I can’t believe that KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 is nearly here! I’m looking forward to meeting up with my friends and colleagues at this event dedicated to cloud native computing. This year, we’re meeting up in Salt Lake City, Utah from November 12th to 15th. As a practitioner, technical enthusiast, end user, and open source contributor, I can relate to many of the diverse KubeCon attendees. I’m also moderating a panel this year, discussing policy and artificial intelligence. This post is a mini-guide for what to expect and the five panel discussions and talks I’m looking forward to the most.
First of all, this is just the North America event — the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) runs KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events around the world, so check those out, too. There’s one in Delhi, India from December 11-12, for example. The events are focused primarily on Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration platform, as well as the many related technologies that exist in the cloud-native landscape. There are lots of activities and the overall environment is very inclusive, so attend with an open mind and be prepared to learn and think. Activities at the North America event include:
The event also offers scholarships, childcare, and food options for vegetarian and vegan attendees, helping ensure that anyone who wants to attend has the opportunity to take part. All sessions are recorded and will be uploaded to the CNCF YouTube channel within 48-72 hours of the event.
The first session I’m excited about is the discussion I'm moderating with Poonam Lamba, a Product Manager at Google; Boris Kurktchiev, the Chief Plumber at Nirmata; Ronald Petty, a Consultant at RX-M; and Jimmy Ray, a Senior Distinguished Engineer at Capital One. The session is on Wednesday, November 13 from 12:10 pm to 12:45 pm MST at Salt Palace, Level 3, 355 E and is part of the Maintainer Track, Policy.
I’ve already talked and written a bit about Kubernetes as the go-to for deploying AI, but this session focuses on the need for strong governance and how policies and AI intersect within Kubernetes. Our goal is to discuss some of the challenges we’ve seen, best practices, and emerging standards for managing AI workloads to guarantee security, fairness, and transparency.
We'll also talk through existing and new policy frameworks for governing AI workloads on Kubernetes, including industry standards and best practices. Our goal is to make sure attendees understand security risks, such as data privacy and model integrity, and why it’s important to establish clear lines of accountability for AI workloads. This panel is geared towards engineers, operators, compliance officers, and anyone involved in deploying and managing AI workloads on Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join us!
I love retrospective talks like this session, led by Christian Posta, Global Field CTO at Solo.io and Louis Ryan, CTO at Solo.io, explores the importance of simplicity in components when building complex systems. Istio is something we’ve all worked with for many years to enable application networking. As it has matured and adoption has increased, we’ve uncovered some challenges and key mistakes made along the way. This session walks through the shift to simpler, more modular components for managing APIs and service-to-service communication. Join this discussion on Thursday, November 14 from 2:30 pm to 3:05 pm MST at Salt Palace, Level 2, 254 B, which is part of the Cloud Native Experience track.
We’ve long celebrated the concept that open source rules the world, with most organizations now agreeing that the code is better and more secure and that bugs in open source software gets fixed faster. Kubernetes itself is open source, as is Docker, Linux, and the many projects coming out of the CNCF that enable cloud native computing.
This session is presented by Emily Omier, Consultant; Matt Bates, Founder & CEO at Cofide; William Morgan, Linkerd Director and CEO at Buoyant; Ashley Davis, Staff Software Engineer at Venafi; and Deepthi Sigireddi, Software Engineer at PlanetScale. It explores the shift from volunteer-led projects to company-maintained open source, while community expectations for free open source software remains the same. Attend this session to hear about how companies are trying to monetize open source and what lies ahead in this changing ecosystem. Join the discussion on Friday, November 15 from 11:00 am to 11:35 am MST at Salt Palace, Level 2, 255 B, which is part of the Cloud Native Experience track.
Recently, Chinese researchers announced that it was possible to attack encryption methods, including RSA, using quantum computers. It’s a big deal, but RSA isn’t broken just yet. Still, quantum computers do pose a unique threat to computer security. That’s why I’m looking forward to this session with Michael Maximilien, Distinguished Engineer at IBM, and Paul Schweigert, Senior Software Engineer at IBM. This talk takes a proactive approach, showing how to deploy a quantum-safe application on Kubernetes, including why quantum-safe cryptography is needed. It promises to provide practical steps we can take to secure our applications in a post-quantum world. Hope to see you at the session, which is on Thursday, November 14 from 11:55 am to 12:30 pm MST at Salt Palace, Level 2, 255 B. It’s part of the Emerging + Advanced track.
This session, led by Jiaxiao Zhou, a Software Engineer at Microsoft, explores sidecar contains, their drawbacks, and how WebAssembly offers a different solution that uses less resources and memory than Linux containers. The session also shows how you can get started with deploying Wasm sidecars to support your primary services with additional functionality (including a demo). It takes place on Thursday, November 14 from 2:30 pm to 3:05 pm MST at Salt Palace, Level 2, 255 B. It’s part of the Emerging + Advanced track.
There’s a lot of great information ahead of us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon this year, and I’m excited to be a part of it once again. Our discussion on AI for policy is important, and I hope it brings together a lot of people in the importance of strong governance and policies for Kubernetes and AI. At Fairwinds, we enable our clients, open source users, and contributors to make the most of Kubernetes for infrastructure management. We are deeply committed to ongoing learning and the evolution of Kubernetes and cloud native architectures as part of the cloud native community. Hope to see you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon — and please say hello!