KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Europe 2018

My highly subjective impressions and ramblings.
Somewhat unstructured because I wanted to get it out fast when it is fresh.

The full program can be found here, some of the talks have links to their presentations if you click on the talk.

Update: Videos are already available, one day after the conference is over, impressive!

Coolest cloud demo ever!

@austencollins, creator of the Serverless Framework show cased a collaborative demo using the new emerging “standard” CloudEvents (it is not a standard by name, but it is a standard). Upload a picture to AWS S3 or Azure Blob storage, send events to several variants of cloud functions, the functions could do whatever they wanted before tweeting. Half of them did image recognition, the other half just posted it as-is. Think the funniest one was IBM Watson that thought a scooter was a “laser guided bomb”. Results on Twitter and the code on GitHub.

Key take aways:

• WE ARE ALL FACING THE SAME PROBLEM, join the CNCF end user community
• CI/CD is prerequisite and was one of the major themes

CI FTW

• Engage with the community, according to Cloud Foundry surveys from their customers 80% of developers want to contribute to the community. However only 34% of them do, and only 43% of the companies. Spotify also talked about this. Me: there are probably very few none core business things these days a company should build from scratch. Pick an existing project, assign resources that can fix or add what is not working or missing. Thinking about how Ubisoft did with Charts museum. Don’t build it yourself unless you absolutely must! The Financial Times keynote also pointed this out: “We are not a container orchestration company”, they did build their own orchestration but moved to Kubernetes in the end.

• Multi-everything: hybrid-multi-cloud is probably the default in a year or two. It is already happening in various ways.
• Really liked the CNCF landscape and the cloud native trail map, l.cncf.io, check it out!

I would add: 0. Use Git and proper branching strategy

• The Kubernetes and CNCF is maturing, and it is doing so fast! Developer experience and enterprise features like security, audit etc. seems to be focus this and next year.

The way to the cloud platform

• Diversity is a big deal at the moment and highlighted at the conference. This is a topic IKEA can be proud of, it is built into our core.
• Kubernetes Operators seems like a must to look into, CoreOS has made it easy (well, at least not as complex) to build: Introducing Operator Framework
• BEFORE you even think about service meshes, think about context propagation. (Yes, requires a longer explanation but it is related to Observability)
• At one of the Envoy talks by Lyft, the maintener Jose Nino stressed the importance of providing good documentation. It helps a lot when onboarding new developers, couldn’t agree more!

Disruptor — digital banking

Monzo, perhaps London’s hippest bank didn’t even exist three years ago! They were on stage during one of the keynotes talking about lessons learned from production problems. Imagine your own bank doing that…

Also, some of the big companies out there are running at start up speed but with massive scale, so beware, make the transformation to a software company now.

Some other great talks:

• Helm plus Service Catalog, really enjoyed this talk, super interesting and important work.
• Booking.com that did a clever thing when introducing Envoy, they started by using it only for their consumers.

• The Envoy intro+deep dive and the Nats intro+deep dive

Things I need to do:

Engage in the community! My only real regret in my career is not engaging more in the broader community. Time for action (and to learn Go).

Bucketlist for things to look into

• Weaveworks — their take on GitOps, well they coined the name it seems, not sure it is a good thing. Their showcase where git becomes the audit log for passing regulation is compelling.
• Istio and Envoy — service mesh is hotter than hot and might actually be consumable already now. Interesting thing is that in a panel debate someone said that you have to have CI/CD in place before you embark on your service mesh journey. Turned out that Envoy has other use cases than in a service mesh.
• Speaking about service meshes, Nats looks like an interesting option for cloud native messaging. 7Mb container image for the server and it can scale like mad. And there are some work done already to use Nats with Envoy(?) to speed up and use the load balancing in Nats. HTTP/2 is nice, but I think messaging is a better fit in many scenarios. Now it can happen seamlessly without the developers even knowing or having to care. Have to follow up on this, could be an alternative to Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ. They have focused on simplicity, stability and scale. It has no support for the OpenMessaging standard though, but that could be built on top of it as a Nats application perhaps, just as Nats Streaming is?
• Rancher 2.0 — OSS container management platform. Good at building a community, think it will be both big and popular. Looks promising so far, started to play around with 2.0-beta3 but not done yet.
• Google Skaffold — “Skaffold is a command line tool that facilitates continuous development for Kubernetes applications”.
• K8s admission webhooks — here it is possible to for instance deny a Pod to be scheduled.
• Hasura, has an interesting GitOps solution with focus on the developer experience.

Other uncategorized stuff

• SPIFFE (Secure Production Identify Framework for Everyone — now that’s a mouthful!)
• Google Kubernetes Podcast
• Programming in Go Youtube channel — Just4Func — Personal tip from a Google developer during dinner that is working on the k8s default scheduler.
• CRD — Custom Resource Definitions, extend the Kubernetes API — MetaController
• Docker seems marginalized to yet another platform provider.

Last but not least

Always apply the boy scout rule when leaving the camp ground, or in this case, the key note, by taking out an extra pair of cups that wasn’t mine.