All you need to know about
Kubecon+ CloudNativeCon Europe 2024

Cloud Consultants Lex and Rob traveled last month off to beautiful Paris for Kubecon+CloudNativeCon Europe 2024, the European event where the best cloldconsultants and techies come together to share knowledge about Kubernetes and other DevOps developments. Did you miss the event or are you curious about the highlights? Read this blog and you’ll be up to date again.

AI as the main theme

If you are not yet doing anything with AI within the ecosystem around Kubernetes then you don’t count, it seems. Artificial Intelligence is being used as a means to improve and/or accelerate. AIOps that can make complex correlations and process them in a proactive and automated way with the goal of achieving a more efficient operating environment. Think of security where logs are intelligently searched and patterns are recognized that are responded to quickly. All this made possible by large-scale deployment and application of graphical computing power in Kubernetes .

Technological evolutions and improvements

The Kubernetes ecosystem is so comprehensive and cutting edge that there is no single specific technological development that deserves attention. Within the entire Kubernetes ecosystem, we see many small parallel evolutions and improvements. Some stem from limitations encountered in practice, such as inefficient use or limits in current capabilities. This is also how new Kubernetes tools are emerging, along with further abstractions in management and automation.

The 3 most important take aways to take with you on the Thalys ride home

A lot of information, knowledge of tools and new insights about the Kubernetes ecosystem go back home with us in the backpack. The 3 most important ones:

Observability by establishing monitoring, logging and traceability to provide insight into end-to-end traffic flows. That is; the entire chain, from the end user to the final target application. For example, Microsoft has made Retina open source. It allows you to visualize, observe and analyze Kubernetes cluster network traffic. Because of its open nature (eBPF), it can be easily hooked up and extended by third parties.
Many new insights to implement and maintain Kubernetes at large scale and the challenges involved. Think multi-cloud Kubernetes setups and costs in cross-region traffic that are not readily observable. And a fat session from Spotify on how they managed to upgrade their global platform without noticeable downtime from listening sessions by end users.
Discovery of various open source tools that support to make work easier through higher efficiency and faster scalability. But also tools for cost control, security, network policy management, CI/CD or basically anything you could think of. The ecosystem around Kubernetes is gi-gan-tic and only continues to grow. The key question is which of the startups coming up with all these tools are going to win this arms race and what you should start focusing on as a company.