In this 3-part series, we’ll bring to you updates from the latest edition of KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 live from the Fira València convention center in sunny Valencia, Spain.
But first: What is KubeCon? KubeCon is a multi-day tech conference organized by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) aimed at bringing together contributors and maintainers of Kubernetes and numerous other open-source projects in the cloud-native space, as well as its end-user community. In this first blog, we’ll bring to you the happenings from Wednesday 17th May, day 1 of the event.
With 7000 plus in-person attendees, for most of us it was the first time in a while we had interaction with so many individuals in real life. And for some (approx 65% of the attendees) it was their first KubeCon ever. The energy showed.
We started off with the keynotes. Priyanka Sharma, who is currently heading the CNCF in her opening keynote reminded us about the principles the Kubernetes community stands for empathy, collaboration, and professionalism. We had a special guest, Van Jones who joined live and delivered an inspiring talk. He said, “The future used to be written by lawyers.. But now, in a future that is written in code, this is a community everyone can contribute to.”
A couple of special announcements were made:
- KubeCon 2023 is coming (back) to Amsterdam.
- Prometheus Certified Associate beta exam coming soon!
The rest of the keynotes were quite end-user heavy, with various companies sharing experiences on their cloud-native journeys. We had insightful stories from the likes of Boeing, Intel, Mercedes Benz, Huawei, and Kasten, all of who are heavily invested in Kubernetes for their core systems.
Mercedes Benz which currently has 900 clusters running worldwide, told us a story with an analogy to constructing the Ulmer Münster tower, which was fascinating. An important lesson here is to optimize for innovation and user experience as against optimizing for cost and governance. The four freedoms of open source, namely, run, read, modify and share, combined with an inner-source approach, i.e., open-source but within the scope of a company, is something that many enterprises of today could adopt to push innovation further.
After the keynotes, the breakout sessions spread across the numerous halls and rooms of the Fira València convention center. We’ll share a couple of the best breakouts we attended today.
One of the educative sessions of the day was Daniel Bryant’s talk titled “From Kubernetes to PaaS to… Err, What’s Next”. It made total sense when he proposed the “Golden Path” as a set of tooling built by Platform Engineers to guide and increase developer efficiency. If developers want to deviate from the “Golden Path” it’s up to them to maintain the stack.
In a talk by Yuvel Avrahami and Shaul Ben Hai of Alto Networks, we learned the concept of “Trampoline pods”, pods so powerful that if their node goes rogue, it could launch devastating attacks against the cluster and in some cases completely take over it. A famous example of a victim of this vulnerability was once Cilium, whose daemonset pods were open for an attack that would allow compromise of the entire cluster.
Of course, the best part of the day at KubeCon is the “Hallway track”. This is the corridor and open space where you get to meet some great people. And of course the booth crawl with a mind-boggling number of tech vendors ranging from the smallest startups to global giants.
After an energetic first day at KubeCon (and clocking up an unusually big number of steps on the Health app ;)) we are off to wind down in preparation for day 2. See you tomorrow!
