CONFERENCE SUMMARY
KubeCon EU 2021: Developers, Developers, Developers (and Control Planes)
Key takeaways from the most recent Virtual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
The Ambassador Labs team have once again returned home from another awesome KubeCon! Of course, this time we didn’t ever leave our homes in the first place, but it was great to be connected virtually to the world wide cloud native community once again over the past week. We had many great discussions, watched a bunch of interesting sessions, and also ran our second #AmbassadorFest meetup alongside KubeCon.
Here are our key takeaways from KubeCon EU 2021:
- Developers, and developer experience, within cloud is a big deal
- End users are making a big impact in the cloud native world right now
- Networking in the cloud (and K8s) is still evolving
- Open standards are providing key abstractions, extensibility, and innovation
- Control planes are where the most end user value is being created
- Anyone can (and should) contribute to the community: Docs are a great place to start
Developers, and developer experience, within cloud is a big deal
Several of us at Ambassador Labs have attended KubeCon since the first editions in San Francisco and London. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that the content of most KubeCons has been skewed towards the operator and platform persona. This initially made sense, as a lot of the early discussions at these events were about creating and assembling cloud infrastructure and platforms. However, the core customer of this infrastructure — the developer — wasn’t always represented strongly, which led to some “suboptimal” user experiences in the resulting cloud platforms.
But it was different at this KubeCon. Right from the opening keynote, in which Liz Rice talked about “Predictions from the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC)”, she highlighted the amount of developer experience (DevX)- and operator experience (OpX)-focused application delivery tooling that is currently located within the CNCF sandbox (including our very own Telepresence!).
Philippe Ensarguet captured it perfectly in this tweet:
Justin Cormack further amplified this sentiment in his keynote, where he provided an excellent whistle-stop tour of many of the current sandbox projects. The recording of his talk will be a great place to start if you are new in the K8s tooling space.
Although not included within the KubeCon hashtag, this related developer experience Twitter thread by Jean Yang was also awesome, and hinted at the increasingly popular theme of managing complexity and cognitive load for developers when creating and delivering software:
I’m sure many of you spotted that the title of this blog post is a nod to Steve Ballmer’s infamous “developers, developers, developers” chant at the Microsoft Anniversary event in 2000. It would appear that everything old is new again at KubeCon EU 2021!
However, we were left with the idea that developers and developer experience is now getting the attention it deserves within the cloud native domain. Open source projects and vendors, ignore this at your peril!
End users are making a big impact in the cloud native world right now
Also evident from the opening keynote was the focus on the end user community. We’ve got to give Cheryl Hung and the CNCF team a big tip of the hat here, as they have been steadily increasing the focus on end users over the past several KubeCons. At this event it was great to hear how the likes of Apple, GMX Mail, Spotify, Peloton and others have embraced CNCF tech and — perhaps more importantly — how they are contributing back.
Something that caught our attention straight away was that many of the end users mentioned their use of Kubernetes in passing, as if this was now the default infrastructure choice. Instead they talked about the interesting areas for focus, exploration, and innovation (i.e where their competitive edge could be found) was in their use of other key cloud native technologies, such as Envoy Proxy and Open Policy Agent (OPA).
At this point in the post it’s a great time to congratulate Spotify on winning the CNCF End User Award! They are doing lots of great work in the cloud space, and they are extremely active in nurturing the current interest in developer portals and service catalog with the CNCF sandbox Backstage project:
James Governer and the RedMonk team have recently published an interesting use case of Backstage for cost optimization, and we expect to see a lot more use cases for this type of tech emerge over the coming months.
Networking in the cloud (and K8s) is still evolving
In addition to the above observation that Envoy was popping up in practically every end user talk, there were a lot of other interesting presentations and discussions around cloud networking. The Cilium project was drawing a lot of attention — as was eBPF in general — and this was opening up the discussion of the evolution of the currently very popular sidecar pattern for managing service mesh and cloud native communications. Will we see the reduced use of sidecars for service-to-service communication in the future, and more of this moving (back) into the kernel? This tweet wasn’t on the KubeCon hashtag, but it was perfectly timed:
Cilium and eBPF was regularly mentioned in relation to network security and observability, as captured by Rich Burroughs here:
We had several great discussions at the Ambassador Labs booth about the upcoming Gateway API specification, which takes the current Ingress spec to the next level.
With our recent donation to the CNCF of emissary-ingress (formerly known as the Ambassador API Gateway) several attendees asked about the roadmap for Gateway API spec. The answer is that emissary-ingress (and Ambassador Edge Stack) already support a limited subset of the new alpha Gateway API!
Open standards are providing key abstractions, extensibility, and innovation
Having watched the evolution of one of my favorite talks by Katie Gamanji, I’m constantly reminded of the benefits of open standards. The latest edition of the presentation didn’t disappoint, and Katie reminded us all that you don’t just get interoperability and extensibility, you also get the opportunity for innovation with open standards:
In his Ambassador Fest talk, Jason Morgan from Buoyant demonstrated the power of the K8s Ingress spec and the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) for easy integration of emissary-ingress and the Linkerd service mesh:
And finally in this space, the Friday KubeCon keynote by Daniel Mangum and Carlos Eduardo talking about the RISC-V ISA and the benefits of open source hardware specifications was fascinating:
We expect lots of innovation in this space over the next several years.
Control planes are where the most end user value is being created
Having attended the co-located Crossplane Community Day event at KubeCon, the power of control planes was on display early on in the week. Several prominent cloud community members — including Bassam Tabbara, CEO of Upbound, the creators of Crossplane — stated that the Kubernetes control plane will most likely outlive the implementation of the orchestration framework itself:
I also had the opportunity to run a fascinating panel discussion as part of this event, focusing on platform as product, platform APIs, and the need for developer self-service. A key takeaway for me from this panel was that you need to intentionally curate your platforms and control planes; design and manage them as as product, as they are a key enabler for meeting end user requirements provided by the rest of the system.
Many thanks to Katie Gamanji, Viktor Farcic, Brian Gracely, and Alex Jones for joining me! Don’t forget to catch the recording of this when it is released:
At Ambassador Fest we also launched our Ambassador Developer Control Plane, and it was great to follow up on the discussion with folks at the KubeCon booth and on Twitter. Richard Li, CEO of Ambassador Labs, argued that one of the biggest challenges for Kubernetes developers today is tool sprawl.
Many organizations are looking to provide developers with a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)-like experience, but — echoing recent sentiments by Kelsey Hightower — what developers really want is “middle ground” that focuses on end-to-end workflows:
As usual, Kasper Nissen was making great observations about the benefits for developers that this kind of technology offered (and echoing arguments about managing the cognitive load placed on engineers, which is being pushed forward by the Team Topologies authors):
Expect a lot more evolution in the developer control plane space between now and the next KubeCon.
Anyone can (and should) contribute to the community: Docs are a great place to start
Throughout the event there were countless reminders for everyone attending to get involved with the community. In my Crossplane panel, both Katie and Viktor suggested that the upside for organizations consuming open source to contribute back is almost limitless: the project is made better for everyone, an organization no longer has to maintain its own independent forks, and it’s also a great tool for hiring — and who isn’t hiring in the cloud native space (we certainly are!)
A standout KubeCon session for me was Celeste Horgan’s “Writing for Developers: Take your Project Docs to the Next Level” Not only were there a bunch of actionable takeaways for anyone looking to write better technical documentation, but the call to action was clear: it doesn’t matter what level of experience you possess, you can always add value by writing good docs and sharing what you know! In fact, if you are just starting out on your Kubernetes journey you should cherish your beginners mindset!
Ambassador Labs’ very own Erika Wolfe also provided advice on creating effective technical documentation. Having recently worked alongside Matt McClure to complete the first iteration of our Application Developer’s Guide to Kubernetes, she was quick to point out that a documentation writer’s work is never done:
If you’re in any doubt about your ability to get involved with an open source project, these talks should have reassured you that there is a place for everybody to contribute within the CNCF.
Wrapping Up
And that’s a wrap for KubeCon EU 2021. Many thanks to all of the presenters, attendees, and organizers at KubeCon! And a big thanks also to everyone we chatted to at KubeCon, whether it was via the booth, Slack or at Ambassador Fest.
Please stay in touch, and we look forward to seeing you at KubeCon NA 2021!
