Peppi-Lotta Kurjenhovi writes: "My KubeCon experience started from day -1; maintainer summit. Maintainer summit is a place for maintainers to connect with each other. There are talks meant for maintainers specifically, project meetups and a lot of networking. You'll get the most out of maintainer summit if you go there to meet new people or if you want to meet people you work with in real life. It’s a good way to build trust and get to know people you work with or want to start working with.
Even though there are project meetups in the maintainer summit, this is not the best place to hold your project meetup in my opinion. The Metal3 project had a virtually empty room. Maintainers are busy people and they are not looking for new projects to maintain. I feel the purpose of a project meetups is to attract new contributors and show your face to build trust. Maintainer summit is not the correct place to hold the meetup when the people who you want to attract are not necessarily able to attend the event.
I learned of an interesting duality: AI makes contributing easy and AI slob is on the rise but new contributors amount is declining in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Well-scoped, well-described issues marked as “good first issues” have been the way to attract new contributors for a long time. Well described issues are an invitation, for someone using AI bots to mass produce PRs, to snatch an easy task. Bots and non serious AI vibe coders are taking all the "good first issues” that have been a stepping stone into a project and this way of getting your foot between the door is disappearing. Creating these good first issues as a task in itself and it's not producing the return it used to. I think the future of new contributor acquisition is in mentorships and programs meant for familiarizing people with a project.
On day 0 I went to Telco day in the morning and I planned on attending the agentic days in the afternoon. The Agentic day opening remarks room was completely full. They had to turn people away at the door. The main point in the opening remarks was, that people are losing faith that they will get return for the investment they have made into AI. The chat bots alone have not manifested the 10x productivity that was promised. The point was that agents need to be put to production this year to keep the AI train moving. I needed to leave the room before the next talk started and I was not able to get back in because there was that long of a line. Unfortunately that was all I was able to learn about agents in the agentic day.
But no worries there wasn't a lack of AI in KubeCon. The theme of KubeCon Day1 was AI and agents. Apparently 66% of serious users are running AI on kubernetes. One new interesting project related to this was introduced a few times; llm-d. It is a project for disaggregated serving of LLMs. The goal is to run a cluster of LLMs instead of having one huge context. Compared to last year's Open Source summit NA I noticed a huge shift in the way people are talking about agents and Ai. There were much more concrete ideas and demos on how agents and LLMs can be used instead of the more general call for ideas I've been hearing before.
The second day's theme was digital sovereignty. CRA is coming fast and that doesn't really have any concrete effect in maintainers and open source developers' lives and work. It is however a big deal to the companies using open source and in that sense it should have a big impact on open source. I feel like the point of the key notes is to make open source people understand why it is important to adopt CRA and all other security practices so that enterprises don't slip into using their own proprietary code. There are projects like the osps-baseline that collect all European acts and extra security guidelines into one easy to follow guide. To achieve sovereignty we need interoperability and abstraction that foundation like Linux foundation are in a position to drive and it must be done securely.
Both growing AI work loads and interest in sovereignty have increased the interest in the Metal3 project that the EST Finland team is maintaining. This was my first KubeCon so this is only secondhand knowledge but I was informed the Metal3 booth was busier than ever. What I saw for myself was that big companies came to the both telling that they have already adopted the project and interested to join the community or looking for more information to make the leap into actually adopting the project in production. Metal3 is a project that allows for Kubernetes native way to manage the lifecycle of bare metal servers. What is more sovereign than having your own servers and managing them with an open source project where you don't have to rely on any cloud provider. Being able to manage your own servers is also important when going forward with the disaggregated LLM workloads that was much talked about in the maintainer summit and Day 1 of KubeCon."