KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 recap
This week I had the great pleasure of attending this year’s KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam. It was a huge event with over 10.000 participants, there was a wide range of talks across all parts of the CNCF.
In general I would say this year’s top themes (which might be due a certain observation bias) are clearly security and sustainability. There were many startups presenting new product ideas around OPA, Rego, and policy control in general.
For me sustainability is an interesting topic, I like how Google Cloud makes it easy to choose low carbon regions to run your workloads. But in my personal opinion, if you work on the cost efficiency of your workloads you will most likely always also reduce your workload’s carbon footprint since CPU, Memory, Storage and Traffic are the cause of carbon dioxide and are the cost drivers in cloud.
Kelsey Hightower did a great open discussion around Open Source monetisation. By the large crowd you could clearly see his significance to the Cloud Native community. But his thoughts on how to make a business out of open source resonated with me. You need to be user driven and empathetic in what you are doing, to understand what value you can give to your users and how to make a business out of it.
He shared a little wisdom that gave me a new perspective on why some enterprises struggle with contributing to OSS. Or at least why to open source software in the first place. There is an inherent fear of bad PR, should the company decide not to invest into the OSS project or reduce maintenance efforts. Or if what the OSS community would like to get as a feature is not inline with the direction the company wants to take.
Cici Huang shared the work the K8S Apimachinery SIG is doing towards self contained Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). The basic idea is to add Common Expression Language (CEL) based validation to CRD definitions. This idea can be extended to also provide migration support in the future. Validation is very cool, and reduces a lot of complexity you have to do today with webhooks, it’s available in beta from v1.25 onwards.
I learned a lot about eBPF, which I always mistook as a networking only tool. But there are many, very cool applications for eBPF in the app observability space. I’m really looking forward to having eBPF based “flight recorders” giving me insights into my code. You might want to check out Parca for that, I know I will.
There were also a lot of “smaller” things. DevSpaces is still a cool tool, Istio Ambient Mesh is coming and GitOps is going to be better than ever whether you are using Flux or Argo. It’s going to be exciting times using the CNCF ecosystem to create, deploy and run our applications.
There were two personal highlights for me this year. My brother who is also a Software Engineer was also attending KubeCon, it was a pleasure discussing the various sessions with him. And seeing my demo on how to use Google Cloud APIs from on-prem securely using Spiffe at the Spiffe booth, made me very proud. Spiffe is a great multi-cloud identity framework you might want to check out.
I’m already looking forward to the next KubeCon and what is happening in the community by then.
