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May 6, 2018
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Copenhagen: KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018 Takeaways

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What a crazy week helping host our annual European community conference in Copenhagen… it’s been wild to see the community grow since the CNCF took over the stewardship of the conference (thank you Joseph Jacks, still remember those conversations we had in the early days):

I was also just blown away by the amount of CNCF ecosystem related jobs out there:

I have a few hours until I board my flight home so I figure I would share some of my take aways from the event in a series of tweets:

CNCF project adoption and the growth of the End User Community

The amount of end users I’ve bumped into at the conference was incredible, insurance companies, medical, automative, government, airlines, tax offices and more. In Dan Kohn’s keynote, he covered our official CNCF End User Community which was setup as a way to ensure End Users have a voice in CNCF governance:

CNCF has one of the largest, if not largest end user community membership of any open source foundation. I’m proud of what we built and mark my words, there will be a day when the number of official CNCF End Users will outnumber our vendors. Also, I was stoked to announce our first Top End User Award to Bloomberg showcasing one of our official end users using cloud native technology an interesting way:

If you’re using CNCF projects an interesting ways, I implore you to join our official End User Community so you have an official voice and more importantly, learn from other end users deploying CNCF projects.

May a thousand [kubernetes] operators bloom

In my opinion, one of the big themes of the conference was the rise of kubernetes operators. In Brandon Philips keynote, Red Hat (CoreOS) open sourced the Operator Framework which makes it easier to write and build operators:

At the conference itself, there were many projects and companies announcing operators for their project or product (see dotmesh, spark, NATS, vitess, etc), expect this trend to continue and explode over the next year, you can see the growing list of operators out there via awesome-operators repo.

CNCF is the center of open source serverless collaboration

The CNCF Serverless Working Group launched their first version of the CloudEvents project:

https://twitter.com/clemensv/status/992478395178119168

There was an incredible demo by Austen Collins showcasing the project across several cloud providers:

For an effort that started under a year ago, it’s nice to see Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM and other major cloud providers collaborate in the working group and support various open source serverless initiatives, I look forward to what they will do next:

CNCF 2020: Expanding ecosystem + Kubernetes: just run my code

Alexis Richardson gave a keynote outlining his thoughts on the future vision of CNCF which I found delightful for everyone who doesn’t attend every CNCF TOC meeting:

It’s not a surprise that I concur with a lot of these thoughts. In the bootstrapping days of CNCF, we were laying the foundation of projects required to bootstrap the ecosystem around Kubernetes and cloud native. The next step was increasing the reach of Kubernetes outside of just orchestration and focusing on technology areas as storage and security. The future of CNCF is all about increasing the mean time to developer satisfaction by improving the state of developer tooling. We need to get to the same point that developers are with Linux with Kubernetes, while super important foundational technology, developers don’t have to know the intimate details of how these systems work and instead stand on the shoulders of them to build their applications.

Another additional thing I’d like to mention that Alexis didn’t bring up formally.  One of my goals in CNCF is to ensure we build a sustainable ecosystem of projects, members and end users. As our ecosystem matures and some of our projects proverbially cross the chasm (we use the graduate parlance in CNCF)…

How do we ensure each of these parties are receiving value from their participation in the foundation? It’s something I think about on a daily basis as more CNCF projects get embedded everywhere, graduate and cross the chasm.

Kubernetes maturing and container standardization unlocks innovation

At the conference, Google open sourced gVisor as another approach to container runtimes which in my biased opinion is made possible due to OCI standardization efforts to allow this type of innovation without fear of breaking compatibility. As part of gVisor, runsc(like runc in OCI) provides an isolation boundary between the application and the host kernel and they have a ton of information in their README about the tradeoffs versus other container runtimes out there:

Conclusion

There are a lot more things to mention (e.g., rise of enovy and it becoming embedded everywhere, cloud native programming languages, chaos engineering) but I have to now board a flight home and get some sleep. Personally, I’m nothing but humbled by the growth of the community and conference the last few years, it’s been an honor helping build it out since the beginning. If you have any suggestions on improving the event or our community in anyway, please reach out via Twitter or shoot me an email:

We do listen to feedback and as an example, in Austin, people complained that the videos were taking too long to post and we aimed to have a quicker turn around this time and followed through with that in Copenhagen:

Thank you again for attending and see you in Shanghai and Seattle!

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