In-Depth

KubeCon 2024: A Final Wrap-Up

• By Tom Fenton
• 11/19/2024

The first day of KubeCon focused on Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects and cloud-native storage challenges in Kubernetes (K8s). On the second day, they had keynotes discussing the threat of patent trolls on open-source projects like K8s and how K8s makes AI more consumable. I attended the keynotes for the last two days, attended the CNCF award ceremony, and talked to various vendors and participants.

Keynotes
Chris Aniszczyk kicked off the third day of the event with a discussion with Joseph Sandoval of Adobe, Lachlan Evenson, Microsoft, and Kelsey Hightower about the past decade of cloud-native and Kubernetes and whether we're actually “there” yet. Strangely enough, I took away from this discussion that we were, but we still have a long way to go.

Another keynote that day focused on what the CNCF will focus on for 2025: more reference architecture coverage, health metrics, and community growth -- all solid goals for the organization.

Awards
Every year at KubeCon, the CNCF recognizes individuals and companies contributing to its success; this year was no different.

Taylor Dolezal presented this year's top three End User Award winners. The CNCF community votes for its top end-user members based on their contributions and achievements.

Adobe secured first place with its over 5,160 contributions across 46 projects. It showed its dedication to cloud-native by transforming its infrastructure for Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Experience Cloud, and other services, showcasing leadership in Kubernetes and developer experience tools. Capital One came in second for leveraging CNCF technologies to revolutionize financial services and contributing to Cloud Custodian. And Reddit took third place for its hybrid cloud implementation and community involvement.

There were far too many Community Awards to list here, but I encourage you to go to this page to see the winners. People like this are the backbone of K8s and the Cloud Native foundation.

CNCF created a new award this year, Lifetime Achievement, which went to Tim Hockin, a co-founder of K8s and a Google Distinguished Software Engineer.

Announcements
Throughout the week, CNCF and its partners announced new projects and improvements to existing projects and products. Although I would like to cover them all, there were too many, but below are some that I found interesting.

Tintri was one of the first companies to design storage specifically for VMware and tackled some of the unique challenges VMs put on it. I stopped by their '80s Ski lodge-themed booth to chat with Brock Mowry about an announcement they made last week about their storage and K8s.

Before KubeCon started, Tintri introduced a new Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver, bringing advanced data management to K8s. Brock demonstrated the integration between Tintri and K8s. It runs on their existing storage management framework and allows for simplified management of both container and virtual machine workloads through a single interface. It includes dynamic provisioning, advanced observability, enhanced data protection, and automated performance optimization. Tintri's CSI driver and management interface should be available before the end of the year.

KubeVirt, which allows users to run and manage VM workloads alongside container workloads on K8s, announced the release of v1.4 of this project, introducing several updates and improvements. Significant changes are that Network hotplugs, Common Instance types, performance improvements by mapping host NUMA, and GPU assignment are now enabled by default. What I like best and am dying to try is its new volume migration feature, which allows virtual machine volumes to migrate from one storage type to another. This update will strengthen its role in enabling seamless management of both VMs and containers within a K8s cluster.

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Flatcar as a CNCF incubating project. Flatcar is interesting because it is a Linux distribution optimized to run containers. It has been stripped of anything that does not further its mission. It is installed as an immutable file system and includes automatic atomic updates. Its users include Adobe, which has over 20,000 nodes running it, so it has support and should be around for a while.

It can be installed on bare metal, as a VM, or on most public clouds. Ever since I heard about Flatcar, I have wanted to install it; maybe this will be the year I get around to it. The name is pretty clever, as a flatcar is an open railcar used by trains to transport containers.

Usually, the last day of a tech convention is a dead day, as most of the big announcements have been made, and people are packing up and heading out. This was not the case at KubeCon. The sessions were still packed, and significant announcements were made.

I found one announcement so interesting that I spent an hour chatting with Ross O'Neill and Natasha Woods about Andela.

The CNCF announced that it will be partnering with Andela, the world's largest private marketplace for technical talent. With the help of CNCF and the Linux Foundation, they will train 20K to 30K African developers next year on the basics of K8s, specifically KCNA and CKAD. They project that the participants will take six to nine months to complete the training.

I see this partnership as a win/win for both organizations. CNCF will expand the adoption of K8s and other cloud-native technologies to African developers, and Andela will give the developers a leg up when pursuing jobs in the fast-growing arena of cloud-native software development, as well as ensuring talent in its marketplace is meeting the skills requests of its clients. Andela stressed that there is a substantial economic impact on the developers as Andela talent with sufficient experience (for instance, minimum 4 years DevOps) and K8s certification can earn up to 25% more than talent with the same experience but without the certifications.

Further, on the training front, CNCF held back till Friday to announce that they would offer four more certifications to help community members validate their skills. These are Certified Backstage Associate, along with OpenTelemetry Certified Associate, and Kyverno Certified Associate. They also announced a pair of new Platform Engineering-specific certifications: Certified Cloud Native Platform Associate and Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineer.

To overachievers in the exam department, the CNCF announced that 500 people had achieved the title of Kubestronaut. These are individuals who have passed all five of the K8s certificates. Congratulations are due to this dedicated crowd.

Of course, the buzz was about AI and how it would change everything. Still, if I needed to select a major thrust for practitioners and projects at the conference this year, it would be observability, as it was overrepresented in sessions and the chatter among the participants.

The CNCF landscape chart has many projects associated with observability, many of which had booths on the show floor.

For those unfamiliar, and to paraphrase the CNCF definition, observability refers to the ability to understand a system by analyzing its outputs using telemetry data like logs, metrics, and traces from various layers, including applications and infrastructure. Observability helps diagnose issues in complex systems by providing insights into service health, performance, and operational issues.

Upcoming Events
The CNCF announced the place and time for its 2025 and 2026 conferences. The next North American ones are in Atlanta and Los Angeles. It also said it will hold its first conference in Japan in 2025.

Final Thoughts on KubeCon
As everyone flies back from Salt Lake City, I am sure they will agree that it was an excellent conference.

They all will take back something different; for some, it will be a tidbit that they took away from a session, and for others, it will be something someone said in one of the keynotes about the future direction of K8s. Still, all will agree it is about the community and the people they met at the conference.

Overall, this conference had far more energy and excitement than any others I have attended this year. Its highly technical nature attracted over 9,000 attendees and 250 vendors. Yes, this year, I did see more folks in blazers and loafers than in the past, but the conference itself was still highly technical and designed for the t-shirt and shorts crowd.