CONFERENCE SUMMARY
KubeCon EU + CloudNativeCon 2023 Summary: DevEx, Debugging, and Doubling-down on Community
A roundup of the key themes from the KubeCon EU event held in Amsterdam
The Ambassador Labs team and I safely arrived home after a fantastic KubeCon EU 2023. We all enjoyed the Valencia edition of the event last year, but KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU Amsterdam felt like the community was returning to full strength after two years of virtual and hybrid events. We had so many great conversations and attended so many fantastic sessions that it’s challenging to summarize our takeaways in ~2000 words, but here goes!
Key themes of KubeCon 2023!
There was so much going on at this year’s KubeCon EU 2023 it’s tricky to pick the key themes. And, of course, everyone who attends KubeCon does so looking through a unique lens. I’ll acknowledge my bias upfront and say I am typically most interested in developer experience and cloud native communications.
In no particular order, here are my top KubeCon EU 2023 key takeaways:
- Developer experience continues to get more attention
- Platform engineering is increasingly focused on DevOps
- Debugging K8s-native applications shouldn’t be a slog (but it often is)
- Cloud native “stacks” are emerging: should you go all-in or select best-in-class point solutions?
- Wasm continues to gain momentum
- The biggest challenge with Machine Learning is CI/CD
- Edge computing continues to move away from the core
- Commercializing OSS isn’t always easy: Striking a balance is key
- Doing more with less is on everyone’s mind
- The community still rocks!
Developer experience continues to get more attention
Both TheNewStack and my team flagged that developer experience (DevEx) would be a key theme in our articles published before the event, and we weren’t disappointed. KubeCon has successfully evolved into a developer-friendly — and maybe even a developer-focused — event over the past three years. DevOps engineers, operators and platform engineers are still well represented, but developers entering the ecosystem have guided projects and platforms into thinking more about developer experience.
This was evident in the excellent talk by Shahar Shmaram & Ran Mansoor from AppsFlyer, “How We Migrated Over 1000 Services to Backstage Using GitOps and Survived to Talk About It!”
I’ll draw your attention to the developer-focused pain points in the slides above: “unknown resource dependencies and ownership” and “lack of technical documentation.” It’s almost like we need some sort of internal developer platform (IDP)! Which was, of course, another hot topic…
Platform engineering is increasingly focused on DevOps
I’ve used this meme in a few of my recent talks, but it felt especially relevant at KubeCon EU 2023 (and hat tip to Derek Morgan for the image):
I spent a lot of time at the Ambassador Labs booth, and if a conversation quickly became technical, I would often ask: “So, are you dev or ops?” To which ~50% of the time, the response was “Yes!” 😁
It turned out that many folks identified as being in a DevOps role. Not platform engineering. Not infrastructure. Not operations. But DevOps… And when I asked a few more questions, I often found that they were building platforms, but they saw themselves as the bridge between developers and operations — and this was the job/role title they had been given. It was also interesting that many of these folks clearly cared about the platform experience they delivered to developers, and they were keen to learn more.
I had several interesting debates about the difference between an internal developer “portal” and an internal developer “platform” — and for me, the distinction is primarily focused on UI versus UX, i.e. are you simply implementing a service catalog (“putting some Backstage lipstick on the proverbial shell script pig”) or actually building a platform to enable developers to get stuff done — and there was a big focus on reducing toil and wasted effort for both the builders and users (developers) of these platforms.
Debugging K8s-native applications shouldn’t be a slog (but it often is)
My awesome Ambassador Labs colleague, Edidiong Asikpo, presented “Telepresence Case Studies: From First Experience to Fast Feedback at Scale” to a packed room. The message that debugging applications deployed to Kubernetes should not be painful clearly resonated, as Edidiong was swamped by questions after the presentation ended!
Edidiong not only provided an overview of the “remocal” (remote-to-local) approach provided by Telepresence, but also presented three real-world use cases of how teams had used this CNCF tool to reduce their development iteration/feedback times when coding locally and testing against services running in a remote Kubernetes cluster.
We also had some great chats at the booth about how Telepresence compares to tools like DevSpace and Skaffold, and we heard some great stories about how these tools were being combined within workflows. And I’ll give a big shout-out to Whitney Lee and Viktor Farcic for demonstrating Telepresence and DevSpace in their session, “Choose Your Own Adventure: The Treacherous Trek to Development” Rich Burroughs created a great thread, even if he was clearly cheering for the wrong team! 😆
And I wanted to give another shout-out to Alex, Colleen and the entire team at The New Stack for letting my colleague Kay James talk about Telepresence on the TNS stage. She had a blast demoing Telepresence and enjoyed Alex’s banter:
Daniel Lipovetsky also presented a great session, “Breakpoints in Your Pod: Interactively Debugging Kubernetes Applications”, which walked through some debugging challenges and how to use the relatively new ephemeral containers to set breakpoints and walk through code.
The key message is that developers now have many options for debugging applications running in Kubernetes. I’m biased with my work on the Telepresence project, but it’s always good to explore alternatives.
Cloud native “stacks” are emerging: should you go all-in or select best-in-class point solutions?
I had many great conversations at the Ambassador Labs booth about cloud native communications/networking stacks. A recurrent theme was people asking if they should go all-in with adopting a stack from one vendor for API gateway + service mesh + CNI, or instead choose best-in-class point solutions.
Having worked on Emissary-ingress and Ambassador Edge Stack, I lean towards selecting point solutions that integrate well. I had a lot of conversations about how these API gateway technologies work with Linkerd and Istio, and many attendees at our booth were looking to create a stack that provided them with the best overall developer experience.
For those interested in this space, I’ll talk more about this in the upcoming PlatformCon in June:
It’s worth mentioning that a lot of cloud native communication technologies are built on Envoy Proxy, which got its own origin story documentary that was premiered at KubeCon EU. This was a lot of fun to watch. The documentary makers wove together a compelling narrative, just as they have done with their previous Kubernetes and Prometheus documentaries:
And, of course, I can’t write about cloud native comms without mentioning eBPF and Cilium. Liz Rice and the Isovalent crew were leading the charge here:
Wasm continues to gain momentum
Web Assembly (Wasm) was front and center at the event, and in addition to eBPF, this was one of the most talked about low-level technologies. I had several terrific conversations about Wasm’s use to create extensions plugins in API gateways and service meshes, and several folks were interested in using this as a runtime target for edge applications.
This, of course, led to conversations about how to create a toolchain for building Wasm applications. In response, the Docker and Fermyon folks were rocking the mic about this throughout the dedicated Wasm Day colocated event and KubeCon itself:
Interestingly, I kept bumping into Dapr throughout the event (and my enterprise Java buddies hadn’t been this excited about a piece of technology for a long time!). Mauricio Salatino and Adrian Cole joined this technology and Wasm in “Safe, Dynamic Middleware with Dapr and WebAssembly.”
The biggest challenge with Machine Learning is CI/CD
Despite the current hotness of ChatGPT, I only spotted one booth that was heavily leaning into this theme, and in general, the chatter was mostly focused on building machine-learning platforms and toolchains. Although ML and AI are everywhere, only a minority appeared to be thinking deeply about their technical requirements and establishing good continuous delivery practices. My conference buddy, Dean, nicely captured this theme from the ArgoCon colocated event:
Edge computing continues to move away from the core
I’ve always considered “the edge” to be my API gateway or network perimeter, but I’m clearly not hipster enough! Seriously, there was a lot of buzz surrounding edge technologies as they expand outwards from the core of the data center, from IoT to serverless functions running in globally distributed CDNs.
Edge computing and associated technologies like Wasm received several shout-outs in the keynotes:
Commercializing OSS isn’t always easy: Striking a balance is key
One of the most talked about sessions at KubeCon EU was by the cloud native living legend Kelsey Hightower, “From Community to Customers.” Kelsey dived deep into the benefits and challenges of attempting to commercialize open source software:
It’s not always an easy path to walk, but we’ve learned at Ambassador Labs that everything gets a bit easier if you put the community and customers first in all of your decisions. This starts with providing clear licensing and good documentation for open source projects and goes all the way to providing obvious value and world-class customer support for commercial offerings.
Rich Burroughs also nicely captured Kelsey’s thoughts on the balancing act that is required between open source and commercial projects, highlighting how this has benefitted the Envoy Proxy project in the past:
Doing more with less is on everyone’s mind
This is a cliche given the current macroeconomic situation, but “doing more with less” manifested itself in conversations at our booth and at the Emissary-ingress and Telepresence OSS Pavilions. Several attendees were looking to do more with open source offerings and asked how they could balance the build vs buy decision over the short-to-medium term.
After chatting with my peers at the event, it appeared that many vendors were offering more generous free tiers and helping users to get as much value as they could before they needed to level up through the tiers. This is something we’ve been focused on at Ambassador Labs, too. This is a balance (as discussed by Kelsey in the point above), but most of us know that we are all playing a long game here, and we believe that helping out folks now will pay dividends in the future.
The community still rocks!
I say this every year, but that’s because it’s true every year: the cloud native community rocks! I had so many great conversations with friends, old and new, and everyone was welcoming. I’ve been working in the tech industry for 20 years, and this kind of thing doesn’t just happen — it takes real work by the community, the vendors, and the CNCF.
A particularly fun event that’s emerged within the ecosystem (largely thanks to Lian Li!) is Kuberoke. The Ambassador Labs team was happy to join Mia-Platform, Loft Labs, Control Plane, and Chainguard to sponsor this edition of the #1 KubeCon singing event:
Outside of the parties, I also had many thought-provoking discussions and met many folks I had only connected with on Zoom. This is why I love going to KubeCon!
In conclusion, KubeCon EU 2023 was fantastic!
Thanks for reading this post and for all the great conversations at the Ambassador Labs booth! The people and the community make KubeCon so unique, and the entire team has a blast reconnecting with folks and meeting new people (or friends we had only met on Zoom until now!)
Join us again at KubeCon NA 2023 in Chicago! And don’t forget to bring your Ambassador Labs beanie — it will be cold.
- Watch the Inside Envoy: The Proxy of the Future documentary trailer here
- Learn More about Telepresence
- Join us on Slack
