What’s Happening at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022: Day 1

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 just got started in Valencia Spain! And we’re here with the latest buzz, keynote information, and Cloud Unfiltered interviews—from Day 1 of the conference. We’ll be back tomorrow with more!

An API gateway is essentially…a bouncer at the discotheque, [who] needs to check your ID, [who] needs to check that you are the age where you will be able to drink. Same thing with API gateways.
– Vik Gamov on Cloud Unfiltered

The Buzz

The one thing that we keep hearing again and again is that it’s great to see everyone in-person again. We missed each other.

On a more technical note, we are hearing a lot about eBPF, a technology that can run sandboxed programs in a privileged context (like the operating system kernel). Allowing this sort of extension to the operating system at runtime enables several next-generation use cases, including networking, observability, and security functionality.

Another technology discussed often at KubeCon: OpenTelemetry (OTel). OTel is a set of APIs, SDKs, tooling, and integrations that are designed for the creation and management of telemetry data. The project is vendor-agnostic and can send telemetry data to the platform of your choice.

Keynote Summary

Priyanka Sharma, Executive Director of CNCF, kicked off the conference with opening remarks covering the state of CNCF, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and several partner initiatives, speaking to over 7,000 in-person attendees and 10,000 virtual attendees.

Igor Dvoretskyi, a long-time KubeCon attendee from Ukraine, shared personally about the current situation in his home country. Razom for Ukraine also shared about how it has been responding to the crisis there. For more information on what CNCF is doing, check out the CNCF Ukraine page.

Other organizations which presented keynote addresses include Boeing, Disney, Mercedes-Benz, Intel, and Huawei.

Cloud Unfiltered Interviews

We have a full slate of Cloud Unfiltered interviews from Day 1, covering everything from API gateways to machine learning to “chaos engineering.”

Vik Gamov (Kong)

First, we talked with Vik Gamov (Principal Developer Advocate at Kong) about API gateways. We covered what an API gateway is, the need for API gateways, how they relate to a service mesh, and more. With the proliferation of microservices, there is an increasing need for a way to manage those services, handle routing logic, and address cross-cutting concerns. API gateways can increase the efficiency and reliability of your suite of services.

Listen to the full episode.

Matthew LeRay (Speedscale)

We also met up with Matthew LeRay (CTO at Speedscale) and discussed the need for API testing in the CI/CD pipeline. While application testing has grown in popularity, API testing is still often seen as a manual process. It doesn’t have to be this way; we can now capture production traffic and feed that into an automated testing suite for our test and staging environments. This allows us to test not just individual services, but the whole interconnected ecosystem of services too.

Listen to the full episode.

Julie Gunderson and Jason Yee (Gremlin)

Julie Gunderson (Senior Reliability Advocate at Gremlin) and Jason Yee (Director of Advocacy at Gremlin) came on the podcast to discuss the role of chaos engineering in development. Chaos engineering is the practice of proactively experimenting on our systems to determine their reliability. This could mean injecting failure, testing scale, or even testing human processes.

Listen to the episode.

Dejan Golubovic (CERN)

We had a chance to chat with Dejan Golubovic (Junior Fellow at CERN) about AI, machine learning, and the petabytes of data that they process with their clusters. Dejan also shared about what it’s like to work at CERN and how they scale their infrastructure using KubeFlow.

Check out the full episode.

Sebastien Goasguen (TriggerMesh)

For our last interview of the day, we spoke with Sebastien Goasguen (CTO at TriggerMesh) to learn about what’s new in eventing and how it relates to Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS). FaaS is great for getting small bits of logic into the cloud without overhead, but what causes that function to run? That’s where eventing and triggers come in. One example of this is event-driven security notifications. In addition to FaaS, there is an entire ecosystem of distributed services and packages, all of which need to trigger other services and react in real time.

Episode link soon!

Next Steps for Cloud Native Professionals

Cisco also announced free tier sign-ups for its new, innovative suite of tools for cloud native professionals:

• Calisti: A service mesh manager that helps you obtain an end-to-end view of your entire service network.
• Telescope: A cloud native application troubleshooting tool for streamlining fault detection and system health.
• Panoptica: A secure application cloud to add robust security visibility and assessment across your applications.

Each tool is open source-based and enterprise-grade, designed to help you with your cloud native applications deployed to multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud platforms.

Wrap Up

We’re just getting started with our KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 coverage. Stay tuned for more updates from Day 2 tomorrow!

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 is the flagship conference of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, gathering together leading open source and cloud native communities to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. This year, the conference is being held in Valencia, Spain from May 16-20, 2022.

Want more updates on KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 and all things cloud? Check out the Cloud Unfiltered podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

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