This year, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon took place in Valencia from May 16th till May 20th.
From the first few days until the end, we followed and enjoyed all of the special keynotes and talks. Industry leaders discussed how Kubernetes and its cloud-native landscape is becoming increasingly crucial in managing heavy and complex workloads.
The topics varied from Mercedes-Benz about managing worldwide 700 clusters to Intel explaining how we can reduce energy consumption in big data centers. All of the keynotes and talks had their own unique information on handling workload complexity in your organization.
In this blog post, we point out four take aways from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon.
1. Security
In this year’s edition, we noticed a strong focus on security. We listed up some of the most interesting toolings:
- Trivy: A tool to scan your Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Dockerfiles, and Kubernetes to detect potential configuration issues that expose your deployments to the risk of attack.
- Falco: A tool to scan your containers at runtime to monitor kernel events.
- Linkerd Automatic mTLS: a tool to enable mutual TLS to securely communicate between your containers.
2. Service Mesh
Besides security, we noticed a lot of topics on how to handle and failover these complex workloads. Service mesh was a big buzzword at the event (or is actually already for years). When talking about service mesh, we also talk about: observability, security, and reliability.
When having multiple clusters running over 50k+ nodes, you need to have a failover strategy to avoid downtime. In other words: uptime needs to be maintained when failover is triggered. We noticed that Linkerd was the primary tool that big industry leaders used to achieve this.
3. Cluster API
Mercedes-Benz introduced an impressive talk on simplifying provisioning, upgrading, and operating/managing multiple Kubernetes clusters with Cluster API.
CNCF describes Cluster API as: “a Kubernetes project that enables declarative management for Kubernetes, using APIs to easily create, configure, and update clusters. It is an end-to-end approach that can simplify the repetitive tasks of the Kubernetes lifecycle while maintaining consistency and repeatability across a unified infrastructure.”
Mercedes-Benz has a modular approach by using Cluster API and Flux to provision their clusters and a custom controller to help them in their deploys.
4. Observability
Prometheus was also a hot topic during KubeCon. No wonder since it is the 2nd oldest project in the CNCF. Prometheus is widely used in the cloud-native landscape for monitoring and alerting. It is commonly used with another tooling such as Consul for service discovery.
Prometheus also came with a lot of new features that have been released recently, which are:
- Feature flags (new in v2.25)
- Agent mode (new in v2.32)
- Remote write receiver (new in v2.25)
- Env-var expansion (new in v2.27)
- Improvements for downstream distribution and library users (new in v2.35)
We were also present with our latest venture called O11y. O11y is a team of open source observability experts. We combine our passion for open source with observability and help you improve your current observability stack.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we can reduce our carbon footprint: from power-aware hardware, better workload design, and smart orchestration.
We had a great time meeting new people and talking about the various subjects around the cloud native landscape.
