KubeCon 2019 Write-up

Posted: May 24, 2019 3:15 am

KubeCon 2019 Write-up

This year's KubeCon (or Cloud Native Con) in one word, it would be community. That was the drive from the keynotes to the sessions. It could be building up the contributor community, adopting organizations, and diversity through some of the scholarships offered by CNCF or industry specific working groups within the CNCF framework (such as telecommunications and finance).

Part of this could be the conference celebrating the 5th anniversary of Kubernetes being released upon the world. Part of it could also be the size and mixture of the attendees. Bear in mind, the last time I attended KubeCon was in Seattle in 2016 where the attendees were a few hundred (or a thousand tops). It was a lot of early adopters and community contributors. However, looking at Kubernetes at that time, it was still an interesting concept. It seemed like it could change the world, but had a very steep installation/learning curve. The vendor area consisted of maybe a dozen participants.

Comparing that to this week where there were several conferences rolled into one week, dozens of booths from the vendors and roughly 7,500 participants where a good percentage are users and adopters. The companies funding the event are also the more traditional corporations: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon.

What I'm highlighting isn't bad. I'm stating this to highlight the growing maturity of Kubernetes as a platform. This results in the big players getting involved and the growing focus on things such as the stability of the stack and user experience stories on how they are rolling out Kubernetes within their company (at least with two keynote talks), or lessons learned from their experiences (another keynote talk). Even the opening for the final day's keynote which focused on where to take Kubernetes going forward with an emphasis on ease of use, stability, and standardization.

I was able to attend only a few talks, however here are a few of the major take-aways:

• Certified Kubernetes - A CNCF certification program to prevent fragmentation of the space.
• OpenTracing and OpenCensus are now combined into OpenTelementary.
• Cisco announcing an approach to L2/L3 service mesh networks that doesn't involve the traditional virtual routers/switches or IP address space.
• Microsoft announcing the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) to allow for various mesh technologies to use a common interface for defining interface policy, telemetry, and routing information without requiring the end service to have to define it. This is currently supported by Istio, Linkerd, and Consul.
• Helm 3 is officially in alpha, which does away with Tiller, allows for chart libraries, and a host of other things including much better security and more native integration with Kubernetes.
• Stateful apps are no longer considered a no-man's land in the Kubernetes ecosystem, but something that will require some advanced thought and planning (like any other deployment).
• In a talk on Knative serving and eventing, learned about the approach taken to apply the concept of duck typing to extending Kubernetes CRDs. This I can see being a real game changer especially as it becomes more mature, and gets picked up by other programs in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
• Some dominant players are coming out in the observability space (Grafana and ELK), however debugging the microservice flow is still an issue.

The slides for all of the talks are available on the KubeCon Schedule, and the talks, while livestreamed, should be available on Youtube in the near future.

Topics: kubernetes, kubecon,

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