In April, we had the pleasure of attending KubeCon and CloudNativeCon at the RAI Convention Center in Amsterdam. The event saw cloud-native vendors and enthusiasts from diverse backgrounds come together to explore, share and discuss the latest breakthroughs, trends and practices in the space.
Debo and Marco were fortunate enough to immerse themselves in all things cloud-native for a few days. Debo shares his thoughts on the event:
The first day of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon began with a keynote speech by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The inspiring speech explored the importance and strength of the CNCF community, as well as the vital roles of vendors. During the speech, I was made aware of some really intriguing metrics. For example, a staggering 58% of attendees were treading the KubeCon terrain for the first time—assuring me to hear as a newcomer to the event!
KubeCon was a buzzing intellectual hive of sessions. With a wide variety of insightful presentations, engaging demonstrations, and helpful tutorials to choose from, it was impossible to attend everything that sparked my interest, much to my disappointment. As one session concluded, I found myself racing against the clock, trying to find the next one. The talks were so popular that there were a few occasions when the rooms reached capacity, and I couldn’t enter. Thankfully, the CNCF was prepared for this, offering a lifeline in the form of the KubeCon Portal. The virtual platform ensured that intellectual curiosity was never compromised, even if physical space ran out, because attendees could tune in online. Phew!
Without a break in sight, there were always sessions in progress, which could be overwhelming for someone like me, who tends to get restless sitting through a 40-minute lecture. However, I found myself appreciating the speakers’ ability to distil complex, technical topics into understandable snippets for those of us not quite familiar with them.
The sessions that really caught my interest were the interactive tutorials. I particularly enjoyed tinkering with hands-on exercises designed to deepen my understanding of Istio and Networking Foundations. It was one of the standout experiences for me at the event.
In one of the keynotes, the CNCF stressed the importance of continuously educating the community to enhance technical knowledge sharing.
Given the rapid evolution of the cloud-native landscape, there’s a real risk of knowledge gaps developing among new members. Therefore, seeing a tutorial focused on teaching Networking foundations at KubeCon was uplifting, reinforcing their commitment to education.
For those who couldn’t attend or wish to revisit the sessions, the CNCF has uploaded many of the sessions on its YouTube channel.
While I enjoyed every session I attended, here are a few sessions from the event that stuck out to me:
Oxeye: Open Telemetry for Application Security
In this session, Oxeye, a cloud-native security company, emphasised the importance of vulnerability tracking across numerous infrastructure layers. This is crucial due to how service interactions can potentially impact cloud-native applications. Oxeye also showcased an assessment framework they use to rank vulnerabilities according to their threat level.
Clarity is essential in Application Security, so I found this tool to be quite valuable. During the session, the speaker, Ron, demonstrated how open-source tools like OpenTelemetry and Jaeger could be used alongside Bandit, a Python vulnerability scanner. The goal was to illustrate how a single vulnerability in a service could provide an entry point for hackers to compromise the entire cluster.
Here’s a link to Oxeye’s talk if you want to learn more.
RedHat: Korrel8r
Another session that piqued my interest was organised and run by RedHat. The software company introduced an open-source automated correlation tool named Korrel8r, which is designed to gather data about relationships between different objects and can visualise these relationships across multiple data sources.
The goal of Korrel8r is to accelerate the process of debugging alerts by identifying their root cause within a Kubernetes cluster. Even though Korrel8r is still in the early stages of development, I’m convinced it has potential as a helpful tool, and it’s certainly a project worth keeping an eye on.
Here’s a link to RedHat’s Korrel8r presentation if you want to learn more.
Dive Into Network Foundations the Right Way: Solo.io
KubeCon wasn’t just about one-way presentations. They also included interactive tutorials for audience participation. I stumbled upon a Networking Foundation tutorial presented by Solo.io that I found particularly engaging. Marino and Jason, the speakers, made the complex concepts easy to understand.
Even better, they’ve even made the tutorial publicly available for anyone to try out. Here are links to the video and the lab.
Inside Envoy
This session discussed the origins of Envoy, an open-source edge and service proxy for cloud-native applications, and its evolution into a widely used tool across many companies. What started as a small, in-house project at Lyft transitioned to an open project on GitHub and ultimately became a fully matured CNCF project. Hearing the Envoy contributors share their journey was truly enlightening.
Here’s the link to the Envoy presentation if you’d like to hear what they’ve got to say.
Final Thoughts
I’m pleased to have attended KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 and was delighted to immerse myself in a culture of knowledge sharing. The event wasn’t just a showcase of emerging trends but a platform for learning and development, ensuring that newcomers and cloud-native veterans went away feeling inspired. It was a testament to the continuous innovation of the cloud-native realm, and every aspect of the event left me feeling inspired and eager to delve into this dynamic space. I’m already looking forward to next year’s event!