Introduction

I’ve just returned from KubeCon 2023 in Amsterdam. I had a good time, met with many friends and colleagues and learnt new things. Overall, it was a success.

Organization

This was my second KubeCon. Last year I attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Valencia. Comparisons aren’t often fair and are a matter of personal choice, but I thought Amsterdam was generally better organised. However, something that did not happen to me in Valencia is that I missed out on a couple of events because they were full.

I was careful to be there early but it’s not always possible when you finish a talk on one side of the venue and you only have 10–15 min to walk sometimes a considerably long distance to attend another event.

Talks

The talks in general were good but I have two issues with them:

• They are too short. The average is 30 minutes which is nowhere near enough to talk about any subject in detail.
• Too many beginners’ talks. Perhaps as a consequence of the first point, the talks were too basic lacking depth. I would personally like more meat and to learn from other companies' experiences.

What’s Hot?

In general lines, the most talked about topics were similar to last year.

OpenTelemetry

There were many talks about Observability and OpenTelemetry and pretty much always full. It does look like this is very hot at the moment. At Digitalis, we are implementing OpenTelemetry on all our customers and we love it! ❤️

GitOps

Amongst all the CI/CD talks, using GitOps stood up. Flux and ArgoCD are still the frontrunners. Rancher guys are also promoting Fleet but I don’t know how popular it is.

Data on Kubernetes

We noticed in the last few years that more companies were attempting to move data applications into Kubernetes. This is quite a complex subject but it boils down to:

• Confidence: k8s is volatile, it was designed for running stateless applications. Can you trust K8s with your data?
• Operators: running databases is more complex than a microservice. Having a reliable operator to do the work for you is a must.

At Digitalis and AxonOps we have a lot of experience in this field and I very much understand the fears and risks. The DoK community is doing a good job helping companies adopt Kubernetes and run their data applications.

One thing that did take me by surprise was how popular Vitess appears to be. There were some good success stories here.

Mesh

It feels like Istio is still the most popular mesh technology followed by Linkerd. But the use cases have expanded to multi-cluster mesh. As the Kubernetes adoption grows in companies, it stands to reason their K8s deployments are going to be larger and more complex. And that eventually you’ll need multiple cloud providers, data centres, etc. This is probably why I noticed more talks on this subject.

Gateway API

This is a topic of high interest to me and many others. We may be seeing the end of the ingress as we know them and it’s going to be core to how we do multi-cluster mesh.

Back to the future

If I learnt one thing from Back to the Future is that predicting the future is fraught with difficulty but hasn’t stopped anyone from attempting it. This is my take:

• Consolidation: we are running into duplication. Many projects and companies are now doing something very similar. This is a very normal pattern and the next stage is usually consolidation. We’ll see projects merging, companies acquiring each other and some others disappearing altogether.
• Multi-Cluster: we’ll see movement in this area with more companies venturing into multi-cluster deployments.
• Observability: Jaeger and OpenTelemetry are clearly a resounding success. I envision this is not the end, we’ll see a lot more features coming up.
• Security and Compliance: from personal experience, I know that companies in regulated businesses such as insurance and banking are late to the k8s party. We have now much better tools to help them in the adoption of Kubernetes (Calico Enterprise is still my favourite — full disclosure, Digitalis is a Tigera partner) and we’ll see them joining the K8s world.

Looking forward to next year in Paris already!

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