Fall is in the air in the northern hemisphere and that means KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America is around the corner. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America this year will take place in Chicago in early November. If you are unfamiliar with KubeCon, KubeCon was started in 2015 as the inaugural Kubernetes Conference. As the years progressed, KubeCon now coincides with CloudNativeCon and is now the hallmark Cloud Native Compute Foundation [CNCF] event that is held yearly in different regions across the globe. 

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon has grown in size over the past years including more than just Kubernetes; an event to include CNCF projects ranging from Incubating to Graduated. In previous years, "Day Zero" type of events have become more popular as there is now a good number of "Co-located" events happening the day before the main conference. Harness is excited to be sponsoring and speaking throughout the conference. Looking through the talks this year, here is what you can expect at KubeCon this year.

What Can You Expect at KubeCon 2023?

The cloud native community has done tremendous work ushering in the cloud native paradigm e.g scale, robustness, portability, and scalability to the masses. In the eighth year of existence from the Linux Foundation, the CNCF has been an excellent custodian for many projects. Since the CNCF is a steward for openness and transparency in projects, having a big reveal e.g how smart phone launches have big reveals is unusual at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. The projects, maintainers, and end users come together to share stories and practices on furthering the cloud native craft.

One way to gauge what you can expect at KubeCon is to take a look at the program schedule  to ascertain the trends that are going on. There has been some consolidation in the CNCF as some cards exited / did not maintain their maturity level. For example in 2020, there were over 1500 cards in the CNCF Landscape. As of October 2023, there are 1240. For KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023, below are the project talk tracks.

Talk Categories

Here are how the talk tracts for projects are broken down.

• Emerging + Advanced
• ML/AI
• Networking
• Observability
• Operations + Performance
• Platform Engineering
• SDLC
• Security
• Service Mesh
  

These categories show the depth and breadth of capabilities that will be on display at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023. Let's take a look at the top five most popular talk tracks in terms of number of talks.

The talk track that has the most talks is Security. As projects become more critical to infrastructure / application infrastructure, security is a critical non-functional requirement. Substantial workloads are run on cloud native infrastructure and as projects become more popular, unfortunately they become bigger. Common themes around security talks this year fall into a few buckets. First would be using signals that cloud native projects can provide such as eBPF for threat detection. Second would be securing cloud native infrastructure. Third would be adapting to trends such as SBOM/SLSA to your applications/ application infrastructure.

The second most popular talk track is Platform Engineering. As a platform engineer, you are responsible for the experience that users of your platforms have. Projects in this space/ talk track are about "building blocks for creating experiences." Talks in this track run the gamut from building a better Kubernetes Controller to creating an Internal Developer Platform (IDP). This year, the popular IDP, Backstage, has a dedicated co-located event so certain talks that would be in the main track are now in the co-located event. 

Third and my personal favorite is Operations + Performance, basically meeting the demands of cloud native scale. A hallmark of cloud native workloads is the ability to "handle one or a billion requests" gracefully. The talks focus around scaling cloud native workloads and the infrastructure that supports those workloads. There is even a talk around disaster recovery for large stateful workloads. 

Fourth, as ChatGPT has brought LLMs into the mainstream/mainstreet over the past year, there is a re-emphasis on items at scale running these types of workloads. Early on in the history of Kubernetes, as the ecosystem was young, running MLOps types of workloads were really taxing on the schedulers that were out of the box at the time in Kubernetes. Projects like Apache Mesos/Marathon were better suited for the highly elastic nature of MLOps workloads. Fast forward to today, Kubernetes is the de facto standard for running these types of workloads. Talks center around scaling AI/ML workloads on cloud native infrastructure.

Fifth most popular talk track is Observability. Taking the three pillars of observability; metrics, logs, and traces; how do these pillars allow for better understanding how your applications/infrastructure are performing previously, currently, and trending to the future. The observability talks are focused outside the kernel e.g no major themes of eBPF in this track. The track focuses on projects such as Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. Building core O11Y into your applications and application infrastructure.  

The track/talk selections are telling where the ecosystem is going and jointly celebrating learnings with the community. One more click down, if looking at a purely data-driven approach, the CNCF does publish statistics for member projects.

Deeper Looks into Trends with Data

When looking to consume open source software from an enterprise architecture standpoint, project vitality is crucial. If a project has vitality, e.g. momentum, behind the project, there is less of a chance of the project becoming obsolete, or incredibly difficult to get needed security patches in. A project that has more than one committer and reasonably helps close issues, especially security issues. Because of the entrance criteria there is incentivization for projects to continue to grow, mature, and graduate inside the CNCF, keeping the vitality up in the projects.  

Consolidating and visualizing the core project stats, the CNCF does an excellent job visualizing GitHub data in Grafana with Devstats. Let's say you hear an interesting talk at KubeCon about OpenTelemtry from the Observability track. Googling OpenTelemtry [OTEL], OTEL is an incubating project in the CNCF which is the middle level of project maturity from the CNCF. If you had to build more confidence that OTEL has vitality from an enterprise architecture standpoint, you can take a look at OTEL's Devstats. One dimension of data you can look at are the companies that are committing to OTEL, which is a good number of firms.

See You at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023

As humans, learning from others is as important as looking at statistics. The event this year in Chicago will surely be a great one, in its eighth rendition. We champion for all of those who consume, maintain, and are excited to learn about cloud native technologies, to attend. 

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Join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America this November 6 - 9 in Chicago for more on Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Ravi Lachhman is a Senior Manager of Product Management at Harness. Prior to Harness, Ravi was the Field CTO at Shipa, leading advocacy and solutions engineering. Ravi has held various sales, engineering, and advocacy roles at Harness, AppDynamics,  Mesosphere, Red Hat, and IBM helping commercial and federal clients build the next generation of distributed systems.