Takeaways From KubeCon 2024

KubeCon is a wrap! I had a blast seeing friends and meeting a lot of new people at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2024. Also had the pleasure of interviewing a number of smart minds for stories I have in the works. I'm looking forward to writing up some formalized takes for some of the publications I write for. But for now, here are a handful of takeaways from the event.

Kubernetes Marks Its Tenth Birthday

Kubernetes, now ten years old, remains the second-highest velocity open-source project after Linux. Opening remarks at KubeCon celebrated the project's history, featuring Kelsey Hightower and others sharing quick reflections. Hightower credited the extension frameworks and the role of the community in shaping the tech over the years. "It's easy to predict the future when you're working on it," he said.

When they open-sourced Kubernetes back then, it was far from done, noted Lachlan Evenson, poking fun at the reckless early adopters. Over the years, its flexibility has evolved significantly, supporting a wide array of workload types. "Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms," he said, though he also highlighted the need for better security controls and simplified complexity.

Kubernetes is also still not great at offering an adequate abstraction for applications, according to Bailey Hayes. "Wasm is going to be that next major abstraction in tech," she says. However, just as containers didn't entirely replace VMs, WebAssembly is unlikely to fully replace containers. For deeper insights on that, check out my story on InfoWorld on this very topic.

Patent Trolls Threaten Open Source

The patent troll dilemma was eye-opening. I didn't expect patent trolls to come up at the opening remarks today at KubeCon! Apparently, patent trolls are becoming an increasing threat to cloud-native open source. "We have to band together to figure out how to deal with this problem," said Chris Aniszczyk.

Assertions by non-practicing entities involving Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects have been increasing year after year. And companies that are attacked often end up caving to these patent bullies. Unfortunately, the settlement fee is often less than the requirement of taking it to court to defend yourself, describes Joanna Lee.

I was totally oblivious to this issue. They say the maturity of open source (it's 80-90% of the code deployed) has attracted attention from some unsavory types. To fight this increasing problem, CNCF is helping to crowdsource and publish prior art and invalidate patents these folks use as claims. They even announced a bounty-program-like program.

I know legal stuff is not a sexy topic to highlight at all, but I hate to see this type of bullying and thought I'd help amplify it to bring attention to the efforts to fight it, because this community is cool. "Don't touch open source, because we're not going to cave," says Jim Zemlin.

Platform Engineering Takes the Spotlight

This year, what stuck out to me was the big focus on platform engineering and a recurring phrase that has just about become a cliche: "Treat the platform as a product." It seems like platform engineering initiatives are really maturing. Companies are spending more effort to streamline the developer experience associated with internal platforms.

"Tools think that APIs don't exist," said Viktor Farcic in his presentation at Platform Engineering Day about rethinking developer portals. It's 2024, and people are finally talking about hashtag APIs at KubeCon. He didn't want to take time recreating processes manually when working with internal developer portals (IDPs) on the market, so he complained to the tooling providers to build some. At least one did (Port IO). That's progress.

Reviewing The Event

Kubernetes has become more usable, and running AI workloads on Kubernetes has become a common requirement. I also noticed more chatter about WebAssembly, open-source funding, and agentic AI. I'm also sensing a lot of potential with eBPF, so I'll be following it more closely.

At KubeCon, I let an AI draw my face, took a quick ski trip in the snowy Utah mountains, and checked in with the jovial CNCF mascots. Also enjoyed mingling with Isovalent's hive mind for post-show drinks. Digging the dad hat swag lately… if you see a dad walking around Portland, Maine, in a The New Stack or containerd cap, that's probably this guy.

I really enjoyed this year and can't wait to write up more formalized takes for some of the publications I write for. Many 'thank yous' to Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Speakeasy Strategies team for making my trip possible and for making me feel welcome.