In-Depth

KubeCon 2024 Day 2: Notes from the Field

• By Tom Fenton
• 11/18/2024

After my first day at KubeCon, during which I attended many sessions and a few after-hours events, I was ready for a second day.

Keynotes
The day started with a keynote speech by Priyanka Sharma, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). She mentioned that Kubernetes (K8s) has been around for a decade and has seen explosive, unprecedented growth. It now hosts over 200 projects, with 257K individual contributors to those projects, 756 CNCF members, and over 96K cloud-native community members!

The keynotes were packed, and there was standing room only when they kicked off.

She was followed by a group of CNCF members who discussed one of CNCF's and open source's biggest threats -- patent trolls. Patent trolls are companies whose only business is to threaten lawsuits against companies that use certain technologies. These trolls' claims are often frivolous, but smaller companies may settle with them instead as the cost of fighting them exceeds the cost of litigation. The good news is that a dedicated group of individuals has come up with a strategy to fight these trolls and has a 90% success rate when fighting them.

With this in mind, they kicked off the Cloud Native Heros Challenge, where you can earn cash prizes for helping with their effort by finding prior art to stop patent trolls.

A keynote address by Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, followed. He talked about the contributions SUSE and Rancher, which SUSE now owns, have made to Linux and Kubernetes. He also mentioned that SUSE will continue to do so and spoke about why he passionately believes in open, community-based standards based on Kubernetes for innovations in AI and the edge.

The rest of the morning was filled with keynotes about AI and how Kubernetes makes it more consumable and usable.

The rest of the day was chock full of sessions, and many of the attendees that I talked to complained that there were so many good sessions that it was hard to pick which one to attend.

The Show Floor
Over 250 booths were on the show floor, from very large companies like Red Hat, Intel, and Google to start-up companies manned by one or two people.

The floor also housed the project pavilion, where more than 70 CNCF projects and their maintainers were located. Here, you could learn about them and snag project stickers. You could also pick up the show's T-shirt with a cool mountain theme.

KubeCon has always been about giving back to the community. In keeping with this on the floor was a "Laptop Drive" where you could donate your old laptop, which would be passed on to those in need. I wish I had known about this earlier, as I would have brought one to donate.

The Linux Foundations learning lounge was at the end of the floor, where sessions and hands-on labs were held.

I got to talk to the folks at Tintri about how their storage platform enables K8s. By the way, they did have the coolest booth on the floor.

Announcements
Many companies use KubeCon to announce new features for their products. Below are a few that I found interesting:

• Mirantis announced Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE) 4, which builds on its long-established product line that they claim sets the standard for secure enterprise Kubernetes.
• Kubiya introduced Captain Kubernetes, the first AI-powered teammate for simplifying Kubernetes management. With natural language interaction and self-healing capabilities, this tool enhances efficiency and control. They believe that it will usher in a new era of autonomous cluster management.
• Infinidat has introduced its Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture to enhance generative AI (GenAI) for enterprises. It improves AI model accuracy by leveraging up-to-date, private data from various sources, including both unstructured and structured data on Infinidat platforms.
  
  RAG allows enterprises to optimize AI output using existing InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA systems without extra equipment. It also supports hybrid multi-cloud environments with InfuzeOSTM Cloud Edition, making storage infrastructure a strategic asset for GenAI applications.
• Loft Labs has launched the public beta of vCluster Cloud, a managed solution that simplifies and reduces costs for Kubernetes clusters. This allows enterprises to deploy vCluster more easily, with a cloud option for quicker setup and the flexibility of self-hosted deployments. Additionally, the new External Database Connector in Platform v4.1 enables virtual clusters to use external databases like MySQL and Postgres (e.g., Amazon RDS) with automated setup and secure credential management for streamlined provisioning.

After-Hour Events
Of course, there were after-hours events. The #KubeCrawl + CloudNativeFest kicked off the night for me. It was held on the floor and sponsored by CDW. They did an excellent job of bringing in local foods, including dirty sodas and Beehive cheese. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and had a good time. Jugglers, magicians, and the often maligned balloon twisters were among the crowd.

At the crawl, there were classic arcade games, including PacMan. You could also get a photo of yourself on a ski lift, a robot-drawn portrait, or kickback by the fire with live guitar music. Heck, they even had a Pickleball court.

The next event I attended was the Heroku + AWS Evening Social, held at Flanker Kitchen + Sporting Club in Salt Lake City. The food and craft cocktails were good, and the DJ kept his mad beats to an acceptable level.

I then wandered over to the bar called the Lake Effect for a happy hour put on by Apollo, Honeycomb, Oso, and Pulumi for a house-made cocktail and some tasty Latin-inspired cuisine. This was a gorgeous old-school bar.

I turned in a bit late, so I was glad that KubeCon Keynotes will start at 9 a.m. tomorrow rather than earlier.