Event Retrospective from Jason English, Principal Analyst, Intellyx
The concept of another big-bang software conference caused me some trepidation — after all, many well-known technology shows have had to pull back on plans to get together in person due to continuing COVID concerns.
But I was happy to find that as the date of KubeCon / CloudNativeCon NA 2021 approached, clear vaccination requirements and on-site mask and health check protocols were in place in the Los Angeles Convention Center to make sure that the only things spreading at the live conference were cloud native knowledge and camaraderie.
Breaking the ice with the normalcy of collaboration
While in-person attendance was nowhere near 2019 levels, the activity level within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem has only accelerated, now that there are more than 140+ projects underway and nearly a thousand member and end user orgs in the fold.
And for the dozens of disruptive vendors with presences there, while end customer traffic might have been rather light on the show floor, the spirit of contribution to a common open source foundation meant there was a lot of partnership activity to talk about.
“CNCF has been really good at facilitating collaboration between vendors, contributors and practitioners,” said Shahar Fogel, CEO, Rookout. “We found that this event was about quality over quantity, and a virtual session would just not be the same as the partnership of finally meeting the cloud native community face-to-face.”
Kubernetes matures into a de facto reference architecture
For anyone who thinks of Kubernetes as simply another layer of container orchestration, there were plenty of use cases on display to set doubters right about how it can change the paradigm of how applications are developed and delivered.
Opsani demonstrated an automated optimization solution that discovers application configurations, generates canary Kubernetes instances and YAML files, and compares multi-cloud deployment options against SLOs of cost, scalability and performance as measured in leading observability tools.
Replicated was there in force, making a splashy picnic appearance on the show floor. They support an open source airgap install utility as well as a subscription-based installation management solution that doesn’t require cloud infrastructure at all — it uses K8s to package up all the system resources needed for secure on-prem (or ‘any-prem’) app delivery.
There’s a lot more to Cloud Native than Kubernetes
Companies are getting huge value out of much more than K8s, so the side-show conferences of EnvoyCon, FluentCon and other project focus sessions ended up drawing much of the attention of in-person and online attendees.
“Big companies like Chick-fil-A and Intuit demonstrated the benefits of transitioning to a GitOps workflow — and it doesn’t always take a huge team. State Farm managed their transition with just 4 engineers,” said Ken Ahrens, CEO of Speedscale. “I also appreciated the Day 0 content of EnvoyCon, where Envoy flexed its muscles as cloud-ready with the likes of Twitter and Adobe relying upon it at scale.”
Velero project backups and cloud native data migration were also hot topics, as practitioners seek to preserve state in a stateless microservices world. Trilio was there announcing the release of Velero data backup, monitoring and restore services in the context of ransomware prevention, which is top of mind for many CISOs today.
“As a program committee member — I reviewed 150 submissions and there were a lot of submissions about GitOps, Flux and more,” said Jason Yee, Director of Developer Advocacy at Gremlin. “People really want to establish an end-to-end platform, so while most companies here are investing heavily in Kubernetes, there’s also a heavy movement toward GitOps.”
Observability and control
With Prometheus a standard part of most K8s installs, Kafka on the rise as a common event streaming service and OpenTelemetry really starting to come into its own, contributions to open source observability tools from most leading vendors like Splunk, New Relic and Datadog continued to grow.
Cribl is a fast-growing vendor filling gaps in this space by acting as a ‘universal translator’ which filters those volatile and chatty sources of streaming log event data, routing them to any of the SIEM, observability and storage backends available to cloud native developers.
Down at the roots of code-level observability, Lightrun was dressed up in a sort-of Sherlock Holmes retro theme, highlighting how their platform allows developers to shift-left issue resolution by sleuthing out runtime bugs directly inside the IDE.
Filling the skills gap is still the greatest challenge
Enterprises are notoriously understaffed (as much as 40% by estimates here) on skilled cloud native engineers — and this talent and training gap is only growing. That’s why CNCF announced the addition of a business-level certification offering known as Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) to compliment its wildly popular CK*-certification courses for operators.
The recently acquired Kasten by Veeam team with their cloud-native backup and data management solution had a huge presence at the show. But one interesting aspect of their appearance was to promote their new free self-directed Kubernetes learning platform which they said has already logged more than 30 thousand courseware users.
Clearly there’s a lot of hunger for learning in this ecosystem, since it seems we’ll never be able to recruit enough cloud native engineers.
The Intellyx Take
Importantly, I found a huge emphasis on developer experience at this show. The more comfortable developers are — whatever their walks of life — the more in the flow they can be to innovate and advance the ecosystem further.
Much of the progress we see in the cloud native movement has less to do with code and infrastructure, and more to do with mutual respect and inclusion.
A cool general session highlight celebrated Indigenous People’s Day with local tribal music and this thought from VMware’s Tim Pepper: “You have heard the saying ‘inclusion is not just inviting somebody to the dance but inviting somebody to dance — the difference between being invited to a dance and dancing.’”
With this kind of event breaking the ice for the next ones, I can see the open source cloud-native movement attracting far more diverse and talented people into its fold as users and contributors in the future.
See this story on Medium: https://medium.com/@bluefug/kubecon-2021-reconstituting-the-cloud-native-community-in-la-d42e44bcd264
Jason English (@bluefug) is a Principal Analyst of Intellyx, which advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. At the time of writing, Replicated and Splunk are current customers, and Gremlin, New Relic, Rookout and VMware are former Intellyx customers. None of the other vendors mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. The author is an advisor to Speedscale. CNCF covered English’s attendance costs at KubeCon, a standard industry practice. Image composite source: Jason English
