Liam Fallon writes:

"I attended Kubecon North America in Atlanta this November. Kubecon is the main conference of the Kubernetes and CNCF communities held annually in North America, Europe, and elsewhere around the world. I have to say Faseela K. of Ericsson Software Technology did a tremendous job as co-chair of the event!

The main theme of the event this year was how AI and cloud native technologies are coalescing, enabling intelligent cloud deployment and handling as well as intelligent cloud applications. A secondary theme was Systems Architecture: how to achieve scalability, robustness and dependability in cloud deployment. Another important theme was security and compliance, with the EU CRA (Cyber Resiliency Act) getting prominent mention.

This year I got to spend time at the co-located CNCF maintainer’s summit, an event for members of CNCF incubating and graduated projects and maintainers of sandbox projects. The event promotes sharing best practices, diving into contributing processes, and solving common problems across projects. Topics addressed included dependency management, developing and maintaining APIs, best practice in dealing with AI in contributed PRs, technical coaching of contributors, and handling versioning in Kubernetes correctly. It was great to see that other projects face the same issues that we face in the open source projects that we maintain and that there is cooperation and knowledge sharing across CNCF projects to help address many of the common issues.

Pic: My colleague Tuomo and I attending the maintainers summit.

The kpt project where I am a maintainer was accepted for two slots at the Project Pavilion, a dedicated space on the show floor for CNCF Projects. We had a healthy flow of people visiting the booth. Some visitors to the booth who were aware of kpt and configuration as data, but most needed to get an introduction. We explained where kpt fits into the kubernetes configuration landscape together with other tools such as Helm and kustomize. Most people understood that other tools don’t scale well when you have thousands of small clusters. This was our first time to publicize kpt at Kubecon since the project was rebooted. It was very interesting to hear people’s opinion of the project, and we got valuable feedback that we will bring back to the kpt project community."

Images reproduced from the official CNCF event Flickr

“KC+CNC_NA_251109_MaintainerSummitBreakoutsB207-208_ML-MN_004” by Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

“KC+CNC_NA_251109_MaintainerSummitGroupPhoto_ML-MN_002” by Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0