Key Takeaways from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon: Containers Everywhere
The last big open source conference of 2018 was KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018, and if there’s one big takeaway from the jam-packed event it’s this: containers and Kubernetes are making big waves in the open source community.
The conference, organized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), gathered over 8,000 attendees from cloud native communities from December 10–13, 2018. The sold-out event was loaded with high-level keynotes, presentations, panel discussions, dialog and deeper dives on projects like Kubernetes, Istio, OpenTracing, Prometheus, Helm — and much more. Attendees had a chance to listen to lots of exciting talks from community members, open source project maintainers, developers and end-users like AirBnB, Reddit, Lyft, Bloomberg, and eBay.
From attending the conference, it is clear that the drive for container technology has moved Kubernetes into the mainstream. At Comcast, our cloud native journey continues as we adopt technology to meet our specific needs. Kubernetes has been a valuable tool for us as we’ve accelerated our shift to DevOps, and it has dramatically helped speed up our application deployment times. We also learned that serverless is becoming a key component in cloud-native computing, and multi-cloud, multi-cluster computing is on the rise. During the conference, the CNCF announced that the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Etcd as an incubation-level hosted project. Etcd is an open source distributed key value store that offers a consistent way to store data across a cluster of machines. Expanding the deployment scope for Kubernetes into mesh and edge ecosystems was also a consistent theme during the week. We learned that projects like Istio, an open source orchestrated service mesh, will become critical for more complex, distributed, multi-platform Kubernetes environments.
At Comcast, we are big users, and supporters of Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally developed by SoundCloud to provide greater visibility into microservices architectures. That’s why we developed Trickster, a tool to make Prometheus dashboards run smoother and faster. I had the opportunity to co-present with my colleague James Ranson on the last day of the conference. The presentation can be found here.
The CNCF and Linux Foundation do a fabulous job of creating a conference that actively encourages diverse participation. We were excited sponsor the EmpowHer Reception the night before the conference, at Fare Start restaurant. We especially loved this restaurant because they been serving with a cause, and helping people in need for more than 25 years.
As Kubernetes and the CNCF landscape continue to mature, and with a vibrant, growing community to support it, we are excited for great things to come.
