KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019
The KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference which gathers adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud-native communities. It provides the attendees with the opportunity to join Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, gRPC, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, CoreDNS, NATS, Linkerd and Helm as the community gathers for four days to further the education and advancement of cloud-native computing.
With nearly 8000 people attending, KubeCon 2019 was a huge event. The size of the conference meant stretching our legs a lot to reach the far-flung presentations we really wanted to see. While that was exhausting, all the talk kept our eyes open and provided us a great opportunity to talk live and exchange views and opinions with those responsible for important cloud native projects and hear how they intend to develop them further. There were also providers of software and hardware solutions, with whom we exchanged opinions and learned from.
Definitely, the hot topic was a network service mesh. Microsoft stole the show announcing the launch of Service Mesh Interface, an open project that defines a set of common APIs that provide developers with interoperability across different service mesh technologies.
The Service Mesh Interface includes:
- A standard interface for meshes on Kubernetes.
- A basic feature set for the most common mesh use cases.
- Flexibility to support new mesh capabilities over time.
- Space for the ecosystem to innovate with mesh technology.
Many other announcements were made by vendors during the event:
- Rancher Labs announced Rio, a MicroPAAS that runs on any conformant K8S cluster.
- VMware announced a CSI plugin that will allow for persistent volumes on vSphere storage and that it will support multi-vCenter and multi-Datacenter configurations with volume and raw mounts.
- VMware released Velero 1.0, an open source backup and restore, disaster recovery, Kubernetes migration tool. Velero comes to VMware via its Heptio acquisition and was formally known as ARK.
- Oracle, which had a large booth at the conference, announced that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Broker for Kubernetes clusters is now generally available as open source software.
K8S has reached a level of maturity where we are seeing hardware designed specifically for the K8S, such as Diamanti, a hyperconvergent K8S device, and Softiron, a Ceph storage array that runs on hardware. For security, Twistlock had a strong presence at the conference. Rancher Labs continues to innovate and has announced a K8S edge distribution called K3S. Dynatrace is using AI and automation in its K8S monitoring tool. Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu) has had a great presence and is investing heavily in K8S deployment tools.
Everyone interested in Kubernetes may explore the KubeCon 2019 Barcelona playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jEASYCaVDo&list=PLj6h78yzYM2PpmMAnvpvsnR4c27wJePh3