If you’ve never been to a KubeCon, there’s a lot going on. At the KubeCon North America event this November, I joined more than 13,000 people. There were talks, panels, vendor booths, open-source tools, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) tag meetings, and so much else going on. A part of you feels like “I wish this was longer” and the other part of you thinks that you’ll want to lay in bed forever after it’s over (joking of course… maybe).
In this blog post, I share my three takeaways from KubeCon NA 2023.
Community For All
It’s hard to understand what CNCF means by being community-driven until you’re actually in it. At any point, you can run into people you’ve known online for years, start conversations with new people who share your same interests, go to a CNCF Tag meeting for the first time and have your thoughts heard, or go to one of the engaging talks.
The point is, if you’re an engineer or you love tech (or both), KubeCon leaves you thinking “Dang, this sucks. I wish I had more people around where I live that are as passionate about this stuff”. It’s almost leaves you with this empty feeling when you leave because you’ve been surrounded by so many like-minded people for a week.
If there’s one thing that you’ll get out of KubeCon, it’s community, friends, like-minded colleagues, and a lot of free t-shirts.
Platform Engineering
Diving into and thinking about the tech/engineering takeaways, it comes down to:
- Platform Engineering
- Security
Let’s start with Platform Engineering.
There were a lot of sessions about Platforms. There were a lot of vendors claiming to be geared towards Platform Engineering and/or Internal Developer Platforms (IDP). All of this is great because Platform Engineering is very much emerging right now. This is a good thing, but there’s also some bad around it.
For one, it’s very easy for sales and marketing folks to say “oh yeah, we do platform engineering”, which unfortunately just makes the whole idea very buzzy.
The truth is, Platform Engineering isn’t buzz. KubeCon offered a lot of talks and meetings around Platform Engineering to truly showcase its power. It was a huge trend and a hot topic at KubeCon NA.
After leaving KubeCon, the goal I have/have in mind for Platform Engineering was/is “let’s define this thing, set some standards, and make it better”.
Security
Security was another big engineering/tech focus at KubeCon NA, especially about securing underlying platforms. Of course, there was a lot of Kubernetes, so the security we saw was for tools/addons like Cilium, various Service Mesh security topics, and generally improving the security of Kubernetes overall.
This was heartening to see because as we all know, security is the most important piece, but it’s usually pushed to the back of the line.
The biggest security takeaways I have for you are:
- See what Cilium is doing with security and Service Mesh.
- See what Linkerd is talking about when it comes to no mTLS.
- Watch some of the sessions on securing your underlying platform (Kubernetes).
Closing Thoughts
What I was left with after KubeCon NA was a feeling of “I’m excited to see the trend for the KubeCon EU”. As technology progresses, we always see new trends, talking points, and direction for engineers. Some of which are, of course, all hype and buzzy, but underneath all of the marketing shows a particular need for a set of technologies or stack.
My biggest recommendation is, as always, is take out the fluff and get down to the technical bits. I believe this is what a big portion of the talks at KubeCon are, which is why it’s an exciting, engineer-driven conference.
