Couldn’t make Kubecon 2022? Not to worry, our one and only Loren Lisk was there (virtually) and is here to give you the greatest hits.

May 18, 2022:

I started my day off real early as I was attending virtually. So after some coffee, I jumped into the opening remarks with Priyanka Sharma’s talk was about collaboration for long-term success and how The CNCF is about a large continuously growing community that must work together and each person can contribute in her/his own way. she shared some interesting numbers.

• 65% of the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon visitors are first-timers like me!
• The number if CNCF projects is growing fast
• In 2016, the first KubeCon in North America had around 700 people
• KubeCon 2022 Europe has >7’000 people onsite and >10’000 joining virtually

These were the four big announcements she presented during the keynote session:

• KubeCon Europe 2023 is going to happen in Amsterdam
• New Prometheus Certification Associate Exam
• Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Certification
• Boeing joins CNCF as a Platinum member

Next up came Mercedes-Benz talking about how it operates more than 900 Kubernetes clusters and 3,500 machines all over the world. They also mentioned that they migrated their clusters to Cluster API. the keynote by Huawei on using Incremental Deep Learning For Satellites with KubeEdge and MindSpore was very interesting if pretty niche for space. With the end of the day’s keynotes I moved on to the scheduled breakout sessions I chose to consume.

• Flux Security Deep Dive – Stefan Prodan, Weaveworks showed us the solid focus that team has with ensuring that fluxcd v2 will be as secure as possible, and also shared with us that fluxcdv2 is apart of the EKS Anywhere project, and that the trust in the system was very important to them, which is why the remainder of 2022 will be focusing on security and passing the third-party security audits.
• The next session was Overview and State of Knative created by Mauricio Salatino, VMware and Carlos Santana, IBM. They gave an overview of the Knative philosophy of being “Kubernetes native”. Knative offers a simplified developer experience deploying and managing stateless and event-driven applications. Maurico mentioned the following Knative features:
  • Simpler Abstractions
  • Autoscaling
  • Progressive Rollout
  • Event Integrations
  • Event Handling
  • Pluggable
• Next, I checked out the awesome talk on Emissary-ingress named “Emissary-ingress: Intro and Deep Dive” which shared a lot on the power that envoy can bring to the table above and beyond the normal ingress basics like built-in tracing and observability and using CRD’s to allow for self-servicing by the developers.
• Saw this very good flowchart on troubleshooting issues in Kubernetes, while talking in slack with other engineers, good for figuring out and troubleshooting the 80% of errors we normally see.
• In Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling with KEDA the speakers introduce KEDA: what it is, how it works, show it in action and discuss future plans, mostly just adding more future metric sources for KEDA to work on.
• Open Policy Agent (OPA) Intro & Deep Dive showed us again how to use OPA and went into more focus on rego and how to get things moving in your company, start small with just a few rego policies in CI with conftest and in kubernetes OpenPolicyAgent with it’s Admission Controller. Works with hundreds of other configs from terraform to kubernetes to config file validation. Helps take written policies and translates them to executable code for all layers of the stack.
• In Fluent Bit: Logs, OpenMetrics, and OpenTelemetry all-in-one they show Fluent-bit being a solid node level forewarder before aggregating at the cluster level fluentd instance, where you can push those pesky logs off cluster and into a secured and analyzable system like elasticsearch or to a third party log service like cloudwatch or logz.io

There were a lot more sessions at Kubecon EU 2022 to go through and I’ve got way more from day 1 to process and internalize, but this mostly wraps up my initial thoughts.

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