Over the years, Kubecon has become the main event of the Cloud Native Foundation and a meeting point for most of the entities working with Landscape technologies. More than ever, the event organised last May in Valencia promised to be a forum full of information and interesting insights related to the Cloud Native world.
With these assumptions considered, CloudFire participated as well, and the five-day experience gave us a thorough understanding of the real centerpiece on which the whole event revolved around: Kubernetes, along with its features and benefits.
K8s in general
The main protagonist was precisely K8s. There were numerous talks dedicated to the new features introduced with the latest version of Kube-APIs (v1.25). Special attention was dedicated to the security area related to applications developed on-top of Kubernetes.
The advantage of Kubernetes has always been that it provides a single API interface that can be "provider agnostic" and allows identical operations to be performed on different clusters hosted on different infrastructures, both cloud and on-premise.
Throughout the conference, various speakers presented tools and solutions to extend the power of this concept to its fullest extent.
The solution that certainly catalyzed most of the attention was on the topic of multi-tenancy. The guys from the Clastix team with the Capsule and Kamaji solutions demonstrated how it is possible to "segment" single cluster resources with Capsule and how to provision and manage an absolutely incredible number of clusters as-a-Service with Kamaji!
Another technology that attracted interest during the conference was eBPF. It allows user-space code to be executed in kernel-space sandboxes, thus allowing efficiency to be increased and the capabilities of the kernel to be extended without modifying it or adding modules, whilst remaining in the sandbox environment. The most promising current application is related to different CNIs, of which Cilium seems to be the most mature and ready.
Change of mindset
That event has in my opinion served to achieve an important mindset change in our Team, specifically related to our paradigm of using Kubernetes. In fact, I came to the conclusion that up until Valencia, the idea of CloudFire related to K8s was something very close to a perfect environment for developers , whereas after the conference it became an automation platform to be used by Dev, Ops and DevOps.
The use of tools such as Crossplane or ArgoCD make it possible to manage infrastructure resources such as Virtual Machines, Bare-Metal, Switches, etc. by leveraging the loop machine provided by Kubernetes. Through this approach, it is possible to manage complex infrastructures with DevOps philosophy, having the certainty that any changes to the resource will be returned to the desired state, written declaratively and therefore already documented (if made outside of that philosophy).
DevOps philosophy and GitOps become the natural way to manage complex infrastructures, bringing with it unquestionable advantages related to reproducibility and documentation.
In this sense, a glimpse of the future was provided by a very interesting talk in which the principles of the next paradigm, only possible thanks to Kubernetes and its philosophy, were described and shown, namely the concept of AIOps or Artificial Intelligence Ops, a natural evolution of the DevOps paradigm in which Machine Learning and AI process data about individual resources and perform preventive and corrective actions without the need for human intervention.
Conclusions
The days at Kubecon were crucial in making a shift in philosophy. Such philosophy is permeating all CloudFire's departments which are using Kubernetes both as a development platform and as a platform to manage the operational and deployment of both infrastructure and new services.
Looking forward to upcoming Community-related events, see you at the next Kubecon! ☁️🧡
