KubeCon EU 2023 Recap and Highlights

Last week  Qensus was present at KubeCon | CloudNativeCon EU. This year’s edition was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Cool, isn’t it ? A home game for us. Our colleague Arnold van Wijnbergen was present these days, enjoyed the various talks, met a lot of passionate people, collected some goodies and wrote us the following recap including his personal highlights.

The highlights include links to awesome talks, great tools, lovely talks with vendors and other impressions of KubeCon EU 2023.


First of all, Arnold especially want to thank the Palo Alto, HashiCorp and Sysdig teams for providing me with  the complementary evening entertainment.

Hopefully we see you next year in Paris ? 

Personal contributions

This year twice I had the opportunity to provide my contribution to this valuable community and an event that is so popular that it was fully booked with 10k visitors.

  • First contribution is being a part of the NL community talk. Live from the theKUBE stage with my colleagues Daniel Paulus en Dinant Paardenkooper. You can see the recorded session here https://youtu.be/IIPV2e4oQO4 .
  • Second contribution is providing a short talk on my experience about the Linux Foundation training portfolio and the value it brought to me and the community.

Wasn’t really planned, but I’m always open to contribute for the Linux Foundation. 

Personal list of conversations

Conversations that still are on top of my mind.

  • Isovalent about eBPF and Cilium of course. Btw I love the new Azure CNI overlay that went GA during KubeCon. Book signing was Epic!
  • Talking with HashiCorp on using HashiCorp Vault in highly secure environments.
  • Elastic sharing my thoughts on Fleet and the Elastic Agent and looking nito stateless elasticsearch. (with a beer sponsored by Splunk)
  • Intel on Confidential Compute, using Gramine as wrapper, next to the SDK. Other interesting was Occlum OSS project.
  • Meeting the people behind Opster about the OpenSearch Operator and awesome UI they created.
  • Meeting my Venafi colleagues at the cert-manager booth and learning more about their new product for distributed machine identities called Firefly.
  • Diving into the future of VictoriaMetrics with their co-founder, especially on the coming logs aggregation capability on the roadmap.
  • Getting some in-depth info about Open Telemetry and understanding the progress on embedding logs into the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) specification.
  • ……

Of course much more to tell, but now let’s summarize the keynotes.

Keynote sessions summary

  • Wednesday was for sure the first epic keynote by Priyanka Sharma and Chris Aniszczyk.
  • Another great one on Wednesday was from Taylor Dolezal, Tulips, Terabytes, and Transformations: Blooming Innovations in the Cloud Native Garden.
  • Thursday I started my morning with some interesting feature updates for EKS by Nathan Taber and looking further into the roadmap of AWS their Kubernetes platform.
  • The two keynotes after that were presented are all unique and great stories to listen to from Tales from the cloud native community till a great talk about how to handle layers of abstraction and the depth of knowledge that is needed to adopt new innovation by Emily Fox (Apple).
  • If you are on Security, especially data privacy and highly sensitive data you don’t want to miss the keynote talk on handling data privacy in AI/MLOps solutions using new technologies like confidential compute, tokenization and strict confinement.
  • Friday was the last day, but I still grabbed three keynotes that were worth my time. First was the keynote talk by Frederick Kautz on Zero Trust. How do we handle trust in cloud environment?  One of the newest technologies to embrace here is SPIFFE/SPIRE.
  • Next in row was the talk from Cisco about enabling real-time media in Kubernetes by Bill Ren. Great to see the results on screen and lessons learned.
  • My closing keynote I really loved was the talk from Aparna Subramanian (Shopify). Is Kubernetes Delivering on its Promise? A Platform Engineering Perspective.

Then let’s look to my highlights from the co-located conferences.

Microsoft Azure AKS

  • You may have missed Azure Day with Kubernetes. This was a pre-day event at KubeCon, but no information loss here. Just go to https://azuredaywithkubernetes2023.com/ and register for all post-event recordings. My highlights here were the tracks about confidential compute, developer velocity and cost management.
  • Another nice part where all the specialized *cons like ArgoCon, CiliumCon and Observability Day. Just too much information here, but looking at each individual co-hosted conference can share my must-see talks.

ArgoCon

The GitOps way. Future is GitOps. All videos can be watched here, but below my favorite highlights.

CiliumCon

Cilium, eBPF power everywhere. All videos can be watched here, but below my favorite highlights.

Observability Day

Of course my favorite topic. All videos can be watched here, but below my favorite highlights. 

  • Prometheus Project Updates by Richard Hartmann. See here https://youtu.be/10pagRTbmnc and learn more about native histograms.
  • Open Telemetry Project Updates by Austin Parker, See here https://youtu.be/WMG_VY1Qxck and get inspired by the converging of the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) with the OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions.
  • Fluentd and Fluent Bit Project Updates by Eduardo Silva, see here https://youtu.be/AYQlTnGFxnQ and learn about the hot reload support of Fluent Bit.
  • Want to learn more about the present and future of Observability ? see the panel discussion here https://youtu.be/B-4kYdN-6-w. Let’s improve developer experience and better correlation of signals.
  • Learn more about eBPF in the Observability space, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly https://youtu.be/BZLafQy5BNE
  • Great story on Observability at scale with Open Systems collecting telemetry from 10k+ edge devices https://youtu.be/NE9cBobjn-I
  • Ready for this reference case? Ingesting 6+ TB of Telemetry data using OTEL collectors at VTEX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDysORX1zIs 

Wrapping up

I have to wrap up, but we still missing are missing a lot of great talks and tracks to write down. Keep your eyes open at the CNCF Youtube channel here https://www.youtube.com/@cncf/videos and catch new talks that get published soon!

If you still have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.

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Arnold van Wijnbergen

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