Kubecon 2018 EU : Day1 – Remote Attendee Notes

Thanks to Liz Rice for allowing to use the KubeNail art from the Tweet here as a featured image for blog!

Kubecon 2018 EU

Kubecon 2018 EU is taking place in the beautiful Copenhagen. As an attendee at Kubecon 2017 in Austin, TX I can see some themes evolving and some interesting new projects being announced. These are my notes for Kubecon 2018 EU as a Twitter & live stream attendee for the first day. The order of items in the list below is interesting to more interesting, as is with everything Kubernetes :)

Operators ++

Operators announced by CoreOS in 2016 enabled managing and deploying even complex applications easily on Kubernetes. It provided a great way to manage an application’s lifecycle cohesively. CoreOS announced Operator framework which allows writing an operator without in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes. Operator SDK enables writing an operator while the Operator lifecycle management framework gives you constructs for defining the lifecycle of your application via operator using a Go lang SDK.

Containers, Sandboxed: Emphasis on Security

We have seen a bunch of security issues affect Linux OS (Spectre & Meltdown) and Kubernetes (Hostpath issue) in last year. The emphasis on cloud native security was evident in some of the morning Keynotes on first day but what I found most interesting was the gVisor project announced by Google. gVisor takes a unique approach which is more effective than virtualisation (Not resource optimal) or rule-based tools such as seccomp, SELinux or AppArmor (Rule enforcement not always perfect and involves huge effort). I am yet to digest the all the internals of the project but the Github repo explains it well. You should also check out a quick demo video of gVisor here

Serverless, Cloud Events & Virtual Kubelet

If one thing I noticed in Kubecon 2017 at Austin, it was plenty of sessions and buzz around service mesh and specifically Istio. I feel a similar vibe around the Serverless space in Kubecon 2018 EU and specifically huge momentum around the CloudEvents Spec and related project/areas (CloudEvents website: http://cloudevents.io ) . The serverless working group has been doing some work in the space and it would be interesting to see the evolution of serverless platforms on Kubernetes and clouds. Recently announced Virtual Kubelet and integrations with ACI & Fargate and the possibilities of bursting the Kubernetes workloads in managed container services make the equation even more interesting. I still believe we are in very early days and there is a lot coming up!

https://twitter.com/goserverless/status/991717933276479489

Database & Kubernetes: Is it complicated?

As the maturity of Kubernetes is growing, more and more data related platforms are making it easier to run stateful workloads on Kubernetes. Although many customers use a managed DB service today, I think this will change in near future. I am specially intrigued by the platform that Yugabyte is building. The post has some good technical details and the team seems to have to built a great product over last 2 years. Another CNCF project which I noticed and would be curious to learn more is Vitess which enables running MySql by scaling horizontally.

More platforms

Rancher 2.0 GA

Rancher has embraced the Kubernetes as a platform entirely with the launch of Rancher 2.0. Rancher 2.0 is a great way IMO for large organisations to manage 100s of clusters as well as for smaller startups to get started with Kubernetes relatively easily.

Digital Ocean Announced Kubernetes

If there is one cloud provider that the developers were waiting to launch managed Kubernetes service - it has to be DigitalOcean. Although many details will become clearer over time, I am sure people personally present at Kubecon can get more details than I have.

Fun & Useful!

The CNCF Landscape now comes with powerful navigation and query & filtering mechanism: https://landscape.cncf.io/

With Kubernetes releasing every three months, it can be tough to keep track of what was introduced in which release. Worry no more, this website will give you a glimpse of changes in each release: http://kubernetesstatus.com

Lastly, I loved the Kubecon 2018 BINGO cards but this is my favourite one:

https://twitter.com/MayaKaczorowski/status/991570236292857856

Let me sign off for the day with KubeNail art by Liz Rice. Hope to see more nail arts of Go lang and other technologies :)

https://twitter.com/lizrice/status/990579721955168256