am not the one who can tell you what is best, but I do have friends and they have great taste for it, so Moti Mahal, KFC, Knife and Fork and places like that are where you will find good non-veg food too.

What to see in half a day

If you only do one thing on this list, do the old city heritage walk. It starts at 7:30 in the morning from the Swaminarayan Temple in Kalupur, runs about two hours through the pols, and finishes at the Jama Masjid. The early start is the whole point: you see the lanes waking up instead of baking, and you are done before the day gets going.

The pols are the part you cannot see anywhere else. Clustered wooden-fronted lanes, shared courtyards, bird feeders on poles, all of it still lived in. That is what got Ahmedabad the World Heritage listing, not any single monument.

Everything below is on the same side of the river, and most of it is within twenty minutes of the walk.

Cross back over and the city changes register. Museums here are unusually good for a city that does not advertise itself as a museum city, and the riverfront is where everyone ends up in the evening anyway.

What to see with a full day

Gandhinagar is the state capital and it is twenty-five minutes north of the venue, which makes it the easiest add-on if you are staying an extra day. The bird sanctuaries are further out and worth the early start.

Where to shop

Nobody comes to a Kubernetes conference planning to buy fabric, and then everybody goes home with fabric. It happens every single time.

The split is the same as everything else in this city. The old side sells cloth by the metre and expects you to bargain. The new side sells brands and does not. CG Road sits between the two, an ordinary shopping street that is genuinely pleasant to walk in the evening.

Meet the local community

Here is the part I would not skip. This is not one meetup group renting a hall. Four cloud native community chapters put it together, from Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Rajkot and Vadodara, which is most of the state's cloud native scene deciding to do one thing together for the first time.

That changes who is in the room. The people checking your badge run the meetups for the rest of the year, in four different cities, unpaid. If you have ever wanted to start something like this where you live, this is the cheapest possible research: find one of them between talks and ask how they did it. They will tell you, at length, and probably feed you.

If you are around the evening before or after, the Kubernetes Ahmedabad meetup is where anything informal gets posted, and the event itself is @kcdgujarat on X, LinkedIn and Instagram.

And if you have not booked yet, do that before you read anything else on this page twice: tickets are on KonfHub, the early bird does actually expire, and RUSHABH25 takes 25% off it.

Or pay nothing. If this post was useful, share it, and I am going to try to put three free tickets in the hands of three people who did. Post it wherever you live online, tag me on X or LinkedIn, and I will pick three names on 12 September, which leaves the winners a week to sort out getting here.

Since you have read this far, where I sit in all of it. I am on the volunteer team as a speaker buddy, which means that if you are giving a talk that day, getting you into the right hall, mic'd up and starting on time is my problem and not yours. And Grafana & Friends Ahmedabad, the community I run here, is one of the community partners. So I will be somewhere in that building from breakfast to the group photo, mostly walking quickly.

So if you are coming from out of town and want a coffee, or a walk through the old city before your flight, find me at the event or on X. I am always happy to show someone around the place I grew up in.

$ see you in Ahmedabad