Best of 2024: 10 Hot Takes Ahead of KubeCon EU 2024
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe is set to gather thousands of technologists in Paris in mid-March 2024 to explore everything cloud-native and open source. So, what are some of the key themes to anticipate at the event? Below, I’ve gathered a handful of hot takes from various sources throughout the programming world.
These areas below represent a cross-section of not only what to expect at KubeCon but also the key focuses within the DevOps sphere and cloud-native ecosystem at large. So, let’s dive into these areas to see what’s at the top of today’s savvy cloud-native and DevOps thought leaders’ minds.
AI Takes the Mainstage
“It’s all about AI this year,” said Joe Duffy, co-founder and CEO at Pulumi. It comes as no surprise that AI is a primary focus, given its ability to accelerate code generation, development processes and areas like documentation.
“We have customers spinning up dozens of cloud accounts, deploying dozens of GPU-loaded Kubernetes clusters into each one, and doing mind-blowing things with AI thanks to the infinite scale of the cloud.” Working with an infinite scale isn’t for the faint of heart, explained Duffy, and AI is becoming pivotal to making these sorts of DevOps actions easier.
Secure Container Images
“One major trend on full display at KubeCon EU this week is the push toward secure, minimal container images,” noted Ville Aikas, co-founder and distinguished engineer at Chainguard. Nowadays, perimeter security and multi-factor authentication have rooted out many classic attack types, he said, and the new attack target is the software supply chain.
In this new era, platform engineers and developers are seeking to reduce the potential for vulnerable components and lessen the time and resources spent on remediation efforts. For Ville, this means pruning out potential security debt at the source. “Minimalist container image design, where all but the essential components are purged, is a security pattern that has a ton of momentum right now in the cloud-native community,” he said.
OpenTelemetry Profiling Signal
“The evolution of OpenTelemetry will continue to be a hot theme at this year’s KubeCon EU,” said Juraci Paixão Kröhling, principal engineer at Grafana Labs and contributor to the OpenTelemetry project. OpenTelemetry is becoming increasingly embedded into cloud-native workflows to enable the standard observability signals of traces, metrics and logs.
However, Kröhling is specifically excited about the new profiling signal, which reached general availability in late 2023. He anticipates a lot of buzz around this feature at KubeCon. “Profiling takes the power of OTel even further, with granular new views into areas like code execution and resource utilization,” he said. There’s a rising interest in applying observability to domains like CI/CD and FinOps, he added.
Going Deeper With eBPF and Cilium
But the observability train doesn’t stop with OpenTelemetry. Cilium, the open source eBPF-based platform, is set to garner plenty of attention, as well. “Heading into KubeCon EU, we’re hearing a lot of excitement from the community about finer-grained observability with eBPF,” said Nicholas Vibert, senior staff technical marketing engineer at Isovalent.
According to Vibert, eBPF and Cillium have kicked off a storm of innovation in DevOps and platform engineering due to their ability to enable deeper insights into runtime behaviors with less performance overhead. He also views Cilium as part of the shift toward a more unified DevOps toolset. Kubernetes engineers are struggling with various niche tools, he said, and Cilium could help tooling fatigue by addressing Kubernetes networking needs.
More Declarative IaC
“In 2023, we saw an increase in cloud-native trends, namely declarative languages using infrastructure as code workflows, standardization in cloud deployments, and usage of Dockerfiles, across the GitHub platform,” said Chris Reddington, senior manager, developer advocacy, GitHub. He indicated that this trend will continue, given the importance of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) in defining desired states and properly scaling.
Reddington is especially excited about Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaling (KEDA), a graduated CNCF project that can be added into a Kubernetes cluster to map and deploy event-driven workloads. IaC tools like KEDA can help configure your desired state and enable more scalable management for cloud-native workloads with less friction, he adds.
Keeping Pace With Compliance
Many new regulations are emerging, such as SOC 2, the EU’s CRA and incoming U.S. regulations. All these, plus future AI-focused regulations, will naturally impact a lot of future application development, said Mike Nash, CISO of Lightbend. “Ensuring your core application infrastructure meets these regulations is a significant undertaking that I don’t believe many organizations have fully thought through yet.”
DevOps Isn’t Dead
“Despite rumors to the contrary, DevOps isn’t dead or dying; it’s gaining a new practice,” said Matt DeBergalis, CTO and co-founder of Apollo GraphQL. He noted that the shift toward platform engineering was a way to reduce operational costs and find ways to ship new experiences more quickly.
As part of this evolution, the need to manage API-based technologies is becoming increasingly apparent. “Teams are investing in AI and advancement in LLMs to realize these savings for both the consumption and production of their APIs.” As part of this movement, he sees APIOps as an important emerging discipline.
Composable Web Architecture
“I predict composable web architecture, coupled with AI, will be top of mind this year at KubeCon EU,” says Dana Lawson, CTO of Netlify. She noted that this could be the key to combining the power of AI and cloud-native development in a more systematic and efficient way.
For a number of years, the programming world has been trending toward distributed architectures composed of smaller, less monolithic components. Now, the integration of AI capabilities into composable web platforms is set to provide developers with greater choice and serves to future-proof their stack, said Lawson. “With integrated code and configuration capabilities, developers can abstract away time spent solving issues and boost developer productivity,” she said.
Fine-Tuning Developer Productivity
Before the DevOps movements took shape, developers were stuck throwing their code over the fence and waiting for operations to do their job. But, the merging of the two areas, enabled by technologies to help deploy, host and scale applications, accelerated development cycles considerably, said Trisha Gee, developer advocate at Gradle, Inc.
However, this doesn’t mean the software development life cycle (SDLC) is friction-free. As Gee noted, many bottlenecks remain, such as slow builds and tests at the local and CI/CD levels. As she said, gaining more visibility into the tooling utilized in these processes is the next big step in improving developer productivity.
Optimizing K8s for AI Workloads
Although Kubernetes was originally geared toward traditional workloads, it’s poised to become a critical standard in batch-oriented computing, says Derek Carr, lead architect at Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes SIG Architecture and Node technical leader. “Given AI’s usage of the latest hardware innovations, there is a renewed interest in the cluster autoscaling communities to ensure Kubernetes is best able to scale workload infrastructure at optimal cost,” he said.
One of the key efforts in the core Kubernetes project is Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA), said Carr, which improves sharing of devices like GPUs across containers and pods. As part of this work, he points to more advanced job queuing mechanisms being developed within projects like kudu.
Final Thoughts: DevOps is Evolving
DevOps continues to evolve and embrace new cloud-native tools and workflows. As we can see above, many technical leaders are now considering how they can take full advantage of generative AI’s potential and integrate it with their workflows. There is also a desire to observe systems in fine detail and leverage this data for optimizations.
But less buzzy areas, like supply chain security and compliance, still need adequate attention. There is also the constant drive to enhance developer experience and refine it over time.
The trends outlined above are slated to shape a lot of decision-making and implementations in the coming months. These talking points will likely spark further discussion at KubeCon EU and, hopefully, will help direct your organization’s efforts, whether you are attending the event or not!
Image Source: Photo by Ilnur Kalimullin on Unsplash
To hear more about cloud-native topics, join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Techstrong Group and the entire cloud-native community in Paris, France at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2024 – March 19-22, 2024.
