Dell recently attended KubeCon EU in Amsterdam and I have the pleasure of joining the Dell team at the booth to talk about everything from Dell’s Container Storage Modules for Kubernetes to our validated stacks and future cloud offerings. We even had Alienware gaming computers and a full-blown podcast booth where we conducted 20+ interviews with Kubernetes community members (coming soon to our YouTube channel!). Dell made a splash with an awesome booth and our swag flew off the shelves with conference attendees lining up down the show floor to obtain one of our Cat/Dog DevOps t-shirts and plush toys. Overall, it was a great show and here are a few musings from the show I wanted to share.

Amsterdam

First off, Amsterdam is a beautiful city and very walkable. Like my home-city of Boston, you can about walk from one end of the city to the other In a few hours' time. If you have not been, the climate is also similar in the spring to the northeast united states, so it felt mostly right at home. What did not feel right at home was the number of bicycles! If you google Amsterdam, you will see bridges, water, and bicycles. Bicycles are king of the road which means as a pedestrian or driver of a vehicle, you want to make sure and yield to the bikes. The food was great, lots of meats and forms of potatoes. I ate too many fries with mayo, which was served everywhere I went. Amsterdam has all kinds of cuisines so with minimal effort you could find something that suits you if the local scene is not doing it for you. The last thing I will say about the city was that there were plenty of parks, green spaces, and places to walk the many dogs of Amsterdam and this was all located directly outside the conference center, which made it a great central place for KubeCon EU.

Energy Level

If you attended any of the recent KubeCons within the past few years, whether that was Detroit last, Los Angeles or San Diego going back a bit further, what you may have noticed is a massive change in the energy level of the Kubernetes community. This was the first sold out KubeCon (10k attendees) and now that we are moving to a post-covid world, I expect more of this. It is great to see the community thriving and driving the excitement and participation that we have grown to love about these communities. I'm hopeful that this post-covid, KubeCon San Diego energy is back and here to stay. This means that Detroit this fall should be another great conference and gathering (if the weather in Chicago cooperates in November!). There seemed to be a lot more first timers at the show and I had a lot of conversations with practitioners learning about the values of the ecosystem and where it was having a real impact on their company. I think the reasons behind this are twofold, first is that travel restrictions are truly easier to deal with for people and companies now, but secondly that Kubernetes is now mainstream and becoming embedded in later adopters. The show is not just early adopters that tend to be leading the charge. This is great for the community and hopefully just means more opportunities for Dell to make an impact on new members of the ecosystem.

KubeCon Themes

Cost / Monitoring

Cost and observability were two of the largest themes that I noticed at Kubecon EU. This is likely to do with the ongoing mass adoption of Kubernetes but also that those teams are now dealing with the efforts of controlling costs. This relates to both the current economic climate companies are facing and how fast you can start to consume infrastructure when you unleash a Kubernetes platform on your developers. In either case, usually the first step in these cycles is to understand what you are running (observability) and then how you can go about controlling the cost of those resources. There was a good amount of companies, projects and tools emerging in this space but also lots of home-grown efforts to reduce cost such as repatriation from the cloud to adoption of multiple clouds with Kubernetes acting as the abstraction. Tied closely to cost was a focus on sustainability at this event. Efforts included reducing carbon footprints in serverless architectures to specialized KEDA scaling implementations with a focus on carbon footprint of workloads.

WebAssembly

WebAssembly’s role in cloud native continued to be a trend at KubeCon EU. In our previous blog and video on WebAssembly, Cloud Native WebAssembly (WASM) is a binary format that is gaining popularity in this ecosystem for its similar traits to containers. Those traits include improvements in performance, security and more. Companies like Furmyon are helping drive adoption of WASM and this KubeCon even had its own Cloud Native WASM day. What this really showed me was that there is a strong interest from developers in additional tools and deployment methods to support an ever-growing list of use cases for Kubernetes.

Security

Security remains a hot topic and rightfully so. With Kubernetes specific attacks continuing to be discovered, individuals and companies are paying close attention. The security discussion tends to trend toward a shift-left putting more focus on how developers, DevOps and platform teams can start to embed security as a first-class citizen into their workflows. This often means paying more attention to developer workflows and doing things like embedding security features directly into how devs interact with CI/CD and Git

Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering has moved passed its “DevOps is Dead” messaging and is continuing to focus its efforts on putting meat on the bone. Platform engineering and DevOps live in parallel and are a major part of delivering a successful platform within an organization. The growing complexity of the Kubernetes ecosystem and projects means that companies are listening to efforts to organize themselves and deliver a centralized platform for developers. The community is gaining a lot of traction and I suspect that it will continue to gain traction going into KubeCon Chicago. Check out more in the platform engineering community.

Conclusion

As always, I am looking forward to both Chicago and Paris and hope that we can continue to sustain the Amsterdam level excitement. Dell and I will continue to challenge our role in the community, and if anyone wants to participate in our podcast booth in the upcoming shows, please get a hold of us! As a parting note, I covered a similar KubeCon review in a recent podcast and if you are looking to reach out and find out more about what we are doing here at Dell related to Kubernetes, head over to https://developer.dell.com!

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KubeCon Musings: Dell @ KubeCon EU Amsterdam

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