KubeCon EU 2019: Top 10 Takeaways

The Datawire team and I have returned home from an awesome time last week where we attended KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Barcelona. Together, we were part of six talks at KubeCon, staffed a packed booth with amazing T-shirts (if I do say so myself!), spoke to dozens of community members, and attended some fantastic talks. As there was so much goodness on offer at KubeCon EU, I’ve tried to summarise some of my key observations in this blog post.

There were several talks that specifically covered the topic of multi-cloud (and the related sub-topics of networking and security), but I also observed that many of the introductory slides within end-user talks showed that their infrastructure / architecture included at least two cloud vendors. At the Datawire booth we also had a lot more conversations (in comparison with previous KubeCons) that anecdotally backed up this serious shift to embracing multi-cloud. The success of Kubernetes has undoubtedly made creating a multi-cloud strategy much easier by providing a solid abstraction for deployment / orchestration.

The functionality and APIs within Kubernetes have become more stable over the past two years, and the platform is widely adopted across vendors. In addition, functionality relating to storage management and networking have become more mature, and there are now viable open source and commercial products in these spaces. The “Debunking the Myth: Kubernetes Storage is Hard” keynote by Saad Ali, Senior Software Engineer at Google, was of interest in regard to storage, and “Kubernetes Networking: How to Write a CNI Plugin From Scratch”, by Eran Yanay at Twistlock, was a good overview of networking.

Source: getambassador.io