Last week, our team was at KubeCon2024 to find out about the latest developments in the cloud-native landscape. Back at home, we naturally want to share our insights with you! Buckle up, get your office chair in an upright position, and let’s get started with Rejekts EU before we get to the actual KubeCon 2024 review.
Rejekts – The pre-conference conference
I had already made my way to Paris a few days before the rest of the team to take part in the Cloud-Native Rejects. Over the last few years, the conference has given KubeCon a second home to many great, yet rejected talks. This has become immensely valuable – the acceptance rate for talks at KubeCon this year was less than 10%. With enough room for ~300 attendees and 45 talks across 2 tracks, this year’s conference set the mood for another fantastic KubeCon week. The contributions ranged from sponsored, short keynotes to standard-length talks and funny, informative lightning talks on the evening of the second day.
Most participants agreed that the less crowded event combined with its high-quality contributions – a mini KubeCon, so to speak – is now a ‘must see’ in the cloud-native event calendar.
Not least because of the wide variety of projects and companies from all cloud-native application areas that were represented by attendees. This made it possible to have stimulating discussions about new technologies, open source and cloud-native development, and marketing strategies at any time between the talks.
My personal “favorite rejects”
After reviewing the event schedule, I decided to prioritize the topics Cilium, Kubernetes’ still quite young Gateway API, and GitOps – and I was not disappointed. Rejekts had a few really good talks up his sleeve for me:
In Demystifying CNI – Writing a CNI from scratch Filip Nikolic of Isovalent, the founder of Cilium, took attendees on a journey through the creation of a simple CNI – in Bash.
From receiving JSON from the container runtime to creating veth pairs to providing IP addresses for pods, it was an in-depth look at a ‘real-world’ scenario.
Nick Young, one of the maintainers of the Kubernetes Gateway API, explained to us how not toimplement CRDs for Kubernetes controllers .
In his great talk Don’t do what Charlie Don’t Does – Avoiding Common CRD Design Errors we followed Charliie Don’t through the process of creating an admittedly scary CRD specification.
The third post I would like to highlight was From Fragile to Resilient: ValidatingAdmissionPolicies Strengthen Kubernetes by Marcus Noble, who gave a detailed introduction to this new type of policy and also gave an outlook on MutatingAdmissionPolicies, which are currently part of KEP 3962.
After some entertaining Lightning Talks at the end of Day 2, I was ready to join the rest of the team and prepare for the main event – so fast forward to the KubeCon 2024 Review!
KubeCon 2024 – AI, Cilium, and Platforms
KubeCon Paris was huge – the biggest KubeCon in Europe to date. The organizers had already announced this in their closing keynote at KubeCon 2023 in Amsterdam, but seeing 12,000 attendees gathered in one place is still something else.
They were all waiting for the keynotes on Day 1, which often set the tone for the entire conference. This year, the overarching theme was clearly identifiable: AI. Every keynote had at least one mention of GenAI, LLMs and the like, and most emphasized: We are living in the AI age.
Interestingly, many attendees left the keynotes while they were still going on – perhaps they are simply oversaturated by the constant hype around AI that we have been experiencing for over a year now.
Maybe they just wanted to get to the sponsors’ exhibition hall faster – many had interesting solutions or at least cool swag to offer!
What drove the team
Or maybe they just wanted to get a coffee without missing the first talks of the day – there was a huge selection. That’s why I asked Justin, Sebastian and Achim what their highlights were instead of just giving you my personal KubeCon 2024 review:
Justin (Systems Engineer):
“I really enjoyed the panel discussion around Revolutionizing the Control Plane Management: Introducing Kubernetes Hosted Control Planes was my favorite part.
We are always looking for ways to improve our Managed Kubernetes platform, and hiding the control plane from the user’s perspective is an elegant solution. I found the presentation correspondingly interesting.
Overall, my first KubeCon was everything I had imagined it would be: all the participants were noticeably keen on Kubernetes and modern technologies.”
Sebastian (CEO):
“My favorite contribution was eBPF’s Abilities and Limitations: The Truth. Liz Rice and John Fastabend are fantastic speakers who presented a complex and very technical topic with great examples.
In general, I’m more interested in basic technologies than the next hip tool that makes my everyday life easier – where’s the fun in that? That’s why I find eBPF so interesting.
Overall, KubeCon was much better organized this year than in Valencia in 2022, right after the pandemic. Still, you can’t beat the climate and the beach there!”
Daniel (Platform Advocate)
“Part of my job is to look at how our users are using and building on Kubernetes. Logically, I was therefore particularly interested in the wide range of talks on platform engineering. What I liked best in this area was the report on State of Platform Maturity in the Norwegian Public Sector by Hans Kristian Flaatten.
During my studies, I experienced the digitized platforms of the Norwegian authorities myself as a temporary immigrant, and the fields of application seem to have grown significantly since then. As a German, it is always somewhat unimaginable to see cloud-native technologies on this scale in public authorities and public institutions.
Otherwise, I share Sebastian’s view: Valencia (my first KubeCon) is hard to beat in terms of setting, but many things were also great in Paris: the city, the venue, and the influx of participants to exchange ideas and discuss.
Achim (Senior Manager Cloud):
“I liked the article From CNI Zero to CNI Hero: A Kubernetes Networking Tutorial Using CNI very well. The speakers Doug Smith and Tomofumi Hayashi explained just about everything you need to know about CNIs.
From creating and configuring a CNI plugin to how it works within Kubernetes, many important aspects of the CNI project were covered.
As for KubeCon in general, I’m like Sebastian – overall the Paris edition was well organized, apart from that there weren’t too many changes for me.
Many of the sponsors and topics presented have been around in one way or another in previous years.”
KubeCon 2024 Review – a conclusion
Looking back, we had a great week as a team. Meeting old and new friends (again), taking part in exciting discussions and learning new things are simply good reasons to come to KubeCon every year. So now we have a year to internalize and apply what we’ve learned before we return to KubeCon once again: KubeCon EU 2025 will take place in London from April 01-04.
If you also work with cloud-native technologies, especially Kubernetes, and would love to visit KubeCon, take a look at our open positions – maybe you’ll soon be part of our KubeCon 2025 review? And if you need an introduction to Kubernetes and cloud-native in general, I can only recommend our tutorials – we promise they’re good!
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