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KubeCon Europe 2022 – Summary Day 1

May 18, 2022 | Cloud Native Apps, CNCF, KubeCon, Kubernetes, Tanzu

My day 1 at KubeCon Europe 2022 started early and my expectations are high. I arrived after 7.30am and I was impressed how easy and fast the check-in was even I had to show my ID and COVID certificate, which would allow me to get inside to the badge printer.

The event location is quite huge and it is very important that you check the map before you enter the building. I had to learn it the hard way and had no clue where I find the breakout rooms or the event center, which was even a different building. The helpdesks were busy with a long queue of people who probably also were running around like me, like a headless chicken. 😀 But after a half day of running from one room to another, I found my way to the sessions.

Keynote Sessions

Priyanka Sharma, the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) kicked off this spectacular event with some very interesting numbers:

65% of the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon visitors are first-timers like me!
The number if CNCF projects is growing fast
In 2016, the first KubeCon in North America had around 700 people
KubeCon 2022 Europe has >7’000 people onsite and >10’000 joining virtually

KubeCon Europe 2022 Keynote Priyanka’s message was about collaboration for long-term success. The CNCF is about a large continuously growing community that must work together, and each person can contribute in her/his own way.

These were the four big announcements she presented during the keynote session:

KubeCon Europe 2023 is going to happen in Amsterdam
New Prometheus Certification Associate Exam
Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Certification
Boeing joins CNCF as a Platinum member

After that Boeing presented their company and mission and we heard Mercedes Benz telling their story of “7 years running Kubernetes”. Mercedes Benz operates more than 900 Kubernetes clusters and 3’500 machines all over the world. They also mentioned that they migrated their clusters to Cluster API, a Kubernetes project with VMware as one of the main contributors.

KubeCon Europe 2022 Mercedes Benz

After a short break it was time for my scheduled breakout sessions.

West Side CD: The Deployment Ballet Goes On

Benoit Moussaud from VMware Tanzu presented a different way of CI/CD with Cartographer, which ” is a Kubernetes-native Choreographer providing higher modularity and scalability for the software supply chain”:

CNCF Cartographer

Overview and State of Knative

The next session was in the event center building, which hosted the presentation of Mauricio Salatino, VMware and Carlos Santana, IBM. They gave an overview of the Knative philosophy of being “Kubernetes native”.

Knative offers a simplified developer experience deploying and managing stateless and event-driven applications. Maurico mentioned the following Knative features:

Simpler Abstractions
Autoscaling
Progressive Rollout
Event Integrations
Event Handling
Pluggable

CNCF Knative

From Kubernetes to PaaS to … Err, What’s Next?

The third session I would like to highlight was from Daniel Bryant, Ambassador Labs. The key message of his presentation was about the “golden path” aka a paved platform.

At the beginning of his presentation Daniel started with the “real question” how much you should build yourself and how you should you assemble the control plane for effective use. Before going deeper into that topic he also joked around, and we know that 50% of all jokes are true, that the CNCF landscape and each KubeCon is not helping very much to make things for developers and operators easy:

CNCF Landscape It was very interesting and important to hear from him, that you cannot provide a good developer experience without a good user experience. Enterprises and platform teams need to treat the platform as a product and focus on tooling and interoperability.

Daniel said, that you need to think and design in/for different personas, user research is key and that you should watch your users doing things or using tools. Then you understand how you need can provide a good user experience for platforms. I personally believe that design thinking is key here.

Another interesting fact he mentioned is how the focus changed from the past KubeCons to the actual one. People focused mostly on operations and realized that the platform as a product mindset and approach is the way forward to provide also a good developer experience.

Developer Productivity Daniel Bryant

If you want to know more how VMware relates to that topic, have a look at this article from December 2018 and a more recent one from 2022. This approach is also part of VMware Tanzu Labs:

The VMware Tanzu Labs platform-as-product approach combines Product Management (PM), User-Centered Design (UCD), Agile, eXtreme Programming (XP), and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. A dedicated, balanced platform team uses these practices to both build and run the platform product.

Conclusion

It was a long day with a lot of impressions and new information. 😀 I definitely felt the spirit and the expertise of this large community! I am already excited and curious about tomorrow! Enjoy KubeCon Europe 2022!

PS: Are you looking for a job? KubeCon and the community got you covered!

KubeCon Europe 2022 Find Job

What I Expect From KubeCon Europe 2022

May 17, 2022 | Cloud Native Apps, CNCF, KubeCon, Kubernetes

Twitter and LinkedIn are flooded with posts about the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 event happening in Valencia, Spain. It is one of the biggest conferences in the world, where users, developers, geeks and newbies come together, who are interested in cloud native standards, technologies and projects like Envoy, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent, Argo, Buildpacks, Cilium, Contour, Flux, SPIFFE, SPIRE and many more.

While May 16-17th consist of a pre-event program, which I don’t attend, I look forward to main conference from 18-20 May. For those who cannot or still don’t want to attend in person, KubeCon Europe is a hybrid event that can be joined virtually as well.

Why do I join KubeCon Europe?

The first reason is the fact that this is my first KubeCon Europe. I want to experience the spirit of the open source community and learn new things. I know some of the open source projects VMware is contributing to but there are so many awesome projects and technologies that I would like to understand better.

The second reason is VMware Tanzu. VMware has a booth at KubeCon and a lot of Tanzu folks are there that I would like to meet. Some of them are presenting as well and I would like to listen to their words and learn how they explain things, which helps me then to better serve my customers.

All VMware sessions can be found here.

Third reason is very simple: Who doesn’t like to meet old and new friends? 🙂

Scheduled Sessions I am Excited About

Here are some sessions that I am looking forward to.

Overview and State of Knative – Mauricio Salatino, VMware & Carlos Santana, IBM

Session Abstract: In this session, we’ll give attendees an overview of the Knative philosophy of being Kubernetes-native and working well with existing Kubernetes tools. Then we’ll provide a demo of FaaS using Knative and conclude with a roadmap for what’s next. Most importantly, we’ll provide information on how you can get involved either as a contributor or end-user who wants to give feedback on its future direction. With its recent donation to the CNCF at the incubating level, there’s never been a better time to get started with Knative.

From Kubernetes to PaaS to … Err, What’s Next? – Daniel Bryant, Ambassador Labs

Session Abstract: This talk will look back on my experience of building platforms, both as an end-user and now as part of an organization helping our customers do the same. The key takeaways are: – Treat platform as a product – Realize that you can’t have good developer experience (DevEx) without good UX – Focus on workflows and tooling interoperability We’ll wrap this talk with a walk-through of the CNCF ecosystem through the developer control plane lens, and look at what’s next in the future of this important emerging category.

Harbor – Enterprise Cloud Native Artifact Registry – Yan Wang, Chenyu Zhang, Daojun Zhang, VMware & Vadim Bauer, Container Registry

Session Abstract: Project Harbor is an open-source trusted cloud native registry project that stores, manages, signs, and scans content, thus resolving common image or Helm Chart management challenges. It has been widely used by organizations large and small around the world to resolve both the container image and Helm Chart management challenges. In this presentation, we will cover some advanced features of using Harbor, such as image signature management(cosign), image management in a cloud environment, unified management of Helm chart and container images, and highly-available deployments.Furthermore, the team would love to get feedback from users and contributors to current features and future roadmap.

Real World SPIFFE Scenarios and Outcomes – Andres Vega & Frederick Kautz, SPIFFE Steering Committee

Session Abstract: SPIFFE aims to strengthen the identification of software components in a common way that can be leveraged across distributed systems by anyone, anywhere. The ability to maintain software security by standardizing how systems define, attest, and maintain software identity, regardless of where systems are deployed or who deploys those systems, confers many benefits. The use of SPIFFE can significantly reduce costs associated with the overhead of managing and issuing cryptographic identity documents and accelerate development by removing the need for developers to understand the complexity involved to secure service-to-service communication, but that is not the only outcome. Production identity can have a positive impact on many areas such as interoperability, compliance, audibility, and more. This presentation demonstrates the real world scenarios and outcomes of deploying SPIFFE across your infrastructure and also using it to bridge and integrate the infrastructure of others.

SIG Cloud Provider: Portable K8s Across all Clouds, Roadmap and Updates – Nick Turner, Amazon & Steve Wong, VMware

Session Abstract: Cloud Provider code allows Kubernetes to run on top of different platforms, with an implementation for each. The agenda will include: An overall status report on removing the cloud provider code from the main Kubernetes repository to “out of tree repositories; “Lightning talks” for individual cloud providers, reporting efforts, accomplishments, and roadmap for features and getting “out-of-tree”. We’ll also discuss the plans to handle cloud provider migration – including interesting topics like building and migrating to cloud controller managers, and kubelet image credential providers. The goal of SIG Cloud Provider is to promote a vendor-neutral ecosystem for our community. We will close with details on how you can get involved with the SIG as either a cloud infrastructure supporter, a K8s distribution author, or a K8s user.

Cluster API Intro and Deep Dive – Yuvaraj Balaji Rao Kakaraparthi & Vince Prignano, VMware

Session Abstract: The Cluster Lifecycle SIG is the Special Interest Group that is responsible for building the user experience for deploying and upgrading Kubernetes clusters. Our mission is examining how we should change Kubernetes to make it easier to operate. In this deep dive, we will examine how Cluster API simplifies the cluster management experience for cluster operators by enabling consistent machine management across environments and quick stamping of Clusters using some new exciting features like ClusterClass.

Optimize Kubernetes on vSphere with Event-Driven Automation – Steven Wong & Michael Gasch, VMware

Session Abstract: Kubernetes abstracts out differences across hosting infrastructure, but there are cases when integrated monitoring across the layers of storage, compute, etc, are essential. When faults or reconfiguration happen, manual monitoring, diagnosis and remediation can be slow, costly, and error prone. The VMware Event Broker Appliance is an open-source project, usable with Cloud Events and Knative to optimize availability, auditing, compliance, etc. based on vSphere events. We’ll cover popular use cases and how to get started. The K8s VMware User Group shares best practices for hosting K8s on VMware infrastructure, and we will close the session with details on how you can participate in the group.

I’ll do my best to provide daily summaries of the sessions I attended.