After the exciting event of Paris In March and one year since the edition of Detroit, we finally return to the United States, to Salt Lake City, to breathe air of innovation, solutions Open Source high-level for corporate IT challenges, and Kubernetes at the center of the scene at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024.
What are the changes coming to the Open Source world?
The sixth KubeCon for CloudFire opens Tuesday, November 13 with a keynote that highlights an important Turning point in the Open Source landscape. Big companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Google they are beginning to understand the immense potential of Open Source licensed projects, and it is evident from their commitment to protecting this ecosystem.
This protection is realized thanks to the partnership with Unified Patents, an organization that protects patents, reporting and invalidating “clone” projects. It's clear that big corporations are trying to protect Open Source, but this change is also raising questions.
Is it possible that we are witnessing a downward phase of the Open Source model, with a transition to an era of corporate patents? The topic has not yet found a definitive answer, but it will certainly be central to the discussions in the coming months.
However, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon doesn't stop there, let's explore the other topics covered together!
Observability and OpenTelemetry
During the various talks, it became clear that observability is increasingly oriented towards the unification of metrics, logs, events and traces. The focus is on using common standards in order to be able to collect and analyze data in real time in Data Lakes.
The maturity of the sector is evident from the adoption by numerous projects, both open source and commercial, such as Prometheus, Datadog, Dynatrace and Grafana. The efficiency of normalizing data at the source allows effective and real-time analysis.
If you want more details on the specifications, you can find them directly on OpenTelemetry.
AI/ML infrastructures
Kubernetes proves once again to be flexible, finding application even in the complex scenarios of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), although it often seems like just the 'buzzword' of the moment.
Numerous talks have highlighted solutions to simplify the adoption of GPU/TPU in mode As-a-Service, with particular emphasis on the use of hardware acceleration Pay-as-you-go.
Another central theme concerned storage: from the fine-tuning phase to the processing, the S3 storage and S3-compatible the preferred choices are confirmed, thanks to their low costs and sufficient performance to guarantee copy times on local storage.
In parallel, alternatives have also been explored for Local NVMe storage, but the challenge remains that of locating the data with respect to the GPU, making scalability difficult in the event of a single node failure. Will we be able to find a solution to this problem? We'll see at the next KubeCon if we get an answer!
Ingress: Welcome API Gateway
With the switch from Ingress Controller toAPI Gateway, DevOps around the world are faced with a new opportunity: moving from a load balancer L7 (Ingress) to a more flexible and powerful load balancer L4+L7, with integrated advanced logic.
Cutting-edge projects such as Envoy and Traefik are making these features easily accessible, paving the way for solutions that combine power and flexibility.
KubeCon and Use Case
One topic that has aroused great interest has been related to AI. Finally, after several editions of KubeCon, the discussion seems to move away from the question”How can I do AI?“to a more pragmatic one”Why do I need AI?”.
This new perspective reflects a maturation in the adoption of Kubernetes, now seen as a real commodity. Exciting use case presentations made it clear that Kubernetes has now crossed the boundaries of the IT department, to become an essential tool in the supply chain of large and small companies.
Friends at KubeCon
Like every edition, there was no lack of post-conference networking moments, we met with and like the veterans of the sector to exchange exchanged opinions. This year we discussed with many friends we have met over the years, adding additional value to the experience.
This edition proved to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration, from which we will draw important ideas for future projects. So much so that already on the return flight we were working to realize what we learned!
See you at the next KubeCon Europe in London from April 1 to 4, 2025!
