KubeCon Rocks in Detroit: What we learned from visiting Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s top conference

This fall’s must-attend event was held in Detroit, and Profisea Labs was an official Sponsor. The right place for utterly devoted cloud professionals to further the evolution of cloud-native computing and discuss hot cloud trends by no means is KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s conference gathers cloud-keen experts delivering valuable content from technical-away business cases to advanced engineering profound submersions.

I will boldly postulate that this autumn’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon has overdone itself, like they regularly do, capturing cloud specialists’ hearts by providing a perfect spot where the cloud community comes together to share their experiences in previously unexplored yet increasingly trending terrains. Here we will explore the main takeaways from Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s top conference, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, 2022, held in Detroit, Michigan.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022: 200+ Sessions, 18 Cloud Native Tracks, 70+ Project Maintainer Presentations

“If you’re interested in enterprise IT infrastructure, Kubernetes should be your technology of choice, and KubeCon is the place to be,” said Jason Bloomberg, SiliconANGLE, and we could not agree more.

Businesses focused on new technologies are open-minded and respond to the application modernization demands of today’s challenges. Kubecon + CloudNativeCon provides a leading forum to share relevant information and ideas about Kubernetes, the hottest DevOps trends, AI-driven digital transformation, and rapidly booming container orchestration approach to microservice architectures that have come to replace traditional application patterns.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 featured presentations from developers, DevOps engineers and Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects’ end users to enable deep dives into a sophisticated approach to application modernization due to state-of-art container orchestration methodologies.

Priyanka Sharma, Executive Director of Cloud Native Computing Foundation, greeted the conference attendees with opening remarks about Cloud Native Computing Foundation stating it is a vendor-neutral home for 100+ fastest-growing open source projects, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy.

Here are five takeaways from visiting Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s top conference you can focus on progressing your digital transformation.

1. AWS ❤️ K8s!

Nathan Taber, Sr. Product Manager on the AWS Kubernetes team, shared with the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon fantastic audience the vision of setting the direction for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS’ managed Kubernetes service. Since Nathan works closely with AWS customers, partners, and engineering teams that are adopting and building Kubernetes in the cloud, much work has been done in this regard, and many projects are coming up.

2. GitOps mindset to evolve Kubernetes automation level

Shatarupa Nandi, Senior Director of Engineering, VMware Tanzu, explained that embracing GitOps is the key to fully realizing the value of the developer experience, security, and operations at scale across multiple environments. Shatarupa Nandi discussed how we could ship high-quality software securely and repeatably on Kubernetes and keep the developer experience simple. Additionally, Shatarupa Nandi pointed out how the IT industry had embraced GitOps for applications, 3rd party software, and Kubernetes. This mindset gave businesses a competitive edge and helped showcase IT’s strategic value and importance.

3. Distributed System to reduce bugs and costs and reach more users

Rebecca Bilbro and Patrick Deziel from Rotational Labs told how they built a very own eventually consistent system implemented in two new open source projects, leveraging gRPC, Kubernetes, LevelDB, and Prometheus tools. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon lucky attendees welcomed a hearty introduction to distributed systems concepts, a list of things to investigate in their systems to reduce concurrency-related bugs and/or consistency-related costs, improve maintenance, and reach more daily active users around the world.Rebecca Bilbro and Patrick Deziel from Rotational Labs told how they built a very own eventually consistent system implemented in two new open source projects, leveraging gRPC, Kubernetes, LevelDB, and Prometheus tools. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon lucky attendees welcomed a hearty introduction to distributed systems concepts, a list of things to investigate in their systems to reduce concurrency-related bugs and/or consistency-related costs, improve maintenance, and reach more daily active users around the world.

4. Kubernetes Node Shutdown should be handled gracefully.

Shutting down a node is an inevitable event, and it can be graceful or non-graceful in a Kubernetes cluster. Xing Yang & Ashutosh Kumar, VMware, let the luckiest KubeCon + CloudNativeCon’s audience know that a node shutdown can be graceful only if it can be detected by the Kubelet ahead of the actual shutdown. In the speech, Xing and Ashutosh explained the graceful shutdown concepts and their impact on the running workloads, including the systemd inhibitor locks mechanism and configuration settings. In Kubernetes v1.24, alpha support for handling non-graceful shutdown is introduced, which enables replacement pods for StatefulSets to be created successfully on a different running node which otherwise would be stuck. Additionally, Xing Yang & Ashutosh Kumar explained how to use the non-graceful shutdown feature using taints and the future roadmap around making the feature more automated.

5. Finding Clarity in a Cloudy Landscape is crucial.

Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source, Cisco, explained the value of Clarity, whether it’s while brainstorming new ideas, solving complex problems, or when you need visibility into your cloud-native environments. Stephen invited the conference attendees to explore the evolution of open source tooling that provides increased Clarity for your end-to-end cloud-native development. Additionally, he shared information about Cisco’s latest addition to the OpenClarity ecosystem, FunctionClarity, which gives developers a framework for code-signing serverless functions.

Merging Financial Management and Kubernetes – one of the prevailing KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 topics were warmly welcomed by our amazing Profisea Labs team since bringing FinOps to Kubernetes-based environments is the core mission we implemented in our innovative cloud cost reduction platform — Uniskai. Additionally, we were thrilled to discuss the FinKube ideas with our FinOps Foundation partners.

Uniskai + Kubernetes to upgrade containerized application management

Kubernetes-based environments, when built across multiple availability zones (AZs), notably increase availability and failure resilience. However, some hidden complexities in the configuration and maintenance of such multi-zone infrastructures, consisting of various Kubernetes clusters. This situation causes uncontrolled system functioning, significantly limiting saving opportunities and resulting in bloated cloud bills.

At the same time, Kubernetes-based infrastructures owners can avoid this problem by addressing well-designed FinOps platforms, like Uniskai by Profisea Labs, to understand, build, optimize, monitor, and protect containerized, multi-account, and often multi-cloud infrastructures. Powered by AI, Uniskai analyzes system utilization and user behavior patterns and provides unique recommendations to curb the cloud bills swelling due to bringing clarity to Kubernetes clusters, graceful Kubernetes environment-inside resources shutdown, and adopting a well-developed spot management strategy.

While Uniskai is not intended to replace the entire DevOps team, the unique AI-powered cloud platform that successfully combines a visual representation of all a company’s cloud assets and comprehensive cost optimization automation is designed to enable you to understand all the lost areas and make saving decisions, optimize Kubernetes-based environments and save up to 75% on your cloud costs.

Wrapping things up

This fall, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon lucky attendants have reaped a rich harvest of valuable content from technical-away business cases to advanced engineering deep dives to further the evolution of cloud-native computing.

Profisea Labs experts are incredibly grateful to Cloud Native Computing Foundation for providing a perfect spot where the Cloud/DevOps communities gather to share their experiences in increasingly trending fields. In addition, we are grateful to our customers, partners, and friends who spent valuable time with us discussing hot DevOps/FinOps topics and featuring our innovative cloud cost-reduction platform, Uniskai’s demo.

It is not goodbye. So let’s meet in Amsterdam this spring!