Kube Con 2024 Paris

I recently attended Kube Con 2024 held from 20th to 22nd March 2024 in France at the Paris Expo 1 Pl. de la Prte de Versailles, Paris. This was the first time I attended a conference and it was an excellent experience. More than 12,000 software engineers were in attendance.

Below are some of the sessions I had attended:

Wed 20th Dec

Key Note

  • Cool demo by Priyanka Sharma (Exec Director, CNF) on running a AI inference model on her local system. She ran a Kubernetes cluster in her local, deployed the LLM model and simple app. Took a picture of the crowd and the LLM model gave a brief description of the image
  • In hindsight, not that cool, but this was the first time for me. It was a huge auditorium
  • Almost all of the other keynotes were related to AI and ML. Some about the new developments in GPUs

Architecting Resilience: Lessons from Managing 7K+ Kubernetes Clusters at Scale - Kwanghun Choi & Gyutae Bae, Kakao

  • Presentation about the company does resiliency. The company - Kakao run many Kubernetes deployments and provide the service to multiple other client in South Korea
  • The talked about how they managed when there was a big fire at one of their data centers
  • The discussed the old architecture and the new architecture that was more resilient.
  • Most of it< i could not understand as it dealt with platform engineering. But nevertheless, a good session>

An Acronym Free Introduction to Software Supply Chain Security - Joshua Lock, Verizon

  • This was a session that gave good introduction about Software supply chain
  • The speaker provided where in each part of the supply chain vulnerabilities can be introduced by hackers
  • The speaker also provided some real world case studies about such hacking attempts
  • I liked the session. There was one example where the presenter mentioned Software development should be like fast food. Make all the the creative decisions at the menu (or the actual software). The delivery should be made as simple and boring as possible.
  • Keep things simple and secure in the delivery part. Don’t make the delivery complicated

Choose Your Own Adventure: The Struggle for Security - Whitney Lee, VMware & Viktor Farcic, Upbound

  • This was a fun session. Here the two presenters did a bit of gamification to secure an application deployed in Kubernetes
  • They asked Sli.do questions to the audience as to what all technologies should be used to for each part of the security of the application
  • The did the exercise with 4 points
    • Add Cluster Level policies
    • Implement runtime policies
    • Manage secrets
    • Secure pod to pod communication

Cultural Shifts: Fostering a Chaos First Mindset in Platform Engineering - Sayan Mondal, Harness & Raj Vadheraju, FIS

  • It was a presentation about how you can do Chaos testing for applications in production setup
  • The presenter was interested in showcasing how we ca develop a Chaos mindset - the knowledge that things are going to to fail
  • The main intention is to figure out if something fails, how does the application respond
  • The presenter simulated chaos by using a CNCF project called Litmus. Using the project, the presenter created a test case where an pod of the application was intentionally brought down
  • The application is connected to logs and observability is set up. These logs can later be verified about how the application performed when chaos was introduced

How to Save Millions Over Years Using KEDA? - Solene Butruille, BlackRock

  • This was a session where I first saw the real time implementation of KEDA
  • The presenter’s company had a problem wherein containers those were spun up when a client initiated an active session kept consuming money and resources even thought the sessions were in-active
  • They solved the problem by using KEDA. The wrote logic about how to consider a session as in-active in the KEDA config. Afterwards the presenter demonstrated how based on the logic, KEDA actually brought down the container that was used by an in-active session
  • She mentioned that though this was good, they did not have much of savings as they had 3 year long term contracts with the Azure

After the sessions, we had KubeCrawl. This was a food and drinks party. I really liked it. After that my colleagues and I went back to have some more food and drinks at the local pub and then retired for the day

Thu 21st Mar

The Hard Life of Securing a Particle Accelerator - Antonio Nappi & Sebastian Lopienski, CERN

  • This presentation was about how CERN does its authentication and autorization. How users from around the world logging and create session in the CERN network
  • It was a fascinating to look at how CERN and engineers working in CERN think about
  • They have a very open source mindset and do not want to be heavily reliant on any vendor. For them, any scientist should be able to get into CERN ecosystem. No matter what the local politics dictates
  • They mentioned the problems they have with older infrastructure (Puppet deployments) and how they are remedying it using Kubernetes now

The IaC Evolution - on Open Source & Everything Else - Sharone Zitzman, RTFM Please; Mandi Walls, PagerDuty; Roni Frantchi, env0; Solomon Hykes, Dagger.io; Eran Bibi, Firefly

  • This was a group panel discussion session about Infrastructure as a Code
  • The panelists discussed about the how IaC has evolved over the years and in which direction it is going ahead
  • Can to know here was Dagger.io - using which CI/CD pipelines can be generated by writing in coding languages like Java/Python
  • It was a good discussion with an emphasis on simplifying things in the Kubernetes ecosystem
  • Also came to know about Open Tofu and how this was forked from the original Terraform project after Hashi Corp decide to change the Open source license in 2023

Product Market Misfit: Adventures in User Empathy - Mitch Connors, Aviatrix

  • This presentation was about how things can go wrong if a product does not seek user input or the developers of the product are not able to empathize with the needs of its users
  • It was a good talk. It was not very technical but enjoyable none the less
  • The learning was definitely try to be in your users shoes, try the product as your user would use it. Also, never stop listening to your end users

Navigating the Depth of App Delivery Through Memes - Lian Li, Independent & Thomas Schuetz, WhizUs

  • This session was a session about CNCF TAG (Technical Advisory Group) app delivery committee
  • They discussed about what the TAG group does. This gave an insights into the inner workings of CNCF project delivery

Towards Great Documentation: Behind a CNCF-Led Docs Audit - Jorge Lainfiesta, Rootly

  • This presentation dealt about documentation and how to go ahead to create documentation for a open-source project
  • The presenter discussed documentation in the context of an audit done by CNCF team on the Backstage project
  • There were some good tips and tricks. Three types of documentation - Project documentation, end user documentation and website documentation

Kubernetes SIG Architecture Intro and Updates - John Belamaric, Google & Davanum Srinivas, AWS

  • Again an presentation about CNCF SIG(Special Interest Group) Architecture
  • It gave an understanding about how CNCF project architectures are over-viewed. Also came to know about SIG groups in CNCF and their charters

After this, my colleagues and I went to visit Eiffel tower. It was majestic and took my breadth away. We had some good food and drinks in a pub near it. We then walked around Paris for an hour talking about different topics. It was fun!

Fri 22nd Mar

Building Container Images the Modern Way - Adrian Mouat, Chainguard

  • In this presentation, the presenter discussed about how containers are build with the focus on building small and secure containers
  • The presenter discussed multiple OSS tools those are right now available those help to build images
  • Chiseled Containers was one such project that was discussed.
  • The session was a lot technical but at the same time understandable

Saving the Planet One Cluster at a Time: Operationalising Sustainability in Kubernetes - Gabi Beyer & Brendan Kamp, re:cinq

  • Session on Sustainability while deploying in Cloud and Kubernetes
  • The presenter gave ideas about how we can migrate some workloads to those countries those use sustainable fuel more. Also follow the sun strategy
  • Some other cool ideas about how we can reduce carbon footprint (CO2e)

New Technologies

  • Cilium (Framework that works at the Kubernetes Level 4 and Level 7)
  • KEDA
  • Litmus - Chaos framework
  • GitOps
  • OpenTofu - Fork from Terraform
  • Dagger.io - Framework that makes CI/CD pipelines as code
  • re:cinq

Learnings

Check State of reports to know about which direction things are moving. Like State of DevOps report and State of IaC report from reputable sources

Software development should be like fast food