In-Depth

KubeCon 2024 Day 1: Field Notes and Cloud-Native Storage

• By Tom Fenton
• 11/14/2024

KubeCon, the premier Kubernetes (K8s) conference, is being held this week (Nov. 12-15) in Salt Lake City. In this article, I will highlight my experience on the first day of the event.

Before I start with a recap of my experiences during my first day at KubeCon, I must say that sometimes I just nail it. In a previous article discussing things you can do in Utah before or after the conference, I stated, "The weather in SLC in November is highly variable. It may be in the 70s and ideal for short-sleeved clothing, or you may need to bring your winter parking as it may be snowing." Sure enough, yesterday, when I arrived in SLC, it was in the mid-70s, but this morning, I woke up with a few snowflakes floating down and dusting snow on the rooftops.

As other technology conferences have seen their attendance stagnate or even decline over the past years, KubeCon has seen explosive growth in the number of people attending it and in the types of people. In 2016, Natasha Woods invited me and 20 other analysts and media types to the first KubeCon; maybe 1,000 people were in attendance. The vendor's "pavilion" was held in the hallway between the ballrooms where the sessions were held. This year it is being held in the gorgeous Hyatt Regency hotel and the spacious Salt Palace across the street. The audience has also changed from the cargo shorts, t-shirt, and sneaker crowd of uber-techies to a more diverse crowd, including a few attendees with blazers and loafers, but the content is still intensely technology driven.

The first session I attended today, after picking up my badge, was A Hitchhiker's Guide to the CNCF Landscape by Katherine Druckman and Lori Lorusso. In it, they discussed Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects. One of the more interesting slides they showed compared the number of projects CNCF had in 2015 (a dozen or two) to the number they have today (over 200).

Storage has always been an interesting proposition with cloud-native applications in general and K8s in particular. Most cloud-native applications and container workloads are ephemeral and stateless, so storing data with them can pose some interesting problems. The following next two sessions I attended discussed some of the storage projects that CNCF is involved with, including three new ones that I hadn't heard of before, Dragonfly, CubeFS, and LONGHORN.

The rest of the morning was filled with sessions around other projects, including the status of some of their more popular projects, including Kepler, which estimates container power usage and offers insights into container energy efficiency and carbon footprint. Another session also discussed why OpenTelemetry is so complicated and what's new in Prometheus, a prevalent open-source systems monitoring system and a CNCF graduate project.

There was also an interesting session on K8gb, which performs global load balancing, high availability, and seamless failover. They also discussed its new extensibility, which allows integration with various resources like Gateways and non-HTTP Services.

In the afternoon, I attended sessions on some new projects, such as WasmEdge, a lightweight, high-performance, and cross-platform LLM inference runtime that allows developers to write against an API and then compile it to Wasm.

What's New
CNCF took the first day to make a announcements about new projects and highlight some of the announcements that were made ahead of the event. Below are a few of the ones that caught my attention:

• OpenCost moves to the CNCF Incubator. More than a few companies have been caught off guard by their cloud bills. This project is a vendor-neutral open-source project for measuring and allocating cloud infrastructure and container costs in real-time.
• CNCF announces cert-manager. Certificates can be difficult to manage and maintain, and this project helps cloud-native developers automate Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) certificate issuance and renewal.
• Jaeger v2: The big announcement in Jager V2, an open-source tracing project, is that it now utilizes the OpenTelemetry Collector framework as the base.

After-Hour Events
As I mentioned above, many of the technology conferences I attend have gotten smaller over the past couple of years, and as such, the number of companies willing to invest in after-hour events has also dwindled, but not so with KubeCon. This year, the problem was deciding which event to attend. Some companies/bosses/editors (my present editor excluded) don't fully appreciate the value of these events. These events allow the sponsor to show appreciation to their customers and supporters with food, drinks, and entertainment, and they also enables them to introduce their name and products to unfamiliar people. I fondly remember when Ice-T did a show for a vendor at KubeCon, and yes, people were talking about it for the rest of the conference.

I attended several different events, including SUSE's A Night at the Museum evening reception, the Falco Graduation Party at the Dueling Piano Show, sponsored by Sysdig, Google, and GitLab, and the Media + Analyst Welcome Reception, put on by the CNCF.

The first day at KubeCon was a success as I was able to brush up on a few of the CNCF projects, catch up with a few friends, and have a blast at the after-hours events. Tomorrow kicks off with the keynotes, followed by more sessions and announcements.

All keynotes and sessions will be recorded and available on the CNCF YouTube channel within two weeks of the event.