This is part 1 of the updates on KubeCon, you can find the part 2
here
It’s the time of year again for the KubeCon US conference here in San
Diego. From the first KubeCon that InfraCloud team attended in 2016 in
Seattle to today – the progress and growth is not a mean feat. As the
projects are maturing and adoption is growing we are seeing more mature
users and case studies. The day one was exciting with some announcements
and real-world use cases.
Kubernetes is going places
From startups to enterprises & government companies to defense
organizations – everyone realizes the value that Kubernetes brings to
deploying and maintaining applications consistently. The tweet is from
the talk given by the Department of Defense (of US I presume) but you
can also see it from the meteoric rise in popularity and the adoption of
a project such as K3S project from Rancher Labs.
I have to say, I’m really blown away by the
#DOD
talk at
#KubeCon!
Really impressive to see the stacks they are using. “We don’t run huge
clusters, we run many little clusters, weapon systems, business
systems, etc… “ They are even running
#kubernetes
&
#istio
on jets! pic.twitter.com/HwmTFi0Qrt
— Andy Domeier (@AndyJD_)
November 19, 2019
Gateways, proxies & meshes
As Kubernetes and microservices gain adoption – the network gets at the
center of the action. We can clearly see that from proxies being
re-written with modern applications and cloud in mind
(Envoy is a great example). While LinkerD
was one of the first well-developed service meshes, Istio seems to be
gaining a lot of popularity in recent times ( Popularity != value ). I
personally think there is room for more service meshes solving specific
problems in an easier way and it’s good to see efforts such as Consul
Connect from Hashicorp, Kuma
from
Kong and Maesh
from Containous. Enterprise
decision-makers need to look beyond the buzzword and really figure out
the use cases they are trying to solve. To understand the service mesh
and if you should implement one, I highly recommend the blog from
William Morgan here. Also,
nice comparison and reference of various service meshes can be found
here.
Policy Management – unified finally!
One of the exciting projects that was talked about during the keynote of
Day1 was OpenPolicyAgent (OPA). The
project unifies managing policies not only in Kubernetes but across the
entire stack. What was even more interesting was that the latest version
of OPA now can compile policies to
WASM
– which gives speed benefit in the range of 20x!
Databases at Cloud Scale
Vitess allows scaling the MySQL database and is one of the open-source
projects to graduate from
CNCF.
The talk by Sugu as part of Keynote
highlighted some of the real-world case studies of the Vitess project.
This is a great validation and a step forward in running stateful
applications on Kubernetes. Look at any big old enterprise company
adopting Kubernetes and data is where most of the risk & difficulty
lies. I really loved the quote in the talk:
“If your moving to
#Kubernetes,
Don’t leave your data behind!” by
@ssougou from the
#KeyNote
at
#kubecon2019.
Congrats @vitessio
on graduation! Looking forward to taking
@openebs through
that CNCF strict lens soon enough! Thanks for the quick summary on
the process!
— Kiran Mova (@kiranmova)
November 19, 2019
We will see more and more of such stories as the databases and
operations mature and the new generation of databases such as YugaByte
etc. get adopted.
MultiCloud is real – but it is early!
Day 0 at KubeCon had an event on multi-cloud, aptly named
MultiCloudCon. There are interesting
projects such as Crossplane which
enable consistency across clouds and other commercial offerings such as
Anthos from Google & Arc from Microsoft which promise a world of
multiple clouds. There are also users doing scheduling across cloud
providers etc. The promise is interesting and useful but it is still
early stages and there is a lot to be done!
eBPF is changing everything
Cilium is another service mesh and API Gateway. The recently announced
Hubble project is
a combination of eBPF and Cilium to achieve observability. We will see
more and more use cases possible with eBPF which will enable newer
paradigms in Kubernetes and beyond.
Tech is good but people make it great!
Lastly, the keynote from Dan and
Kelsey were inspiring on how the
community has helped each other and grown over the years but one Tweet
that sumps has to be this one:
I am a relative newbie to
#KubeCon.
What strikes me is the warm, welcoming, and inclusive culture.
People genuinely want to help each other and are excited to reconnect.
Seriously, you seldom find this in other communities — it’s super cool
💜
— Joe Duffy (@funcOfJoe)
November 20, 2019
That’s all for Day1 – looking forward to the rest of KubeCon over the
next 2 days!
(header image source – Business photo created by dashu83 –
www.freepik.com)