Hey everyone,
I broke my Monday Cadence but here we are.
I wanted to share a bit of a recap on KubeCon EU & CloudNativeCon 2023 which was last week and held in Amsterdam.
Persona
Overall we are seeing that trend towards the new Systems Administrator attending KubeCon|CloudNativeCon, I spoke with existing Veeam customers at the show, and this is a first for me at this event. The biggest shift I saw though was how these “Sysadmins” have been landed with looking after this new platform, they were not even saying they were on Day 2 and having to solve the data protection problem but they were on Day 20 and having to scramble to fix this problem!
In the KubeCampus Learning Day which was held on Tuesday, I asked the audience of circa 90 people where they landed between Developer, DevOps and Operations and we saw around 30% in each camp. In Detroit, this would have been more shifted towards the Developer and DevOps persona.
I was also very happy with the emphasis on the show floor around data, we know data lands in many different areas ranging from application database data to big data and machine learning and AI data. The booth was consistently busy with conversations and demos taking place and it didn’t feel like the “What is it you do then?” it was more “We have that issue, I would love to see some more”
I also believe that the persona spectrum is not absolute, I am speaking to DevOps-focused engineers that have a responsibility around data! I have been saying and speaking a lot about the evolution of the systems administrator will have to be more DevOps or more Automation aware and focused vs keeping the lights on.
Trends
Before I got there I was expecting Edge to be a big contender for the top trend at KubeCon but I did not see much about this at all, I wonder if this is because Edge is so poorly described and has no boundaries to what the definition of Edge means passed a marketing term these days.
Cost for me was a huge trend I saw on the show floor this year, we had the usual tools from KubeCost and their open source project OpenCost but then others such as Granulate (An Intel Company), Zesty (Only AWS services), Cast.ai and Finout.
I believe anyone that has adopted cloud or cloud-native has an issue with cost management and optimisation.
Security was another vibrant trend across the board, the key players being Sysdig and Snyk. I will say though that the session and talk track around Policy as code specifically from Kyverno was well attended and we should do more from our K10 integrations here with Kyverno and OPA to double down on this trend.
Learning, it was said that 58% of attendees were first-timers to the event, which makes me think about where are these people coming from (most likely systems administrators) but then where are all the developers now going? Are they going to WASM events or specific developer conferences?
Sustainability was another undercurrent to the show, One to keep an eye on. Project Kepler is one to look out for, it calculates energy usage of applications, could integrate that and create sustainability dashboards for backup data.
Data in general was a great discussion point, The Data protection working group session ended up being virtual as the co-chairs could not attend. We have people heavily involved in this working group but I always try and catch these sessions to get a grasp on their trends.
Kubernetes Storage (KubeCon Session)
- My first in-person KubeCon Session
- Has to be Open-Source focused
- The workshop session was broken down into 4 labs and sections providing theory and hands-on
- Kubernetes Storage 101
- Kubernetes Storage Troubleshooting
- Kubernetes Storage Performance
- Kubernetes Storage Protection
We made the lab available via Instrqut (the same lab technology used for KubeCampus) but we also made these labs available in a GitHub Repository for people to run against Minikube or any Kubernetes distribution.
Please take part and walk through the lab in the above link.
Ok that seems a lot, next week I will get back to some trends we are seeing in the space and start sharing some focus areas around events that are coming up.
