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Kubecon Europe 2023: Highlights and Key Takeaways
1.7k Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Ryan and Bhavin talk about Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 and discuss all the vendor announcements from the past couple of weeks. Kubecon Europe in Amsterdam had close to 10000 attendees and shows a continuous increase in the adoption of containers and Kubernetes.
Below, you can find links to the things discussed during the podcast: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LWKrMmneVFLjYkGSmeaTgTqqNZTY7A90UQEa2xZxnVE/edit?usp=sharing
Are you ready to earn extra income from sharing your expert opinion? Head over to userinterviews.com/hello to sign up and participate today!
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Transcript
Introduction to Kubernetes Bites
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to Kubernetes Bites, a podcast bringing you the latest from the world of cloud native data management. My name is Ryan Walner and I'm joined by Bob and Shaw coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts. We'll be sharing our thoughts on recent cloud native news and talking to industry experts about their experiences and challenges managing the wealth of data in today's cloud native ecosystem.
00:00:29
Speaker
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you are. We're coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts. Today is April 27th, 2023. I hope everyone is doing well, staying safe, and let's
KubeCon Amsterdam Experiences
00:00:42
Speaker
dive into it. I know a lot of us in the community are fresh back from
00:00:48
Speaker
KubeCon, Amsterdam, and I feel like I'm just recovering from my jet lag for the most part. It's been a while since I've done the six-hour difference. You know, last time I did that was, I think, Hawaii. A lot of years. Actually, and that was like 10 years ago. So it's been a while since I did the six-hour difference. And I know you, Bobbin, were visiting family. So how the hell was that?
00:01:10
Speaker
I know, like you talking about six hour difference, right? I know. I should be complaining. No, like usually I don't get jet lag. So okay, actually, let me start from the beginning. I went to India to visit my family like three years, like late after meeting them. I think I was there in like February of 2020. That's when I got married, came back and then the pandemic hit. So I hadn't seen them for a while. So it was great to like meet everybody in person, just hang out. Like I didn't,
00:01:40
Speaker
choose to work from home. I was completely on PTO. Had some great food. The only complaint was like, it was so hard, dude. Like, I don't know what the weather in Amsterdam was. I've heard mixed reviews that it was raining one day and it was hot.
00:01:54
Speaker
It was so hot in Mumbai. It was hot in humid. The daily highs were like 98 or 100 degrees. So I was staying put inside my house in front of the AC or below a ceiling fan for like 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. I was not moving.
00:02:12
Speaker
Yeah, and that's like a sticky heat too. Yeah. I've never been, but like, you know, if it feels anything like Florida or anywhere in the Northeast, but it's super humid, it's miserable. The positive aspect, right? Like this is considered to be the mango season. Like, I don't know if you have heard, like Indian mangoes are like really good. So yeah, I had a lot of mangoes in this trip. And this is like the first entrance that came in the US. Yes.
00:02:36
Speaker
There are some fruits that you get in India only, like for example, again, I don't know if this is the actual name, but Chiku, it's a small brown fruit that looks kind of like a kiwi, but you only get it in India. It's like super sweet. CHIKOO, I think.
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah. Oh yeah, it does look like a... Yeah, kiwi. But like it tastes so good and you don't get it here even in the Indian stores that you have in the U.S. So, that was fun. Like eating mangoes and chicus. Another name for chiku is sapota.
00:03:08
Speaker
Okay. I don't know in what language, but good to know. It's a category of fruit. That's like a mango. So there you go. Okay. This is what the internet is telling me. Just internet, not Chad GBD. Come on. I don't know how much it knows about chicus. We can always ask it later. But yeah, that was my India trip. I had a lot of fun, but I'm happy to be back and excited for what's next.
KubeCon Highlights and Trends
00:03:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's been quite a whirlwind. I know we did one show with Michael and it was a great show.
00:03:40
Speaker
about, we focused a lot on community and what they're doing and what, you know, our local meetup, Kubernetes Boston is all about. So that was a lot of fun. We missed you though. Yeah, it was a great episode. Like I did listen to it. As soon as it came out, love the study groups that Michael runs for people to get their CKAs. I love the fact that you covered funding round for Honeycomb. I was like, yes, I did.
00:04:05
Speaker
I did. I said I had to do you justice and bring it to the table there. I probably didn't do as job as you did. It was fun. As soon as I heard it, I was like, yes, let's go. You got to bring it to the table.
00:04:20
Speaker
Okay, so obviously no guest this week. We're back in the swing of things. The week after KubeCon, we always do a KubeCon review and our recap, which includes generally, if we're at the show, we'll tell you what it's like to be there, which I'll give a little bit of my perspective. I've never been to Amsterdam before, so maybe a little bit of background there.
00:04:41
Speaker
talk about a little bit of sort of the people that I felt like were there on some of the trends. And then there's a whole bunch of news and Bob and I will kind of go back and forth with a lot of the, you know, highlights. We may not get to every single link that we have in the notes. Yeah, but we will make them available like we did last time in a document. They don't fit in the show notes. They don't let us put that many in there. So we'll probably do a Google Doc.
00:05:08
Speaker
But anyway, we'll put that in the show notes and we'll do it that way. So let's start with Amsterdam. So the biggest thing I want to kind of talk about with the show itself was the energy level that was KubeCon EU this time.
00:05:23
Speaker
Um, a lot of people, you know, if you have been to other cubecons before, um, you know, the last one in Detroit and previously in LA, it was not at the energy level. I mean, LA was abysmal, right? So I wasn't there, but I know a lot of people were including yourself. It was, it was, it was tough. And then Detroit, we felt like we were getting there again, right? We still had a lot of pandemic stuff to worry about. Um, and before that.
00:05:51
Speaker
before everything was San Diego, which was a great show. And we feel like the energy is back to that San Diego level capacity. And it was one of the biggest shows, right? 10,000 people completely sold out of tickets. So that was really exciting to see. I'm pumped to see what Chicago is like, as well as for folks who don't know,
00:06:19
Speaker
in 2024 in the spring, it'll be in Paris. So that'll be a lot of fun.
00:06:25
Speaker
there. So I'd like to see what it's like, you know, growing wise, and I know there's a, you know, there's a different energy for EU versus North American. So anyway, the energy was back, which was a ton of fun. And do I have a question about how will it be in Chicago cold, like it's Chicago in November. We talk a lot to like, internally about sort of who made that decision. But, um,
00:06:51
Speaker
It's no one from the Chicago area in November, I'll tell you that much. I mean, maybe it is. Maybe they're just spreading some love for their November city. It could be hit or miss, right? We had this happen in Detroit when normally it's supposed to be a lot colder and we got a great, so you never know. Let's be optimistic. Chicago is a very cool city, so that will be it. It is. Okay. Yeah, so Amsterdam as a city, I think it was a great place for KubeCon.
00:07:19
Speaker
If you've never been, it's a very, I say very short city. Not a lot of like huge skyscrapers, very kind of walkable. Every street in the city is like a bunch of rings. So it's, you know, you can pretty much get anywhere on foot. That being said, there was a lot of guidelines around how to get around the city. And if you don't know, right, if you just Google Amsterdam, you'll get pictures of bicycles because bicycles are absolutely the way to get around.
00:07:46
Speaker
And there's a whole etiquette to learn, which you can only learn so much in a week, but basically the rule of thumb that I learned is that bikes stop for nothing. It's like taxis in New York City. They will plow you down. And to the point where, you know, I saw a bike, I was walking with my wife, she came along with me. I was walking and a bike hit a person, like waiting for fries or something. Fries are very popular in Amsterdam.
00:08:12
Speaker
And he hit the wrong guy. And the guy chased him down, pulled him off his bike, and started wailing on him in the middle of the street. And I was like, oh my, I'm not riding a bike, never mind. Yeah, we did ride a bike after that. I will say the locals, you know, all stepped in to like end it, but basically bikes.
00:08:31
Speaker
will not stop for anything. And, you know, if you're on the bike, be careful not to hit the wrong guy. It was a very, once in a, you know, I'm sure a lot of occurrence, but, um, I happen to be there and it scared the pants off. So, um, as you were describing Amsterdam and the bikes and how people should have, should know what they're doing. Uh, I don't know if you watched Ted Lasso, Ryan, but the latest episode of Ted Lasso, they did an away game in Amsterdam. Okay. I haven't.
00:08:56
Speaker
that the owner was walking on one of the bike lanes only street and she got basically toppled over in from one of those bridges into the canal and accurate yeah accurate right there that is an accurate thing you're in the wrong spot walking you will know about it yeah and you will be that yeah it's not like everywhere else where like the walking uh gets um sort of you know
00:09:17
Speaker
Priority dedicated to name to name skip priority even you so cars will stop for you bikes won't But cars also stop for bikes not the other way around. Okay? And occasionally you'll get you know, because there's also really tiny cars there. Yeah, it's not like here in the u.s Where everything's huge? No, I've one tiny cars and some of them ride in the bike lanes And so you definitely don't want to get in by one of them anyway, it's a whole thing But I it was it was actually a fun part of the you know experience. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So
00:09:44
Speaker
I'm also a very big dog fan and dogs are everywhere. I don't know what it is. And they're allowed in everywhere, right? So like, if you're not a dog person might be tough. I'll just put it out there because dogs everywhere, they're allowed in everywhere, like restaurants, everything. So it was kind of fun.
00:10:04
Speaker
But anyway, I don't want to spend too much time on the actual city, but it was a lot of fun if you were there. I'm sure you had similar experiences. If not, we'd love to hear about it. Now, as far as the show goes, right before we dive into some of the announcements.
00:10:20
Speaker
I do want to say that I felt like there was a lot of first timers I keep on, and maybe this was due to the size and restrictions being completely lifted. I didn't expect this entirely just because travel is hard budget and those kinds of things. A lot of people are having a hard time traveling through their company, but there was a lot of first timers, and maybe this is in Europe. It's easier to get to and from places
00:10:46
Speaker
without a plane ticket, per se. Maybe that made it easier, maybe it didn't. I'm not sure, but there was a lot of first timers there, which meant there was a lot of educational questions and learning and things like that. Not to say that there weren't a lot of people outside of that discovery phase. There were still a lot of customers that were well beyond their journey. So to me, that means
00:11:10
Speaker
a lot of the early adopters are there who are living it and breathing it and consuming it and have different problems. And then you have a whole new set of lagers, the bigger organizations, the financials, all those who have huge legacy systems that are now coming in and are learning about things like data on Kubernetes. And they're saying, well, someone told me not to run my database. And then you ask, well, what database are you running?
00:11:37
Speaker
a SQL Server and Oracle database, right? And you're like, of course, because you haven't fully adopted microservices and DevOps, and there's a whole thing that you're skipping here. So I felt like there was those two spectrums of conversations and not a ton in the middle. So that was my observation, obviously, personal accounts, anecdotal for me here. And beyond that, I think the last thing I'll talk about before we'll dive into a few things is trends.
00:12:06
Speaker
At every show, we talk about things that are often buzzing. People talk about a lot. A lot of them shouldn't be too surprising. Cost and security and multicloud are still a huge portion of that. I think cost was even more so, maybe even top of the list for me in terms of certain conversations and sort of seeing what's going on. A lot of because of what's going on economically.
00:12:32
Speaker
There's a direct correlation between infrastructure and cost and what to do there. Surprisingly, that doesn't mean people are just repatriating. Although we do hear a lot about that. I think we even did somewhat of an episode on that topic. But we also see a ton of people using multiple clouds to spread their costs around and really care about monitoring and those kinds of things.
00:12:59
Speaker
The other unsurprising one was AI. Even though there was only so many specifics, it's taking off as a whole thing. And then the show as a whole, which was the most surprising to me, probably because I don't...
00:13:14
Speaker
have a ton of experience working in the field is the sustainability aspect. It was a big part of certain keynotes and projects and things like that around how to use infrastructure, cloud-native infrastructure in a sustainable manner. Things like energy consumption and monitoring and
00:13:34
Speaker
cost of serverless and how to be better about that. It was kind of a fun way to look at certain problems that we don't often look at. So I did appreciate that as well. I had a question on cost, right? And since you were there, maybe you can give a first-hand experience. What people talking about cost, because I have two suggestions, right? They were looking at Kubernetes to reduce costs with their legacy infrastructure. And they're like, OK, if I move to Kubernetes,
00:14:04
Speaker
that gives me certain capabilities that helps me reduce cost. Or the second one was, oh, I went all in Kubernetes, spent a lot of money, and now I need to scale back my infrastructure. So I'm looking for solutions that can help me optimize how I run my Kubernetes clusters.
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah, the conversations I had were more on the latter. I'm using these types of tools and platforms. And how can I use them more efficiently? Gotcha. That makes sense. And sometimes that means caring about physical server. Sometimes that means comparing cost of one provider versus the other. Something that I think was interesting to me was still the trend towards
00:14:45
Speaker
people don't want to build their own Kubernetes anymore, right? Also, not surprising, right? This was something, you know, Joe Beta and everybody sort of acts as if we want to make Kubernetes boring because we care about everything that's happening on top of it. And I think we've seen that trend even in Detroit. We saw that trend. But, you know, the Amazons, the AKS, and the OpenShift, the world are still, you know, top three when it comes to working. But you definitely see a little bit of, you know, I'm already in it.
00:15:14
Speaker
How do I make this more cost effective? That being said, the other side of that was also there, but not as probably. And then I guess one of the buzzwords that I was surprised you didn't mention already was platform engineering. Was that a topic around the show on the show floor?
00:15:31
Speaker
Well, not like Detroit, which was, I think, because the folks behind the messaging of platform engineering used some pretty risque DevOps is dead, right, that kind of thing. So that was a bigger buzz, I think, in Detroit. Platform engineering, for me, went from Detroit as purely a buzzword of what
00:15:57
Speaker
what is going on to, to how do we do something with that term, right? And so yeah, it was still there. You know, there's still a lot of talk about those terms, you know, you know, people are, you know, have jobs with those engineering titles and things like that now. So it's definitely here to
Kubernetes 1.27 Updates and Innovations
00:16:15
Speaker
stay. And I think that community is, you know, the next step for that I saw was just, you know, getting me behind it. I know we had spoke to Luca and I spoke with him at the
00:16:26
Speaker
at the conference as well. And that's really where the community is, is like putting meat on the bone, so to speak.
00:16:33
Speaker
No, I think talking about putting meat on the bone, right? I think Spotify engineering did publish a blog around, obviously they were the ones that came up with Backstage and they shared some metrics around like what are the benefits of developers that use Backstage a lot versus developers who don't use Backstage as much. The increase in developer productivity, the increase in developer satisfaction, so like job retention and the amount, the increase in the pace,
00:16:59
Speaker
with which they are producing code. So there are definitely benefits to it for the adopters that are all into platform engineering. But yeah, it was good to see. Let's see how these trends show up or mature or evolve till we hit Chicago in the next six months.
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, it'll definitely be exciting. I personally am a fan of that community. Oh, yeah, for sure. Absolutely. You know, everybody is. But I like the term. I like what it represents and sort of the evolution of sort of where it represents in DevOps.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't think I'm afraid of anything. I'm sure I am, actually, of being physically at the show. But I think we can switch and dive into a few announcements. Why don't you start off with a couple? You have more than I do with your advice. Yeah, sure. I had to catch up. I wasn't there in person. I was like, shit, I need more responsibility. I need to come up with more articles.
00:17:55
Speaker
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00:18:20
Speaker
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00:18:34
Speaker
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00:19:01
Speaker
I think just a few easy ones to start with. I'll do a couple and then hand it back to you for like to go one on one through our lists. But Kubernetes 1.27 is out. Like this is not, I know this is not a KubeCon thing, but I really like the name Chill Wipes. Like that's what the release is called. I'm sure it gave.
00:19:20
Speaker
People chill vibes, hopefully, when they try to upgrade it. But no, it has a lot of new enhancements. A few features or things that you should keep in mind is new images like the 1.27 images won't be posted on the old registry. Like I know we have covered it many times on the part how it's not Kubernetes.gcr.io now. It's a new container registry for images. 1.27 images are not even pushed to Kubernetes.gcr.io.
00:19:46
Speaker
Another interesting thing that applies to us, or our audience at least, the read-write-1-spod, which is just one of the access ways, has now moved into beta. It was alpha for a while, now it's beta, so it can be used by people that want to try it out without having to enable the feature flag when they install Kubernetes.
00:20:06
Speaker
And then one last quick major update in 1.27 was if you are looking to upgrade or update the amount of resources a specific container in a pod has, now you can do that without having to actually restart the entire pod. So like if a pod has three containers, you just want to edit the resources for one of those, it can do it on its own rather than having to take down the other two containers that
00:20:28
Speaker
coexist in the same port. So those are like 127 updates. And then there's, there's a, there's a bunch of, uh, you know, if you are from our general audience of volumes and storage, there are a bunch of, of, of relevant, uh, things such as like the removal of certain APIs, like expand CSI volumes, CSI inline volumes group snapshots. Now I think in beta, um, anyway, go to the link that we have here and kind of
00:20:57
Speaker
search for what's going on and just search for the term volume because there's actually a ton in here if you're working with data. So I just wanted to add that little mark there. No, no, I agree. I think this release had like 60 enhancements, so obviously we won't cover all. So look at the link, find the thing that applies to you. Yup. And then I just wanted to talk or highlight the cube interview that Audi did
00:21:20
Speaker
around how they are implementing communities and how they're using it. The reason I want to highlight it is the guest used an interesting term where Audi actually embraces the silos. They don't want people to spend time eliminating or breaking down silos and spend 80% of the time doing that. They want to actually automate everything that's done inside a specific silos and then make the organization faster as a whole unit.
00:21:46
Speaker
And then they can worry about breaking down the silos, but the message was completely opposite to what you would usually hear. The message from audio is, embrace the silos and don't spend your most of your time just worrying about breaking them down. Keep those walls up. We couldn't break them down, so just keep them up. I know.
00:22:07
Speaker
Sure. So the one that I found pretty interesting in the world of Kubernetes and data and storage was the announcement from Veritas, who announced a SAN for Kubernetes at KubeCon, right? So this is Veritas InfoScale, I believe it's called, really a block storage that is sort of
00:22:34
Speaker
aimed at Kubernetes deployed cloud native. They compare it to a lot of the players in the space like Portworx and Longhorns and the ones that are native or in the CNS space. So it just kind of caught me as a, wow, this is a company like this is really embracing that CNS capability. And I think it just kind of shows
00:22:57
Speaker
that there's a need to kind of move and adopt this space, and that there's still a huge push for that CNS capability, even with larger companies with full-blown SANS solutions and things like that.
00:23:16
Speaker
We'll put the article in there. I haven't really tried it or looked too much into it, but definitely. It seems like a good, good article. Like at least I clicked on the notes right now as he was talking. And okay. Interesting that Veritas puts
00:23:32
Speaker
effort behind building a software sensor. Yeah, 16 nodes is the max you can do, it says in the article. It's definitely early days with anything, but we'll see where it goes. Yeah, for sure. Next, I would like to talk about
00:23:48
Speaker
something around security. So, intent-based access control. I know we always talk about role-based access control, but there is a new startup called Authorize, and they're trying to use a pun, like it's Authorize, but they have an author for the mascot, so it's Authorize. I'm hoping I'm doing justice.
00:24:07
Speaker
And people on the audio can actually
Kubernetes Security Concerns
00:24:09
Speaker
get it. But yeah, they are talking about how they use or implement intent-based access control, where you can have these intent definitions in YAML files where you can specify what part of the app should talk to a different part of the app. And you define that. And then regardless of the actual network policy management layer that you have underneath it,
00:24:27
Speaker
Like one of the examples I've also used is if you deploy Kafka, you want specific part of your app to talk to that Kafka broker. You can just specify that in an intent file and then they do all the plumbing underneath the cover. So it makes the whole process of following the principle of least privileges easier. So that was another startup. I don't know how we missed it, but there is 11.5 million in seed funding.
00:24:52
Speaker
And so they are definitely working on this open source project, which I think they plan to submit to CNCF as a sandbox project. But then they also have like a cloud platform that I think they'll build out using the money that they have raised. And then talking about intent-based access control, right? We can't forget our old friend, role-based access control. And the reason I'm bringing it up.
00:25:13
Speaker
is because there was a news vulnerability called RBAC Buster. I love the name. I know I kind of went on the name of things a lot, but that was a good one. I know they actually, I don't know, they did think about it instead of just going with the first thing that came to their mind.
00:25:30
Speaker
But it is about how hackers can use a method where they get into your cluster through iPod squatting and just using, asking you to pull down different images, which looks similar from a public Docker registry. So kubernetes.io slash
00:25:47
Speaker
cube controller becomes Kubernetes, which is misspelled and cube dash controller. It looks close enough that people might actually pull it down and then have it on their clusters. Once they are in the door, they can go ahead and create these cluster roles and cluster role binding so that even if you fix the vulnerability or fix the front door, they are still in your cluster and then they hijack your resources for some Monero crypto mining, which is difficult to catch. Iback, RBAC, whatever you use, make sure you're secure.
00:26:15
Speaker
Yeah, and the other thing that I took from reading about that Marbec Buster was the initial access was through a misconfigured API server, which is just like, I know we've done a lot on security on this podcast, especially we
00:26:34
Speaker
recently and misconfiguration right is it was one of the tops and actually VMware put out like the state of Kubernetes and it's the top security thing that comes out here and and the what this boils down to is like you know we have to adopt automation and you know
00:26:54
Speaker
take out the middleman of human fingers. It's not always going to solve the problem, but we should be using this as a big old flag to say if misconfigured things are the biggest vulnerability for attacks like these or just other
00:27:12
Speaker
things going on. It is imperative. We get some control over that. So yeah, interesting that, you know, once they got in there, they set up basically near admin privileges with a cluster role and it didn't look much different. Other than the fact that I think I read something about it, it spins up a whole bunch of demon sets to use the resources. I feel like that you probably noticed a little easier, but yeah, I forgot how many clusters they kind of showcased were affected, but it wasn't a small number. I know.
00:27:41
Speaker
Yeah. Don't leave your doors and windows open. Like anybody can get it. Like fix that. Fix that problem first. Then make sure like all your furniture is aligned properly and it's done.
00:27:51
Speaker
Nice. I think, do you have something next or should I continue? Yeah. Go. Yeah. Go again. Okay. So I have a couple of smaller startups. I know like KubeCon is always interesting for me because big vendors obviously make their announcements, but sometimes the really cool features come from like smaller companies. So one of them are called Engrock. They are a reverse proxy startup. Again, I think they, this is another funding round that we missed too. Like I need to step up my game, but
00:28:20
Speaker
I think it deserves its own show still. I think I might need it. There is series A, about like $50 million five months back, but they are a reverse proxy startup that helps users connect their Kubernetes clusters together and apps to their Kubernetes cluster. They just introduced an ingress controller for Kubernetes, which basically makes it easier for people to install the reverse proxy on their Kubernetes cluster.
00:28:49
Speaker
Not great, not something that blows my mind, but it's something that the reverse proxies are becoming an important thing. Instead of having to install or worry about certificates, having a reverse proxy making that secure tunnel, I know Teleport does a lot of these things in the security ecosystem as well. Another startup to look out for, I think they're San Francisco based as well, so local to the US.
00:29:12
Speaker
And then going like staying on the west coast going up north in Seattle like Diagrid right like one of those vendors that made a lot of noise, maybe a couple of coupons back like that. And they had the whole dapper day. They added new features to their diagrid controller which is a fully managed
00:29:29
Speaker
service that you can use to run dapper in production. So they added features like app visualizer. They have a really neat UI where you can actually see how your app is built and running. They have an advisor. They enabled certificate rotation and management. And then, as you said, the theme for KubeCon was, again, around the cost optimization piece. Even Diagrid added a cost optimization tab in their UI where for connected clusters, it can show you enhancements. Yeah, big news there.
00:29:59
Speaker
Okay, go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. So one thing I did want to talk about, which I thought was very cool. Again, the focus on education right in, in, in this KubeCon was, was definitely obvious. And I love to see that because, you know, as we advance and kind of keep talking about new feature, this new feature, that and whatever release it gets more complicated, education becomes key and
00:30:25
Speaker
our friends over at Castan Veeam have something called the Cube Campus. And they did actually a lot of great sort of training and sessions and that kind of thing. But I did want to call out, they did announce like the capability to start partnering with Cube Campus. So it's not just like a Castan Veeam thing anymore. It started out that way, but it's kind of grown and morphed into a bigger thing. I know I had conversations with them about, you know,
00:30:53
Speaker
potentially putting stuff on that site. And I just love to see sort of that organic need and sort of want to build more educational material from the community.
Startups and New Technologies at KubeCon
00:31:06
Speaker
So really cool stuff. If you haven't checked out Kube Campus, they have a whole ton of really great training.
00:31:12
Speaker
and labs and those kinds of things. I think it's worth calling out and definitely checking out if you're in that phase of kind of digging in and you're the hands-on type of person that learns.
00:31:24
Speaker
And I think if I remember correctly, like even at KubeCon Detroit in the five minute sponsored keynote that each platinum sponsor or diamond sponsor, whatever the top level is gets, they did highlight CubeCampus. Like they want everybody in the community to get familiar with the Kubernetes concept so that everybody can choose their own path, but getting people started with the right set of skills and tool sets is important. So yeah, kubecampus.io for people that are looking to learn about Kubernetes. Go check it out.
00:31:52
Speaker
For me, I think a couple of additional news, Isovalent, I know the company that built Psyllium, which is now the default CNI for almost all the managed Kubernetes services, they announced something called Psyllium Mesh. So Psyllium Mesh basically connects your Kubernetes workloads.
00:32:09
Speaker
with traditional workloads or physical servers that are running either on-prem or in the cloud. So you can have a virtual machine, you can have a physical server, you can be running that on-prem or in the cloud, but you can use the cilium mesh and for your Kubernetes clusters, you don't need to install anything new. But for these traditional parts of your application stack, you can install something called as a transit gateway that allows you to connect
00:32:31
Speaker
your traditional apps that still haven't been modernized to the modern apps that you are running on your communities cluster. So that was a cool feature that I wanted to highlight. Maybe people can try it out in their environments or in their cloud environments. I feel like Mesh is becoming one of those terms that you just tack on to the end of your product name. And now you have something new, right? I'm not taking away from what Zilliam Mesh is. Yeah. I love that.
00:32:55
Speaker
I almost ignored this announcement because I was like, yeah, well, maybe it's just another service mesh. Like I don't need to focus on it. But then I caught the point where like they're actually, they have a transit gateway that works with other components are like, okay, that makes it cool enough to be included in the newest section.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Something network related, right? You see the term mesh and you automatically will go there. Cool. So another one I had here was if those are familiar with the Dragonfly in memory database, Datastore. I'm personally not, but really kind of an interesting project.
00:33:30
Speaker
They have a GitHub repository here, but basically the announcement from them is a brand new operator operators. And the reason I bring this one up is operators were also a huge topic. I think this goes hand in hand with the fact that we see sort of, you know, the adoption phase moving towards, you know, do things for me like build my Kubernetes cluster, run my Kubernetes cluster. We also see the same trend for
00:33:57
Speaker
applications that are developing operators. They're definitely becoming the de facto. If someone's looking to run something, they're probably going to look to see if that thing has an operator first. At least that seems to be the way people are kind of migrating to. So this was from Dragonfly, again, an in-memory data store for developers. So if you haven't checked that out, I think some pretty interesting stuff in their GitHub repository that you can poke around at.
00:34:24
Speaker
And I agree, right? Operators are the way to go. I think the episode that you and I did was back in 2021. Again, operators were prevalent then, but they still were kind of new. But now everything is operator-based. And as you said, people do look for operators as the first option to deploy things. If you're not, start looking at operators, dude. You should not be deploying individual deployments or pods. It should be operator-based. I think we're definitely getting to that point, right? Two years has made a big difference. For sure.
00:34:54
Speaker
I think a couple of different announcements. Cloud Casa, a vendor in the communities data protection ecosystem. I know there were news maybe a couple of months back that they were spun out of catalogic and now they're looking for funding, but now they have actually added something that can be useful for
00:35:11
Speaker
people that are using the open source project Valero. So like Cloud Casa has added a UI where they can import or they can connect to their Valero installation. They can start managing them through the user interface. One gotcha that I found was it is generally available. It has a free tier. If your communities cluster has 15 worker nodes, if you go above that, I think it's like 200 bucks a month per node or per cluster. I'm not so sure, but yeah, there is a free tier.
00:35:37
Speaker
which should work for most of the people that were using Valero as that open source backup tool. But yeah, a vendor adds something. Yeah, I think they got a lot of great noise from this effort, right? Just kind of focusing on an open source tool. I mean, they've had sort of their backup as a service product for a while, which is
00:35:55
Speaker
like underneath the covers, still based on some Valero plus some other stuff. And now they're kind of saying, well, if you're using Valero, we know this is a favorite in the community. It's open source. A lot of people can use it. We're just going to allow you to start visualizing and using those things from Cloud Casa.
00:36:12
Speaker
which I think is very cool. Even to say that if you already are using the tool and you want to use this thing, you can import them. You can say, here are my existing backups, which I think is a really great tip of the hat to what the community and maybe how they're viewing the efforts, which I think is just awesome. We were quite far away from them. I personally was in the show floor, but I heard all about what they were doing with Lero.
00:36:41
Speaker
Definitely some cool stuff. I think kudos to them on sort of making this happen for users of Valero.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah. And going from a startup, I think next, let's talk about Cisco. I think in KubeCon Detroit, like Cisco had a really big booth, but all they did was give out branded hoodies to people. I think people confuse them for like the Swag Collection Center. But now for this KubeCon, I think they did introduce three different open source projects around the security and space. So like VM clarity, which allows agent less detection and management of software bill of materials. So that's one.
00:37:17
Speaker
NASP, N-A-S-P. It's a new project to provide service mesh type capabilities for non-cloud endpoints, so maybe going for that edge locations. And then media streaming mesh. I don't really know what this does, but that was a third project, so I had to say its name at least. But yeah, Cisco making some moves in the open source ecosystem.
00:37:35
Speaker
Very, very cool. Going back to the cost and things like that, Grafana Cloud basically announced a bunch of updates to Kubernetes monitoring. I think this is also, again, still related to cost, but also monitoring observability.
00:37:55
Speaker
Huge topic right topic i think the more people are using clusters and more people are putting applications this is an obvious thing to start caring a lot more about and specifically the some of the things they added where things like predictions historical information and those kind of things which i think you know.
00:38:12
Speaker
Initial efforts that we saw a few years ago. We're just visualizing what was there what was being sort of consumed or used and now we're moving on to Kind of predicting some of the some usage or predicting costs and those kind of things you'll I'm finding that trip that transition of of Monitoring tools and those kind of things are starting to look out more a lot a lot more like that and then everybody
00:38:36
Speaker
Everybody loves Grafana, a little part of your heart at the very least. We're in this ecosystem at least. Very cool stuff. I haven't personally used Grafana Cloud or anything like that, but I've used a lot of Grafana deployed to Kubernetes. Very cool stuff.
00:38:53
Speaker
Nice. And then I think I have a last couple of topics for me. One, let's do the security one first and then we'll close out with a storage startup. So Aqua Security, they have a new version of Trivi that came out during the week of KubeCon, which now provides full compliance scanning for CIS benchmarks. So I know there are a lot of benchmarks that
00:39:14
Speaker
that people or organizations like to comply with. I know we have the CIS standards. We had the NSA hardening guide. NSA hardening guide was already something that we used to do. Now I think they have added the full CIS Kubernetes Benchmark Suite. So you can just download the CLI tool, run it against your cluster. It will give you a result of what to fix to be compliant to this new benchmark, or not new, but to this CIS Kubernetes Benchmark.
00:39:37
Speaker
And then finally, I think the funding round that I wanted to talk about are the Kubernetes storage startup volumes. They announced a series A funding of $20 million. So again, still pretty small. But again, I think, Ryan, we had spoken about the next- We brought up volumes or volume Z. We couldn't decide on how it was accomplished. When they came out of stealth, I think we had mentioned them.
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, so now they officially have some money that they wanted to show people. And then I think the one-liner for them is they provide a web-based interface which customers can use to provision NVMe block access storage for Linux-based and Kubernetes applications. And this was a copy paste from their blog, so I didn't know what they did. Yeah, and I'm still torn on the name, right? I think, are they going for like a Gen Z, Volume Z thing going on, right?
00:40:28
Speaker
I'm connecting dots that probably aren't there. You can only connect dots looking back. Isn't that one of the Steve Jobs? The last thing I will end on, I did mention it early in the show, which was the state of Kubernetes 2023 ebook.
Conclusion and Future Engagements
00:40:48
Speaker
from VMware and I did wind up taking time to download it and read it. I think there's some really good information in there. I mentioned sort of the misconfigurations as sort of some of the top security concerns. It's just blend them all together.
00:41:09
Speaker
Again, that was leading, right? And sort of down there is like unpatched CVEs and failed compliance, secrets management, etc. But they go beyond just talking about those things, right? They talk about sort of what I think from the business side, people are, you know, organizations are getting out of it versus what are the most commonly used. I think it's well put together and worth a read. So we'll definitely put a link to that in there as well.
00:41:34
Speaker
Yeah, you know, we have now been talking for about 40 minutes on KubeCon things. We don't want to dive into every single piece of news here. We will include everything that we talked about and more.
00:41:47
Speaker
in some show notes. And before, before we leave, we always do a chat GPT section, which, you know, I don't know what I asked it because we're doing KubeCon. I didn't know if it had anything, you know, related to KubeCon stores, but I said, I asked it basically, if you were to attend a Kubernetes conference, what would be your priorities during the conference?
00:42:14
Speaker
And it basically answered, hey, I'm not a person I can't really suggest that I have a personal preference. But I can suggest some priorities about somebody else who is human, I think is what it's trying to say about attending a Kubernetes conference to consider.
00:42:31
Speaker
And they're fairly generic, attending the keynotes and speeches, attending technical sessions and workshops, connecting with the community, visiting the expo hall, participating in Q&A and panels, which
00:42:46
Speaker
You know, it just assumes that you can do that very, very easily. Attending social events. These are all things that, you know, clearly are just kind of scraped off in attending things. But I want to step further. I said, all right, so if you were to go to a party, you know, a social event, what what would you focus on? And I was really hoping it would say like, you know, pound down the Mai Tais or something like that. But it didn't.
00:43:11
Speaker
It said to engage in small talk, you know, which I actually like these answers, right? It says attend those after parties participate in the group activities, use social media. And the last thing it says, which I really is the reason why I'm talking about this, because it was a little bit of a warning of an answer, but it was it was
00:43:30
Speaker
The fact that social events and technology are meant to be fun and engaging and to be open to those new experiences. And I think that one line is probably all I really took away from its answer, but it's so true, right? When you go to these events, it really is a big difference from trying to consume from your couch or your office or whatever, your laptop. It makes a big difference and connecting with the community in person, face to face.
00:43:57
Speaker
Um, if you can, if you're, if you're lucky enough to do so, um, you know, go and be able to enjoy those experiences, put yourself out there. And I think a lot of, a lot of, uh, um, you know, opportunities and networking at these events is so true. So, so you got to write their chat, GBT, I'd say, um, you know, who knows. I think Ryan to add to your thing, right? Like for people who couldn't make it to Amsterdam, because maybe they didn't have enough PDOs, they didn't have enough budget for the travel.
00:44:28
Speaker
I wanted to highlight like, okay, there is one in Chicago, but the podcast that you did with Michael last time, right? Like there are local communities that are still so valuable that have champions that want to engage and that want to help you. So if you're not able to go to a KubeCon, go open meetup.com, find your local communities chapter or communities meetup and go and talk to the people there. And there might be some social events after to attend.
00:44:52
Speaker
Absolutely. And I go as far as to say that you may often get more out of one of those small intimate events than you do at a giant show. I mean, the giant shows are fun and good to keep up with trends and kind of what's going on. But you're doing at a different level versus, you know, a small 30 person meetup or 10 person community, you know, going after a single goal, you'll have better conversations.
00:45:17
Speaker
And it's sort of the lifeblood of the larger community that is Kubernetes and cloud native. So go get involved. For people that don't know, I think Ryan literally took a shot at me because I haven't been to the Boston communities meetup yet. And I looked at the next one and shit, like that, I have a conflict for that one too. So maybe in June I'll make it, but I'm sorry, Michael, but yeah, I'm looking forward to meeting you soon. The next one is, uh, May 11th. That's right. Yeah.
00:45:45
Speaker
I will be there barring any major changes, but yeah, I plan to be there. If you are a local to Boston, given you're listening to a podcast where, you know, those are from Boston, tell us. We'd love to meet you and talk about if you have a topic for the show. That's a great way to kick it off. But anyway.
00:46:04
Speaker
I think we can wrap it up. What do you say? I think that was a pretty good overall gist of it. Hopefully our listeners, you have gotten enough out of it. And with that, that brings us to the end of another episode of Kubernetes Bites. I'm Ryan. I'm Bobbin. And thanks for listening to another episode of Kubernetes Bites. Thank you for listening to the Kubernetes Bites podcast.