Last week, our team was present at KubeCon 2024 to learn about the latest and greatest in the cloud-native ecosystem. Back in our cozy (home-)offices, we want to share our insights with you! Buckle up, bring your office chairs in an upright position, and let’s start with Rejekts EU, before getting to our KubeCon 2024 review.
Rejekts – The Pre-Conference Conference
I made my way to Paris a few days earlier than the rest of the team in order to make it to Cloud-Native Rejekts. Over the past years, the conference has hosted many great but rejected talks of KubeCon, where acceptance rates were below 10% for this year’s European rendition.
With space for ~300 attendants and 45 talks on 2 tracks, ranging from sponsored keynotes over regular talks to lightning talks on the second day of the conference, Rejekts set the scene for a fantastic cloud-native conference week.
Cloud-Native Rejekts took place at ESpot, a flashy eSports venue.
Many attendees agreed that the less crowded venue combined with high-quality talks made for a very insightful conference – kind of like a Mini-KubeCon. In addition, folks representing projects and companies from pretty much all cloud-native areas of interest were present.
This led to engaging conversations on the hallway track, revolving around community contributions, new technologies, and marketing strategies.
My Personal Favorites
Based on the event schedule, I decided to focus on talks about Cilium, Kubernetes’ rather new Gateway API, and GitOps. I wasn’t disappointed – there were a few gems among the overall great talks:
In Demystifying CNI – Writing a CNI from scratch Filip Nikolic from Isovalent, creators of Cilium, took the audience on a journey to create their own rudimentary CNI – in Bash. From receiving JSON from the container runtime to creating the needed veth pairs to providing IP addresses to pods, it was a concise walkthrough of a real-world scenario.
Nick Young, one of the maintainers of the Kubernetes Gateway API, told us how to not implement CRDs for Kubernetes controllers in his great talk Don’t do what Charlie Don’t Does – Avoiding Common CRD Design Errors by following Charlie Don’t through the process of creating an admittedly horrible CRD specification.
The third talk I want to highlight was From Fragile to Resilient: ValidatingAdmissionPolicies Strengthen Kubernetes by Marcus Noble, who gave a thorough introduction on this rather new type of policy and even looked ahead at MutatingAdmissionPolicies which are currently proposed by KEP 3962.
After a bunch of engaging lightning talks at the end of Day 2, I was ready to meet up with the rest of the team and prepare for the main event – so let’s dive into our KubeCon 2024 review!
KubeCon 2024 – AI, Cilium, and Platforms
KubeCon Paris was huge – the biggest in Europe yet. The organizers had said so in their closing keynote at KubeCon 2023 in Amsterdam already, but still: Seeing 12.000 people gathered in a single space is something else.
Justin, Sebastian, and Achim waiting for KubeCon to start
All of them were awaiting the Day 1 keynotes, which often reflect the tone of the whole conference. This year, the overarching theme was obvious: AI. Every keynote at least mentioned AI, and most of them stated: We’re living in the age of AI.
Interestingly enough, many attendees left the keynotes early, maybe annoyed by the constant stream of news regarding AI we’ve all witnessed over the last year. Maybe also due to the sponsor booths – many of them showcased interesting solutions or at least awesome swag!
What the Team was up to
Maybe they also went off to grab a coffee before attending the first talks of Day 1, of which there were many. Thus, instead of giving you my personal favorites, I asked Justin, Sebastian, and Achim to share their conference highlights and general impressions. Read their KubeCon 2024 review below:
Justin (Systems Engineer):
“I liked the panel discussion about Revolutionizing the Control Plane Management: Introducing Kubernetes Hosted Control Planes best.
As we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our managed Kubernetes offering, we also thought about hiding the control plane from the client’s perspective, so this session was very insightful.
Overall, my first KubeCon has been as I expected it to be – you could really feel how everyone was very interested in and excited about Kubernetes.”
Sebastian (CEO):
“My favorite talk was eBPF’s Abilities and Limitations: The Truth. Liz Rice and John Fastabend are great speakers who explained a very difficult and technical topic with great examples.
I’m generally more interested in core technologies than shiny new tools that might make my live easier – where’d be the fun in that? So eBPF looks very interesting.
Overall, this year’s KubeCon appeared to be better organized than the one in Valencia, in the aftermath of the pandemic. Anyways, no location will beat Valencia’s beach and climate!”
Daniel (Platform Advocate):
My favorite talk was the report on the State of Platform Maturity in the Norwegian Public Sector by Hans Kristian Flaatten.
I experienced the digitalized platforms of the Norwegian Public Sector back in university as a temporary immigrant, and adoption seemingly improved tremendously since.
As a German citizen, it seems unbelievable for the public sector to adopt cloud-native technologies at this scale.
While I share Sebastian’s views regarding Valencia (which was my first KubeCon), I liked a lot of things about Paris: The city, the venue, and the increase in attendants and talks to choose from.”
“I really liked From CNI Zero to CNI Hero: A Kubernetes Networking Tutorial Using CNI – the speakers Doug Smith and Tomofumi Hayashi explained pretty much everything there is to know about CNIs.
From building and configuring CNI plugins to their operation at runtime, they covered many important aspects of the CNI project.
Regarding KubeCon in general, I feel like Sebastian – Paris was well organized, apart from that there wasn’t too much change compared to the last years. Many sponsors were familiar, and the overall topics of KubeCon remained the same, too.”
KubeCon 2024 Reviewed
Looking back, we had a blast of a week. Seeing old and new faces of the cloud-native landscape, engaging in great discussions about our favorite technologies, and learning about new, emerging projects are just a few reason why we love attending KubeCon.
We now got one year to implement all of the shiny ‘must-haves’ before we might come back: KubeCon EU 2025 will be held in London from April 1-4 2025.
The next KubeCons will be in London/Atlanta (2025) and Amsterdam/Los Angeles (2026)
If you are working with cloud-native technologies, especially Kubernetes, yourself, and would love to attend KubeCon one day, have a look at our open positions – maybe you’d like to be part of our KubeCon 2025 Review?
If you need a primer on Kubernetes and what it can do for you, head over to our Kubernetes tutorials – we promise they’re great!
