Top Talks and Trends We’re Looking Forward to at CloudNativeCon+KubeCon 2019 San Diego

Three years ago, through roundtable discussions within Work-Bench’s infrastructure executive network, we saw first-hand the need for automating and orchestrating application deployments, and learned more about the potential for Kubernetes. We even deemed it the winner in the container orchestration wars. With Docker’s recent sale of its enterprise business to Mirantis, Kubernetes continues its steady march on becoming a standard for managing microservices. Today, we’re entering into a new phase for the technology’s adoption led by some incredible cloud-native companies built over the years. We’ve had the privilege to invest and support companies like CoreOS (acquired by Red Hat), CockroachDB, Scytale, Windmill, Algorithmia, and FireHydrant, all solving for timely and important problems in this space and we continue to stay on top of new trends in this space.

Seeing what’s in store at CloudNativeCon+KubeCon is the best way to understand where we are in this journey and this post captures the top talks we’re most looking forward to at CloudNativeCon+KubeCon this year.

Kubernetes is Running at Scale Across Organizations. Last year, Kubernetes was a science project for most forward-thinking organizations. Today, it’s running massive workloads at companies like Spotify, Fidelity, and the Department of Defense. Check out these talks to see and learn from early adopters on their Kubernetes setups.

• Uber’s Kubernetes Migration Journey for Microservices: This talk by Yunpen Liu discusses the migration from Mesos to Kubernetes at Uber’s scale — 15M trips a day across 600+ cities — and walks through two case studies on logging and networking.
• Fidelity’s Move to “Finance Grade” Kubernetes with GitOps: A view into how far along Fidelity, as a major financial services provider, has deployed Kubernetes and the challenges they faced in introducing this to their organization.
• How the Department of Defense Moved to Kubernetes and Istio: This talk showcases the DoD’s foray into cloud-native technologies and their entire stack built. If you’re interested in security, this would be a good one to attend as it dives into how the DoD built a zero-trust architecture to support their work.

Security, Identity & Policy: With every new paradigm shift, there’s a lot of key considerations for teams to understand here, especially the potential for attacks. where it can happen, and how teams can limit the blast radius to contain them.

• Piloting Around the Rocks — Avoiding Threats in Kubernetes. Trail of Bits is a high-end security research and engineering firm that conducted a security review of Kubernetes and in this talk breaks down the architecture of Kubernetes into Trust Zones, where controls need to be enforced or will result in security failures.
• Security Beyond Buzzwords — How to Secure Kubernetes with Empathy: This presentation covers how VISA uses “secure by design” Kubernetes deployments to reduce the likelihood and surface area of a possible attack exploiting vulnerabilities.
• How Yelp Moved Security from the App to the Mesh with Envoy and OPA: Yelp discusses how they shifted left and built security features into their infrastructure using open source technologies without hurting the developer experience.

The bleeding edge — AI, Serverless & Servicemeshes: These themes are still pretty early, but work by early adopters and pioneers will show the art of what’s possible with cloud-native architectures.

• Serverless Platform for Large Scale Mini-Apps: From Knative to Production. A team from Ant Financial (Alipay) will discuss how they adopted Knative with secure container runtime and reinvented the Knative control/data plane, which largely saves deployment and operation efforts to enable serverless in Kubernetes clusters.
• ServiceMeshes — There and Back Again: This talk, with a lot of LOTR goodness, captures how Nordstrom’s work with service meshes have evolved over time. Most importantly, the team will walk through open-source contributions and adaptations made to get to their service mesh into production.
• KubeFlow at Spotify — Building and Managing a Centralized Platform: This talk demonstrates best practices Spotify has learned from managing Kubernetes for backend services and apply them to building a centralized Kubeflow platform. This, combined with a look into how Spotify organizes its teams into squads for agile product development, helps build better products to improve user listening experience.

Bonus: If you’re at Cloud Native Rejekts, be sure to check out Dan Bentley’s talk “Code Fast and Test Accurately without Kubectl” which discusses the importance of a tight inner feedback loop for developers, and open-source tool, Tilt, which is a development environment purpose-built for microservices.

Our companies, Algorithmia, FireHydrant, Scytale, and Windmill will be in town for the conference so be sure to stop by their talks and booths! Lastly, if it’s your first time in San Diego, be sure to tweet at SD native @BobbyTables for the best taco spots 🌮🌮🌮