
KubeCon North America 2024 took place in Salt Lake City, Utah on Nov 12-15. We interviewed people on the show floor to gather their impressions of the event, what they learned and what they want to see in the future. Do you have something cool...
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Abdel Sigewar
Hi and welcome to the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. I am your host Abdel Sigewar.
Mofi Rahman
And I'm Mofi Rahman.
Abdel Sigewar
This is our Kubecon North America 2024 coverage episode. Kathleen spoke to attendees on the show floor, asked them questions about their experience of the event and some behind the scenes.
Mofi Rahman
But first, let's get to the news.
Abdel Sigewar
CERT Manager is a CNCF Graduate Projects CERT Manager is a popular certificates manager for Internet applications, allowing developers to automate TLS and MTLS certificate issuance and renewal. Congratulations Search Manager for achieving this milestone.
Mofi Rahman
DAPR also joined the list of graduated CNCF projects. Dapr or Distributed Applications Runtime, is a portable runtime that provides integrated APIs for communication, state and workflow for building production ready applications. Congratulations DAPR for this achievement.
Abdel Sigewar
Istio released version 1.24 and with that announced that Istio ambient mesh is GA. The Ztunnel and Waypoint proxies which constitute the core features of Ambient Mesh have been marked as stable and ready for production use cases At Kubecon North America.
Mofi Rahman
2024, the CNCF announced the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge, a bounty program aiming at helping fight patent roles during the keynote of the event. Patent trolls have been raised as an issue Kubernetes and other Cloud Native projects have to deal with. The bounty program asked developers to find pre existing public information showing a patent should not have been granted in the first place.
Abdel Sigewar
2025 is fast approaching and the Cloud Native community is already gearing up for a plethora of events. The CNCF announced the lineup for their flagship events for next year. On the Menu 5 Kubecon and Cloud Native events in Europe, China, Japan, India and North America, one open source security con in North America and 30 Kubernetes community days around the world.
Mofi Rahman
Three new cloud native certifications have been announced at Kubecon North America Certified Backstage Associate, OpenTelemetry Certified Associate and Kiverno Certified Associate.
Abdel Sigewar
Speaking of certification, the Linux foundation announced that prices will go up by 10% starting next year for the three main Kubernetes certifications CKA, CKS and CKAD and the Linux Certified System Administrator Exams.
Mofi Rahman
WASM Cloud joined the CNCF as an incubating project. WASM Cloud is a project built on top of reusable webassembly components allowing teams to run polyglot application on Kubernetes Cloud and Edge.
Abdel Sigewar
Spectro Cloud announced in a blog post that they have raised $75 million in Series C funding. The San Jose based startup intends to use the funds to help develop their kubernetes management solution for on prem Cloud and Edge installations.
Mofi Rahman
Solo announced they will donate their Glue API gateway to the cncf. Glue is an API gateway that runs natively on kubernetes and enables developers to manage API endpoints and ingress access on their clusters.
Abdel Sigewar
And that's the news.
Kathleen
Hello and welcome to the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. I am at Kubecon Cloud native con North America 2024 and I am speaking with I'm Rajas.
Rajas
I work at Broadcom doing all things Kubernetes there and I also am a tech lead at Tag Runtime and heavily involved in the CNCF Working Group for Artificial Intelligence. So that's where I hang out these days.
Jeremy Rickard
Jeremy Rickard from Microsoft Ray Lohano and.
Joe Thompson
I'm a Solutions Architect at rehat. I'm also a Kubernetes SIGDOCS Co Chair and a Kubernetes SIG Security sub project lead, currently leading the external audit sub project and I've also been a release lead as well for the 1:23 release team.
Kathleen
Jimmy Zelensky I'm the Co Founder and Chief Product Officer of Authz. We build a product called SpiceDB and SpiceDB is a database that is specialized for storing authorization data. I actually gave a talk on it briefly earlier at the conference and largely it was about kind of securing Kubernetes using SpiceDB because Kubernetes authorization is a little bit work in progress if I would say so myself.
Frederik Brancic
Frederik Brancic, the CEO and founder of Polar Signals. We build tooling to measure and analyze performance over time so that way you can lower resource cost across your cloud bill and improve performance. But also down to the source code line number. Understand why your code is behaving the way that it is in a very unopinionated way because it requires no instrumentation so it's truly just what the source code is. If the source code is executing, that's what you'll see.
Lucy
My name is Lucy, I'm a senior Software Engineer at Uber and I work on our Kubernetes and compute platform.
Sree
Hi, I am Sree. I am a full time software engineer and part time grad student.
Joe Thompson
Joe Thompson I'm a consulting engineer at Clarity Business Solutions based in Olympica, Maryland and I've been part of the Kubernetes community for almost 10 years now.
Kathleen
What were you hoping to get out of the event?
Rajas
Mainly I was trying to look at how we can integrate AI with cloud native like that was Like a hot topic this time. There has been like a lot of buzz around scheduling AI workloads. It's almost impossible to go to a talk right now without people mentioning Q and I was just trying to flip things around and see what's on the other side, like you know, take an upside down approach and see what all we can do from like learning from AI and like integrating that with our ecosystem. And it's been pretty good. There have been like a couple of fun thoughts around that, things around issues with GPU monitoring, extending Kubernetes in a way that it adds to more resource scheduling or more efficiency in terms of like how we do things. So that was really good.
Jeremy Rickard
I was really hoping to connect with contributors that I haven't seen in a while. I was really excited to have a lot of face to face discussions at the Contributor summit and that worked out really well. I think we had a couple of really good conversations about lts. I'm a co chair for the working group LTS and I think having those meetings biweekly, the regular cadence is great but in person is so much better and we had really good focus time to work through some challenges and some issues that we think we're facing. I'm still seeing a lot of security related things. I think even at Regex there was a lot of security content. It was really interesting to see. I did a talk on security as well and I think I had a lot of conversations with people afterwards and it seems like there's so many common problems that people are facing right now reacting to ever growing security vulnerabilities and just the complexity of managing that and seeing some of the stuff in the vendor space, the tools that are coming out for that is really cool and seeing work projects are doing to increase security. I think also the thing that has been really cool to see is the momentum around istio. So I took away the news about Ambient going ga and also in the keynotes yesterday there were some really cool things about envoy based app gateways that I thought was cool.
Joe Thompson
For Kubecon it's always about connections so I love connecting with my fellow contributors at the Kubernetes Contributor Summit which is the last one actually it's going to be the Maintainer Summit at the next Kubecon. Also love meeting new contributors as well at the SIGME greets who want to get involved with contributing to Kubernetes. Also just meeting new to me Kubernetes contributors and just talking about their projects or what they're working on.
Kathleen
Yeah, I Think this conference specifically, it was mostly my talk. My talk was supposed to be kind of enlightening folks to kind of the inadequacies in Kubernetes authorization system. Basically get people up to date on the history of authorization, let them understand kind of what exists in Kubernetes and then kind of where it falls over and then kind of where Kubernetes is going in the future and then how we're going to have to adjust that foundation to support that future.
Frederik Brancic
So I think being naturally drawn to low latency, high performance workloads, we wanted to understand even more what kind of workloads are out there because we're always surprised just how many problems in the world are latency sensitive, performance sensitive. And we just had Jimmy on as well, you know, odds that they're definitely also a super low latency workload. And there are things like this that we find new things every time we come here. So we're always excited to come back.
Lucy
It's always important to us to come to these things, to meet up with the contributors and to see what's next and what we might be missing in our platform. I've seen a lot of great talks. I saw some great new things around stopping disruption of stateful workloads. And it's always important for me to go to the contributor summit to see our contributor family and to work out what we're building next in Kubernetes. We've got some really great stuff coming in signode that I'm really excited for over the next few releases. It was great to align everyone at the summit there and I'm looking forward to it coming out over the next few years.
Sree
I was hoping to get a 101 on Wasm, which I did. I was hoping to make new friends and catch up with old ones. It's been a couple of years since I last came to a Kubecon and so I wanted to get the usual six month boost where I am very excited about contributing, getting back into things. It usually lasts till the next Kubecon. So yeah, I was looking to get that out of this and I think I did. So yeah, time will tell for this.
Joe Thompson
Year I was hoping to reconnect with some more people that you know during the pandemic and we weren't doing things in person. There were some in person meetings that I missed. Not everybody was back at Kubecon in person last year. It seems like more people are back in person this year. I ran into a lot more people in the hall and at side events.
Kathleen
And that was fantastic. What trends have you seen at the event?
Rajas
Particularly AI. But the one main trend that I'm seeing is the focus on security and how it's not just about running the workload, but making sure that the workload is hardened. The entire journey of a particular workload is done in certain way so that there is track or attestation at every stage of it. So that's like a good focus that I think we should be having for this decade going forward. And I'm seeing a lot of involvement from the end users as well, a lot of case studies. So that was really good.
Sree
Yep.
Joe Thompson
So I think the big trends are actually aligned with the themes of the kubecon keynotes. So day one was AI, day two is security, and day three is community. And also the interrelations between some of those themes, like with AI with and how security is applied to AI with like maybe BOMs for LLMs. And also like security applied to like gateways as well.
Kathleen
Yeah, trend wise, I think there's kind of two things that come to mind. The first one is I actually got put on the keynote in Paris for my opinion on this and I think it's actually coming to fruition. Heterogeneous workloads on Kubernetes. So there's a lot of talk about running different types of workloads. We talk a lot about running low latency workloads on Kubernetes. I know LinkedIn just made a big post about how they do stateful services on Kubernetes, slightly different from statefulsets built in. And then there's obviously tons of talks on AI workloads. So that is kind of the more interesting evolution of even container workloads. But then outside of container workloads, there's a lot of traction around how you make Kubernetes core APIs extendable beyond just the container workloads. So you see projects like KCP testing the waters there for a future of Kubernetes that's more extensible than what we have today and less container focused.
Frederik Brancic
So again, this is a little bit related to the previous question. I think what's blatantly obvious is everything AI that's happening, but there's sort of an extension that we're seeing more and more of which is there are many more robotics companies popping up. And specifically for the work that we do with low latency and high performance workloads, this is even more important when we work with AI in the physical world. Right. That's a trend that we've been observing very recently.
Lucy
I think a big thing that I'm seeing, particularly around AI and generative workloads, is that in the past we used to have that everyone was on the same hardware and the same arches and no one really cared about what hardware they were on in the same way, or at least not many people did. Back in 2014, 2016, you know, you were either on intel x86 or AMD 64. Kubernetes itself was built around this time and you can sort of tell because like, you know, we just have CPU and memory, it doesn't really matter which memory. But more and more I'm seeing that users and developers really do care about what hardware their workloads are using. Obviously the great example, and the obvious example is GPUs where they're like, oh, I need to use a H100 because it's better at training. But even outside of that, a lot of people are moving on to ARM because it's cheaper and it's more energy efficient for them and Kubernetes is having to respond to that. So we've got, and we're responding quite well. I think we've got DRA coming down the pipeline, for example, and that has been a great boon for this. But I think that this is becoming more of a trend in our industry, that we are becoming more fragmented and more specialized in the hardware we're using. And I don't think this is going to stop in the near future.
Sree
I think this one's a little obvious. AI, AI and more AI. We saw that coming, but it's a bandwagon. But I'm curious to see where it goes.
Joe Thompson
AI and LLMs and machine learning, and I distinguish between all three of those, continues to be big, just as it was last year. Machine learning was big a few years before that. I think one of the trends that I'm starting to see now is the idea of governance of LLMs, not only in terms of the ethics of things like training and the source material, but also things like how much resources they use and how are we going to run those things in a shared environment with other things without everybody stomping on each other. The other big trend I'm seeing is in Kubernetes itself. There seems to be a lot more talk this year about observability.
Kathleen
What's your favorite thing you've learned so far?
Rajas
One thing that came out of this conference was the focus on quantum machine learning for Kubernetes. I've just been hearing about all of these things. And yeah, I really like, I don't know what it means, I don't know what I'm talking about over here, but I've been hearing this from a bunch of folks using quantum machine learning and that sounds pretty cool. So, yeah, that's really something that I learned earlier.
Jeremy Rickard
I think the thing that I found the coolest was from the contributor summit, there was a session talking about the work that's happening for API compatibility. Again, going back to my working group. Lts with that hat on, I think one of the questions or one of the problems that we saw through some of that work was that people, people are really hesitant to upgrade because they're afraid that there will be changes in the API that will break their workloads. So that's one of the hesitations they have with upgrading and compatibility mode. I can't remember the cap number, but introduces a new flag to the API server and eventually would bubble down to the rest of the components that would allow you to run with a targeted API version. So you may be able to use a binary that's like132, but set it to Kubernetes 1.30 as the compatibility version and it would really only expose the things that were in that version. So it would give you a little bit more protection or maybe a little bit more comfort or warm fuzzies about upgrading and then you can bump it to the later version. After we've worked through some of those.
Joe Thompson
Challenges so far, I met a fellow Kubernetes contributor who works on the kasi, or Container Object Storage interface, which allows you to provision or to consume object storage in Kubernetes. It's also an alpha feature, and so we had a great discussion on how to make that costly more secure.
Kathleen
I think the thing that I learned the most is actually not at all coupled to Kubernetes. There was a talk called the Maintainer Monologues, and in it it was mostly about kind of like different open source maintainers talking about their kind of stories. And there was really great advice from Scott Rigby about kind of avoiding burnout by actually building concrete workflows so that when someone is kind of crossing a boundary, you have an established pattern and policy for handling someone crossing the boundary. And that will kind of keep you and others safe from kind of people taking advantage of you in ways that aren't sustainable long term.
Frederik Brancic
I think this is again, a little bit related to AI. I think we've been learning more about the hype seems to be dying down and we're kind of coming to the reality of how do we actually operate these AI workloads. And I think there's still a lot of challenges to be figured out here. And I think this is exciting, right? Like it would be kind of boring if, you know, it was the same old stuff all over again. So it's exciting to see that there are complicated and interesting problems that are being tackled by the community.
Lucy
I went to a talk where someone was demoing a really cool thing that they built where they were using Firecracker and a few changes to the CRI in order to run an application and move and reschedule it on a different node without stopping the application. And I found that really, really cool. And it has, in my opinion, great use cases for things like database and things where, guess what, you don't have to reason about the disruption as much anymore. I think it's probably like a year or two away from being production ready. It seems what they had done was quite hacky, involved quite a lot of forking of storage for example. But I think that stuff like this is going to be especially useful, especially around reducing disruption. And I mean we see a similar trend in Signode where we're working more and more on less disruption when you do stuff to your pods.
Sree
Well, like I mentioned, the WASM101, I had no clue what it was coming in, but I've heard my friends talk about it a lot and WASM Con gave me a good opportunity to get started. I think I'm going to look into it a little bit more.
Joe Thompson
Favorite thing I've learned so far. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the in place POD resize is actually going into beta in 1.32. I was actually talking to somebody yesterday who had thought that it was in 131 and I was like, what? Nope, nope, it's in 132. So yeah, eagerly awaiting that the 132 betas are out.
Kathleen
Come on 132, what would you like to see at future Kubecons?
Rajas
One thing is that, I mean we should keep this momentum going because I truly like the energy over here and specifically I would like to see more talks or panels from the academia, the research side of things, and more case studies coming out from academia. The poster sessions have been like a really good step and more case studies would be really good.
Jeremy Rickard
One of my favorite things is seeing end users and I think I'd love to see more end users. I think I've been asked that question before and it's probably the answer I'll give in the future. I love seeing how people take the things that we're working on and deliver cool stuff.
Joe Thompson
For me, a Kubecon is not just learning new things, it's also about growing the community as well. So I think my personal passion is tutorials. I've done few tutorials at kubecon, some like more hands on workshops for new contributors or for just folks just to engage with the community, but maybe with other skinstripe projects as well.
Kathleen
Yeah, I think Kubecon is always kind of a work in progress, so it's nice to see the subtle changes they make every year. Honestly, I think the project pavilion being continued to be invested in is definitely like a big one. I know we've done a lot of experimentations of trying to pull people in there. There's tourists this year and they kind of have like the big stage over there to bring people in. I just think more attention needs to be paid there. And then also this year they kind of did a weird thing where they kind of closed the sponsor hall while talks were still going and a bunch of people ended up leaving and not actually even knowing that talks were still going on. So maybe better communication about that or at least kind of like helping guide people towards those rooms near the end of the day.
Frederik Brancic
So I don't know if I'm necessarily representative of the larger Kubecon crowd and I think this is something that we've been trying to address with the pre events, but I would love to see more in depth technical talks again at the main event as well. And I feel like I keep hearing this from the larger audience as well. I do think we've done a good job of that at the pre event, but I think we can allow some more of that back into Kubecon proper again as well. So I think that's something I'd love to see. And I feel like the CNCF projects maybe could get a little bit more attention as well at the conference. But overall I think we're moving in the right direction with that.
Lucy
I think that it's always great to be here and it's always a great conference, but I think one of the things that I wish I saw more of was stories of end users at Kubecon. There's a lot of vendors, there's a lot of integrators and that's great, but sometimes I just want to hear like implementation stories and more stories and to really try and get a sense of have I done something that someone else has done in a better way than me, especially as coming from a company that is an end user. It would be great to see more end users here.
Sree
I definitely want more technical content, more workshops, stuff where I can get my hands dirty. I did enjoy the contrib fests. I would definitely like to see more of those and a little better CFP filtering. A lot of the talks seemed promising when you looked at the titles and the abstracts, but fell short of expectations.
Joe Thompson
Yeah, really more of everything. I'm hoping that Kubecon will, you know, get back to the pre pandemic numbers in fairly short order. That would be nice and it would be nice to be able to do that safely. One thing that we need to do more of. It seems like they've backed off a little bit from the virtual component of the event and I would like to see that return in a more because that's a big accessibility thing for a lot of people who aren't able to attend. For whatever reason, they're not able to attend. So more emphasis on the virtual part of the event would be nice.
Kathleen
Wonderful. Thank you very much.
Abdel Sigewar
Well, hey Mophie.
Mofi Rahman
Hey Abdel.
Abdel Sigewar
Unfortunately, Kaslan could not join us this round for logistics reasons. So people have to deal with me and you, I guess.
Mofi Rahman
I mean, you make it sound like it's a bad thing. I don't know.
Abdel Sigewar
I don't know. Well, I think people will have to tell us. Yeah. Anyway, so if you have listening to this, we are the week after Kubecon this. I mean, you have listened to the Kubecon episode. Obviously we were all there in Salt Lake City. Off the top of my head, one of the things I've heard a lot is a lot of people were surprised how lovely Salt Lake City was. I don't know. What was your impression?
Mofi Rahman
No, I think it is a lovely little place. Every direction there's a mountain, which I was not expecting. I did not. Right. Like from the location, pretty much all direction you look, you see like a mountain range. We got a couple of small days of snow as well, which was.
Abdel Sigewar
Yes.
Mofi Rahman
Kind of like good and bad for things. But you know, it was like the snow on top of the mountain looked lovely.
Abdel Sigewar
Yes, yes. But like the city was nice. The blocks are huge. A lot of walking, but it was pickle. But anyway, Kubecon, how was Kubecon for you?
Mofi Rahman
I mean like every Kubecon, Kubecon is always part work, part talking to people, but part also meeting co workers all the time. So. And friends and other people in the community So I feel like even the worst kubecon is generally pretty good.
Abdel Sigewar
Yes.
Mofi Rahman
So it's hard to have a bad kubecon generally, but this kubecon especially was really good. Kubernetes turned 10 years old. So you have. And every kubecon we still get about like, what, 40 to 50% people that are coming to the kubecon for the first time, A good percent of them using kubernetes for the first time in their life in that year alone. So as the community is growing, we have like a lot of new people joining the community as well as coming to kubecon. So that's always exciting to see.
Abdel Sigewar
Yeah. Still, like, that's one of the most interesting stats that comes out of every kubecon is the number of new joiners. We covered this in the news, but I think, like, what was particular or what is interesting about this kubecon is that the opening keynote was talking about patent trolls. There was like a good 10 minutes talking about that.
Mofi Rahman
I mean, that's kind of the sign of a project. I feel like getting more mature. Right. Like Kubernetes over 10 years old in the first five years of Kubernetes, patent trolls probably wouldn't have cared about kubernetes enough to write do trolls. To have patent trolls in your particular line of technology is in some convoluted ways a sign of how popular the technology has gotten.
Abdel Sigewar
A sign that you're doing a good thing.
Mofi Rahman
Sign you are doing a good enough thing for someone to seek illegal monetary benefit from it. Right. So it's.
Abdel Sigewar
Well, it's legal. Let's say unethical. I mean, it's legal.
Mofi Rahman
Yeah, that's. That's the better word. Yeah. It's not illegal. It's unethical. And it's kind of. Yeah, unethical is probably the better word. Not illegal.
Abdel Sigewar
Yeah. Anyway, so what was your. What was your takeaway? Anything interesting that you saw, heard, talked about, chatted about?
Mofi Rahman
Like, AI and other things are top of mind for a lot of customers and teams figuring out how to make Kubernetes a better place for it. I think the work group serving got announced, I think last Kubecon or this Kubecon, but I think the group got bigger this cycle. A lot of people are talking about like serving as a dedicated type of workload on kubernetes for the longest time. I probably was saying, like serving is just web application. That's another different type of web deployment. But after spending some more time into that space, I probably do agree that there are some nuances that require a little bit of extra attention. Maybe from the kubernetes side of things or from the provider side, just the need for additional resources like GPUs and TPUs make those workload a little bit more unique compared to your traditional web application.
Abdel Sigewar
Yes. And we did have wga, the working group serving episode a few episodes ago. We're going to leave a link in the show notes, but that's definitely was. I mean we learned that when we were preparing for our session. There's quite a lot of challenges related to how fast your workload starts. Starts because you're typically downloading like a very large model and doing multi host serving. I'm sharing GPUs. These are all things that are still kind of in the working basically.
Mofi Rahman
Yeah.
Abdel Sigewar
Auto scaling based on serving workloads is also another one. So definitely a lot of that. A lot of that. Yeah, yeah.
Mofi Rahman
So like from that auto scaling point, right. Your traditional HPA of looking at CPU and memory metrics is not necessarily the best way to scale for your AI workload that requires like looking at GPU metrics. So there will be work in the next few cycles to figure out how do you either improve HPA or plug into something external like ADA in your application system to scale not just based on your CPU and memory, but something else.
Joe Thompson
Yes.
Mofi Rahman
That gives you a better signal of how your application, your inference serving application are doing on your cluster.
Abdel Sigewar
Yeah. We did record an episode on the YouTube channel about auto scaling based on TGI size, queue size. So if you use TGI, which is the hugging face serving library, it does have a metric called queue size. So basically based on how much requests are coming from users, the queue is essentially the amount of prompts that are waiting to be processed by the LLM.
Mofi Rahman
Yeah.
Abdel Sigewar
So yeah, there is definitely some movement in that space. As you said, it's quite an interesting, it's quite an interesting space to keep an eye on. Yeah. So I think for me some of the interesting things, I mean Istio had a big announcement to make and Solo, the company behind it had big, big presence at the event. So that was quite interesting because they were just right behind our booth. There was quite a lot of big vendors present with like big announcement that have been made at the conference. But I feel like this edition, a lot of the big announcements have been the CNCF itself. Right. Like the certifications, the price, all these new things coming out of the graduated projects. Obviously it's the end of the year so they had to like celebrate the New graduated projects. So that have been to me like the most interesting thing going on is like all the stuff that the CNCF announced. I don't know if it's all Kubecon North America, because this was my first time going to Kubecon North America, but it was definitely like something that was kind of unique and different from Europe, from the European version.
Mofi Rahman
No, I think the announcements are always great. I think this year another kudos to CNCF for highlighting the Project Pavilion in a better way. I think they had this taking a group of people to project, to project, to get people to talk about all these different projects. Project Pavilion also was situated in, I think more of a central location where people could easily find them. So that was, I think a big win for people to be able to find this open source project that a lot of people rely on. So it was good for people to know about different projects that they probably otherwise wouldn't have heard about. Also for the projects to be able to recruit new contributors and maintainers and members.
Abdel Sigewar
Yes.
Mofi Rahman
So I think that was a big win for me. I went by the Project Pavilion multiple times just to talk to people about different projects. And yeah, that was exciting stuff.
Abdel Sigewar
Yeah. And we spent quite a lot of time also recording some content which should be coming out soon. Video content to be more precise.
Mofi Rahman
Yeah, we got to interview a few different projects and few people. Obviously there were a lot more than we could have covered. But it was a start. Hopefully in the future we'll get to do more of those.
Abdel Sigewar
Yeah. And something I learned is that you used to do some photography. You taught me a lot about videography and photography.
Mofi Rahman
Yeah, it's kind of like in a past life. I had like a small business back in college. I actually used to do that. And back then I was like, this skill will never come in useful ever again. But look at me now.
Abdel Sigewar
Yes. Now you have cameras and stuff.
Mofi Rahman
Yeah. This is, I guess, lesson to everybody, listening. Any skill you have, if not directly, sometimes indirectly, can be used for other things.
Abdel Sigewar
Yes, yes, definitely. Definitely. Well, cool. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for filling up for Kathleen. Although I don't think any of us could actually fill up for Kathleen anyway.
Mofi Rahman
No. Yeah. So I think in Seattle there has been a storm as if we are recording this. So yeah, Kazlin is okay, but Internet connection has been a little less than ideal. So we're hoping that get fixed very soon.
Abdel Sigewar
Yes.
Mofi Rahman
And yeah. And anybody else that are listening are now again, you're going to be listening to this in the future. But if you are struggling with the Internet connection and the storm, our best wishes and yeah. So that everything gets fixed very quickly.
Abdel Sigewar
Yes, we wish you the best. All right, thank you very much, Bobby.
Kathleen
That brings us to the end of another episode. If you enjoyed the show, please help us spread the word and tell a friend. If you have any feedback for us, you can find us on social media Kubernetespod or reach us by email at kubernetespodcastgoogle.com you can also check out the website at kubernetespodcast.com where you'll find transcripts, show notes and links. To subscribe, please consider rating us in your podcast player so we can help more people find and enjoy the show. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
Release Date: November 26, 2024
Hosts: Abdel Sghiouar, Kaslin Fields
Title: KubeCon North America 2024
The episode kicks off with hosts Abdel Sghiouar and Mofi Rahman welcoming listeners to their comprehensive coverage of KubeCon North America 2024. They highlight that their colleague Kathleen engaged with attendees on the show floor to gather insights and behind-the-scenes perspectives.
Abdel and Mofi begin by updating listeners on significant developments within the Kubernetes community:
CERT Manager Graduation (00:31):
Abdel announces that CERT Manager has graduated to a CNCF Graduate Project. CERT Manager automates TLS and MTLS certificate issuance and renewal, enhancing security for internet applications.
"CERT Manager is a popular certificates manager for Internet applications, allowing developers to automate TLS and MTLS certificate issuance and renewal. Congratulations Sert Manager for achieving this milestone." – Abdel Sghiouar
Dapr Graduation (00:44):
Mofi shares that Dapr (Distributed Applications Runtime) has also graduated, offering a portable runtime with integrated APIs for building production-ready applications.
"Congratulations DAPR for this achievement." – Mofi Rahman
Istio Ambient Mesh GA (01:01):
Abdel highlights Istio's release of version 1.24, marking Istio Ambient Mesh as generally available (GA). The Ztunnel and Waypoint proxies are now stable for production use.
"Istio ambient mesh is GA. The Ztunnel and Waypoint proxies which constitute the core features of Ambient Mesh have been marked as stable and ready for production use cases." – Abdel Sghiouar
Cloud Native Heroes Challenge (01:16):
Mofi discusses CNCF's new bounty program aimed at combating patent trolls by encouraging developers to provide public information that invalidates unethical patents.
"The Cloud Native Heroes Challenge... aiming at helping fight patent trolls during the keynote of the event." – Mofi Rahman
CNCF Event Lineup for 2025 (01:37):
Abdel outlines CNCF's event schedule for 2025, including KubeCons in Europe, China, Japan, India, and North America, an Open Source Security Con, and 30 Kubernetes Community Days globally.
New Cloud Native Certifications (02:00):
Mofi announces three new certifications: Certified Backstage Associate, OpenTelemetry Certified Associate, and Kiverno Certified Associate.
Certification Price Increase (02:10):
Abdel notes that the Linux Foundation will raise prices by 10% for major Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKS, CKAD) and the Linux Certified System Administrator Exams starting next year.
WASM Cloud Incubation (02:25):
Mofi reveals that WASM Cloud has joined CNCF as an incubating project, enabling polyglot applications on Kubernetes Cloud and Edge.
Spectro Cloud Fundraising (02:38):
Abdel reports that Spectro Cloud has raised $75 million in Series C funding to enhance their Kubernetes management solutions for on-premises, cloud, and edge environments.
Solo's Donation to CNCF (02:52):
Mofi mentions that Solo has donated their Glue API Gateway to CNCF, facilitating native Kubernetes API endpoint and ingress management.
Kathleen conducted interviews with several key attendees, capturing their experiences and insights from KubeCon NA 2024.
Rajas, a Kubernetes expert at Broadcom and tech lead at Tag Runtime, emphasized the integration of AI with cloud-native technologies.
"There has been a lot of buzz around scheduling AI workloads... extending Kubernetes to add more resource scheduling or more efficiency." – Rajas
Jeremy shared his enthusiasm for reconnecting with contributors and discussed security advancements and the momentum around Istio.
"I took away the news about Ambient going GA and also in the keynotes... really cool things about envoy based app gateways." – Jeremy Rickard
Joe highlighted the importance of community connections and ongoing projects like the Container Object Storage Interface.
"For KubeCon, it's always about connections... I love meeting new contributors and talking about their projects." – Joe Thompson
Jimmy discussed SpiceDB, a database specialized for authorization data, and its role in securing Kubernetes.
"SpiceDB is a database that is specialized for storing authorization data... securing Kubernetes using SpiceDB." – Jimmy Zelensky
Frederik focused on performance measurement tools that help optimize cloud resource costs and improve application performance.
"We build tooling to measure and analyze performance over time to lower resource cost and improve performance." – Frederik Brancic
Lucy emphasized the importance of staying updated with Kubernetes advancements to enhance Uber's compute platform.
"It's always important to meet up with contributors and see what's next... working on less disruption when you do stuff to your pods." – Lucy
Sree expressed excitement about contributing to the community and delving into WASM.
"I was hoping to get a 101 on WASM, make new friends, and catch up with old ones." – Sree
The discussion with attendees revealed several prominent trends shaping the Kubernetes landscape:
Rajas noted the significant focus on integrating AI with cloud-native technologies, emphasizing the importance of workload security and quantum machine learning.
"The main trend is the focus on security... involvement from end users with lots of case studies." – Rajas
Security remains a top priority, with discussions around securing AI workloads and enhancing overall Kubernetes security measures.
"There's a lot of security related content... increasing security and seeing work projects are doing to increase security." – Jeremy Rickard
Kathleen and Rajas observed a move towards running diverse workloads on Kubernetes, including low-latency and AI-specific tasks, necessitating more specialized resource management.
"Heterogeneous workloads on Kubernetes... extending Kubernetes core APIs beyond container workloads." – Kathleen
Lucy highlighted the growing importance of hardware specificity, such as GPU and ARM architectures, to meet the demands of modern workloads.
"Users and developers really do care about what hardware their workloads are using... moving on to ARM for cost and energy efficiency." – Lucy
Joe pointed out emerging trends in governance for Large Language Models (LLMs) and the increasing emphasis on observability within Kubernetes.
"Governance of LLMs... there's a lot more talk this year about observability." – Joe Thompson
Attendees shared their most valuable insights and lessons from the conference:
Rajas:
"The focus on quantum machine learning for Kubernetes... sounds pretty cool." – Rajas (14:11)
Jeremy Rickard:
"Session on API compatibility... introduces a new flag to the API server to manage targeted API versions." – Jeremy Rickard (14:35)
Joe Thompson:
"In-place POD resize is going into beta in 1.32... eagerly awaiting the release." – Joe Thompson (18:02)
Kathleen:
"Advice on avoiding burnout by building concrete workflows from Scott Rigby... keeping safe from unsustainable interactions." – Kathleen (15:54)
Frederik Brancic:
"Exciting challenges in operating AI workloads... tackling complicated and interesting problems." – Frederik Brancic (16:27)
Lucy:
"Demo on using Firecracker for non-disruptive application migration... promising for databases and reducing disruption." – Lucy (16:55)
Sree:
"Gained foundational knowledge on WASM and plans to explore further." – Sree (17:47)
Attendees provided feedback and suggestions for future KubeCons:
Rajas:
"Maintain the current momentum and include more academic talks and case studies." – Rajas (18:27)
Jeremy Rickard:
"Increase end-user participation to showcase real-world applications of Kubernetes projects." – Jeremy Rickard (18:46)
Joe Thompson:
"Expand tutorials and hands-on workshops to foster community growth, and reintegrate virtual components for greater accessibility." – Joe Thompson (19:22)
Kathleen:
"Enhance the visibility of the Project Pavilion and improve communication to prevent attendee confusion during events." – Kathleen (19:57)
Frederik Brancic:
"Incorporate more in-depth technical talks and highlight CNCF projects more prominently at the main event." – Frederik Brancic (20:36)
Lucy:
"Feature more end-user implementation stories to provide practical insights and relatable experiences." – Lucy (20:36)
Sree:
"Increase technical content and workshops, and improve the Call for Papers (CFP) filtering to ensure high-quality sessions." – Sree (21:04)
The hosts concluded by reflecting on the vibrant community spirit and the picturesque setting of Salt Lake City, where KubeCon was held. Abdel and Mofi shared their positive impressions of the city's mountains and snowfall, underscoring the welcoming atmosphere of the conference.
"KubeCon is always part work, part talking to people, and part meeting coworkers and friends... always pretty good." – Mofi Rahman (22:10)
They also touched on the growth of the Kubernetes community, with a significant influx of new members celebrating Kubernetes' 10th anniversary. The discussion included the importance of CNCF's role in fostering project visibility and community engagement.
The episode offers a thorough exploration of KubeCon North America 2024, capturing the essence of the event through attendee experiences, latest project updates, and emerging trends in the Kubernetes ecosystem. With insightful quotes and detailed discussions, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the current state and future directions of Kubernetes and its vibrant community.
For more details, transcripts, and show notes, visit kubernetespodcast.com. Subscribe and rate the podcast to stay updated with the latest in the Kubernetes world.