CONFERENCES

KubeCon EU 2023: Themes, Talks, and (Movie) Trailers

Join us to learn more about devex, debugging, and API gateways

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Ambassador Labs

5 min readApr 10, 2023

The Ambassador Labs team has packed our suitcases and booked our flight tickets for KubeCon EU 2023 — Amsterdam here we come! We’re looking forward to seeing you in our sessions, the hallway track, and also at booth #S7. Please stop by and say hello!

We’re presenting several sessions, sponsoring Kuberoke, and have also been heavily involved in creating the Envoy Project Documentary premiering on Thursday night at KubeCon EU.

Please come and find us to learn more about Envoy Gateway, Emissary-ingress, Telepresence, or TAG Contributors!

Themes: DevEx, Stacks, and Wasm

It’s always challenging to predict themes that will emerge at KubeCon EU, but here are our best (educated) guesses for 2023:

Developer experience all the things: KubeCon has successfully evolved into a developer-friendly and maybe even a developer-focused event over the past three years. 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 year I think we’ll see this impact in GUIs, CLIs, and workflows.
The emergence of technology “stacks”: We increasingly see technologies being grouped into stacks, and there is a CNCF tool for every category. I’m keeping an eye out for these stacks in 2023:
– Internal developer portal (IDP) stack: Developer portal + service catalog + observability
– Cloud networking stack: API gateway + service mesh + CNI
– Observability stack: Metrics + logging + tracing
– Security stack: Secure supply chain tool + DAST/SAST + Zero trust
– Dev stack: IDE + container build tool + debugging tools
Machine learning on Kubernetes goes next level: This has been a popular trend over the last several KubeCons, but this is the year we’ll see more production use case discussions. Of course, the hype with LLMs and ChatGPT will only increase the interest in this space.
Wasm has a breakthrough moment: We’ve been closely watching what the Docker folks have been up to in this space, and the likes of the Fermyon and Cosmonic teams are also driving a lot of innovation within the Wasm ecosystem. There’s already a Cloud Native Wasm Day colocated event, and KubeCon is peppered with interesting talks.
Community, community, community: If there’s one constant theme at KubeCon, it’s the power of the community. Everyone involved within the CNCF and wider cloud community makes this event and the surrounding ecosystem what it is.

Ambassador Labs Sessions at KubeCon EU 2023

The Ambassador Labs team is presenting several sessions at this year’s KubeCon EU.

Emissary-Ingress: Self-Service APIs and the Kubernetes Gateway API
(11:55–12:30, Wednesday, 19th April)

Lance Austin (Principal Engineer, Ambassador Labs) & Flynn (Technical Evangelist, Buoyant) will explain why ingress controllers are necessary, how self-service developer workflows work for developers and for operations, and how Emissary-ingress based on Envoy proxy makes all of this easier. They’ll also look at current best practices with a deeper dive into Emissary-ingress’s evolution and future, notably the plans for supporting the Kubernetes Gateway API.

Envoy Gateway Update
(14:30–15:05, Wednesday, 19th April)

Alice Wasko (Software Engineer, Ambassador Labs) & Arko Dasgupta (Software Engineer, Tetrate) share a project update on Envoy Gateway, the OSS Envoy ingress controller and what the future plans are for the project!

Envoy Gateway is a collaborative effort between engineers from Emissary-ingress, Tetrate, Tencent, Contour, and VMware, who decided to work together to create a new first-party ingress controller for Envoy.

Its goal is to combine the experience and knowledge from existing solutions into a new gateway that is ready to use on its own but can also serve as a foundation for everyone to share and build on for their own additions and extensions.

ContribFest: Emissary-Ingress — Bugs, Deprecations, and Features, Oh My!
(16:30–18:00, Wednesday, 19th April)

Interested in getting experience with multiple CNCF projects? Come help us smash some bugs, remove deprecated features, and help work on new features. You can learn about developing helm charts, designing Kubernetes CustomResources, and working with Envoy configuration.

Telepresence Case Studies: From First Experience to Fast Feedback at Scale
(14:30–15:05, Thursday, 20th April)

Edidiong Asikpo (Senior Developer Advocate, Ambassador Labs) presents a case study of three companies that adopted the open source CNCF tool Telepresence and improved their developer experience, accelerated their inner dev loop, and reduced staging environment costs.

She’ll follow this with a demo on speeding up the development build-push-test cycle and streamlining the developer experience.

TAG Contributor Strategy: What We Get Out of It (and You Could Too!)

(16:30–17:05, Thursday, 20th April)

Dave Sudia, Senior Developer Advocate, Ambassador Labs, joins panelists Catherine Paganini, Buoyant; Dawn Foster, VMware; Nate Waddington, CNCF; and Josh Berkus, Red Hat to discuss best practices for projects to recruit contributors, do self-governance, scale sustainably and mentor others effectively. TAG CS members share how giving back has shaped their careers, advanced their skills, and grown their own communities.

The CNCF Pavillion: Bring your questions for maintainers of Emissary-Ingress and Telepresence and see demos of the latest versions live!
(Wed-Fri, April 19–21)

Join maintainers and members of the Emissary-ingress and Telepresence communities at the OSS pavilions. Learn about the projects, see a demo, and learn how to contribute!

Ambassador Labs Booth, S7 in the Sponsor Hall: Watch demos, pick up some swag, and have a chat!
(Wed-Fri, April 19–21)

Join Daniel Bryant (Head of DevRel), Kay James (Solutions Engineer), Steve Rodda (CEO), and more surprise guests at the booth! We love to chat about all things Kubernetes, Edge Stack, and Telepresence. We also have swag and demos!

Trailers: Envoy Project Documentary

We’re super excited about the Envoy Project Documentary's premiere at 18:15 on Thursday in the Forum Center. Ambassador Labs has been involved with Envoy Proxy since its open source release back in 2016, and all of our projects and products use Envoy in some way: Emissary-ingress, Edge Stack, and Telepresence.

If you want to learn more, check out the recent movie trailer.

Can’t make it? See you online!

If you can’t make the event this year, there’s always the virtual KubeCon EU option. You can still watch a number of talks online and chat with folks via Slack. You can also join Ambassador Labs on Slack.

If you want a sneak peek of what’s to come, check out our wrap-up blogs from last year’s events:

We hope to see you there, and stay tuned for this year’s conference wrap-up!