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With KubeCon starting this week and the focus on the serverless ecosystem during the O'Reilly Velocity conference, the time seemed right for a snapshot of what to look forward to.
Starting with the Velocity conference snapshot, the top proposals focused around the concept of what it means to be cloud native, how to main the new normal through observability, creating chaos to harden systems, and how to secure them. Given KubeCon is a celebration of the cloud native concept, Kubernetes, and more recently the serverless concept. The next two are related to the new normal of the DevOps and SRE ecosystem. The last topic of security focuses on a very complex area that is still not quite understood. Looking at the dedicated tracks for KubeCon, the one thing that is missing from the Velocity report is the growing use of CI/CD within the Kubernetes community ranging from companies making tools to assist with the creation and managing of various Kubernetes clusters such as Zalando, and Rancher's RKE, but some of the Kubernetes specific tooling that utilizes Kubernetes's management aspects to provide a built-in CI/CD infrastructure utilizing tools like Tekton, Jenkins X, or even Aktion. In addition, there is a lot more focus on the serverless concept with a focus on knative, and building up the service mesh.
One of the most powerful, yet intimidating, aspects of Kubernetes is that it provides a very convenient abstraction layer to interact with clusters of machines. In the past, this would have required a lot of internal tooling and deep magic to scale systems up. Kubernetes is the answer to the internal tooling, but like any complex and flexible tool, there is a steep learning curve. This explains the focus of the previous KubeCon in Barcelona as well as this week's KubeCon containing a lot more case studies of enterprises experimenting with the space, and sharing their lessons learned.
Yet, there is still a lot of ambiguity especially with how Kubernetes handles security: what that means from the developer, operations, security, and business perspectives? In addition, what does the concept of cloud native and going serverless really mean other than the buzzword? Lastly, for enterprises transitioning from their monolithic business application into microservices, what does it mean to scale them and how do you debug and test them at scale? The space is still evolving, and there are still no good answers out there. However, this week may provide a few tidbits to help point the way.