Who’s getting excited? Next week, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, will kick off in Salt Lake City, Utah. In its ninth year, the conference has grown into more than just a technical conference—it’s a vibrant community event that offers attendees the tools, relationships, and inspiration to drive innovation in the cloud native ecosystem.
The show offers a unique blend of learning and networking in a thriving and fun atmosphere. For me, the excitement is real. I can’t wait to connect with Aqua’s open source community, reconnect with colleagues and friends, scoop up some cool swag, and immerse myself in technical talks and workshops. The toughest part? Picking which sessions to attend. But after some careful planning, I’ve already pinned down a few can’t-miss events on my calendar. Here’s what I’m most looking forward to:
AI and ML track
Kubecon is a conference focused on cloud infrastructure, so naturally the AI track in Kubecon would be mostly about training and serving AI workloads on Kubernetes infrastructure. This talk stood out to me for its use case of using AI/ML within Kubernetes itself. In their talk, Sharma and Ramirez offer to use ML for learning behavioral patterns of Kubernetes’ Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). This seems like a great match since user behavior and usage are usually driven by patterns which could be learned, modeled and then predicted. I also appreciate the mature approach of highlighting “ML algorithms” in this track instead of “AI/LLM” which dominates today’s headlines, as old school ML tools and techniques are mature, practical, and proven, and in my opinion overshadowed by LLMs and remain underappreciated.
Data processing and storage track
Object Storage Is All You Need – Justin Cormack, Docker
I fell in love with Object Storage when I first used it. The simplicity of it, the API-first nature, the infinite scalability potential, the straightforward replication and DR, made me consider it one of the cornerstones of “cloud native applications”. Despite its huge popularity, it probably still hasn’t yet reached its full potential. Although I am familiar with the concepts and techniques, I’ll attend Cormack’s talk hoping to gain more knowledge of and inspiration for a fundamental technology of the cloud native stack.
Emerging and advanced track
In 2018, I tweeted that “#Kubernetes is the universal cloud API. This is bigger than it being a container scheduler.” . Six years later, and this holds true. The Kubernetes API has proven to be a simple, robust, and universal interface for any kind of application. Since Kubernetes popularized, we’ve seen more infrastructure applications being built or rebuilt as “Kubernetes Applications” which essentially mean CRD and kubectl. But to build an application that looks like Kubernetes’ API, or plays well with Kubernetes’ tooling, you don’t need to actually operate a full-blown Kubernetes cluster. What if we extracted the “API machinery” portion of Kubernetes into a generic Kubernetes style API framework?Be sure to check out Stefan and MJ’s talk to find out.
Cloud native experience track
Open Source 2.0: The Maintainers’ Perspective – William Morgan, Buoyant; Ashley Davis, Venafi;
In my OSS journey I’ve come to speak with many people who have different perspectives on open source software. Most end-users, however, don’t really know enough to have an opinion. A normal user might care about the pricing model, the community health, or the popularity of the project, but will know little about the legal nuances, the politics and the challenges behind OSS. The last couple of years have been dramatic for OSS, as anyone who follows the scene had noticed, but everyone else who was busy heads down doing their full-time job and using this software, might want to catch up. This panel by distinguished OSS personas can shed some light into the state of the OSS and Cloud Native industry, and the business behind it.
Security track
I could not let you go without my personal favorite and totally unbiased shout out to Aqua’s Teppei Fukuda!
Teppei, creator of Aqua Trivy, will be talking about our new project VEX Hub that aims to improve the accuracy of vulnerability scanners so that you, users, get more actionable and useful results. Today users deal with an overload of vulnerabilities, some of them could be completely irrelevant when considering the specific use case and implementation details. Someone familiar with the subject matter could easily confirm that a given vulnerability should be ignored for a specific software component, but how can we spread this information to all the scanners and users? The industry has come up with VEX, and we have contributed and collaborated to both develop the specification and integrate it in Trivy. VEX Hub makes VEX practical and accessible to everyone, and makes leveraging VEX statements seamless with Trivy. If you are using Trivy, or any other vulnerability scanner, you don’t want to miss this talk.
If you’re still left wanting more, you can catch Teppei and me at the Aqua booth #H4 throughout the event.
Please stop by to learn more, and you won’t want to miss the opportunity to:
- Capture a memory at our photo booth
- “Chill” with us at our Ice Cream Social during the KubeCrawl on Wednesday, November 13th at 6:00pm
- Win fun prizes and grab some exclusive Aqua swag!
