The CNCF hosted its flagship conference, Kubencon + CloudNativeCon EU 2020, virtually sharing the latest Kubernetes product updates and insights. Toolbox shares the top 5 takeaways from the event.
This week turned out to be a very exciting one for the cloud community as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) kicked off its largest flagship conference virtually after the pandemic postponed it from late March. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020Opens a new window was held from August 17, 2020 to August 20, 2020 and gathered participants, experts, and leaders from the open-source and cloud-native communities to discuss the future of container industry and cloud technologies.Â
This year, the KubeCon conference brought 17 new members under its umbrella for cloud-native technology innovation including, Juniper Networks, Cloudreach, Anchnet, Netdata, Zerto. The event saw several major announcements from industry titans, including IBM’s Red Hat, AWS, and Accurics. Here are the top 5 takeaways from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020.
Growing Adoption of Secure Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)
As enterprises look forward to cloud-native application security, it is essential to adopt a developer-first approach that builds secure IaC. Cloud security companies, Synk and Accurics, each rolled out new products to empower developer and application teams to build reliable and robust IaC.
Synk, an open-source security firm, launched the developer-first IaC security tool, Synk IaC, to identify and remediate misconfigurations in Kubernetes and Terraform codes before they go live. Jim Armstrong, product marketing director of container security at Snyk, saidOpens a new window , “With the launch of Snyk Infrastructure as Code, we are empowering development teams to be secure by default, in line with our philosophy of shifting security left, whilst giving security teams visibility and confidence that the company is safe and developers can keep working iteratively.â€
Security company, Accurics, releasedOpens a new window an upgrade to Terrascan, an open-source static code analyzer, to implement policy guardrails across IaC deployments. The new Terrascan architecture depends on the CNCF’s Open Policy Agent (OPA) engine that simplifies policy definition for developers that want to create custom policies. The new updates will also identify security errors in Terraform templates for cloud providers, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
Development of Price Performance Containerized Applications
At the event, AWS announced the general availabilityOpens a new window of its fully-managed Kubernetes service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on the AWS Graviton2 processor. With Amazon EKS support for AWS Gravition2 processors, customers can run their container applications and workloads more efficiently at a reduced cost.
Michael Hausenblas, the product developer advocate at the AWS container team, said, “A primary goal of running containers is to improve the cost efficiency for your applications. Combine both, and you get a great price performance. For example, based on internal testing of workloads, we saw a 20% lower cost and up to 40% higher performance for M6g, C6g, and R6g instances over M5, C5, and R5 instances.â€
Emergence of New Projects in Service Mesh Technology
The KubeCon 2020 event hosted numerous service mesh technology sessions owing to the growing adoption of the technology. According to a new CNCF surveyOpens a new window , 18% of companies use service mesh in production, whereas 47% of companies are evaluating the use of service mesh in their organization. Service mesh is a relatively new technology that creates an abstraction layer in the network for easy deployment of microservices and Kubernetes apps. This has led to the growth of Consul Connect, Linkerd, Google’s Istio, and more recently, Open Service Mesh from Microsoft.
@janakirammOpens a new window , “service meshes are becoming the foundation of the developer experience. It plugs an important gap in the Kubernetes stack, particularly by bringing in security. We are going to see a lot of advancements, whether it is multicluster service or hybrid service mesh
— The New Stack (@thenewstack) August 17, 2020Opens a new window
Additionally, CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) announcedOpens a new window that the open-source project, Thanos has moved from sandbox to the incubation level. Thanos is a metric system that provides a way to scale Prometheus-based systems cost-effectively. At the incubation level, the community can build new features and expand end-user adoption. Currently, Thanos is used by Red Hat, Alibaba Cloud, Adobe, Monzo, and others.
Easy Management of Kubernetes Clusters by Red Hat
Even though there is significant adoption of Kubernetes into enterprise platforms, companies are grappling with the complexities around Kubernetes. To solve these bottlenecks, Red Hat announced the general availability of Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) for Kubernetes. ACM is a management layer that can manage clusters running on any cloud environment while maintaining consistent policy-based governance.
Apart from this, RedHat made a series of revelations at the event, including the announcement for the virtualization platform for OpenShift 4.5, the addition of new capabilities to its hybrid cloud portfolio, and the collaboration with Argo CD, a continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes deployments.Â
Expansion of Cloud-native Community
During her keynote at the event, Priyanka Sharma, general manager of CNCF, noted how the size of the cloud-native developer community has been rapidly growing. She further described the open-source community as an inclusive group of people and shared that the community is here to support new members with proper tools, training, certifications, webinars, and events.Â
Currently, CNCF has certified more than 15,000 developers and plans to expand its ecosystem with technically sound developers and proliferate the open-source and container industry with innovative projects and products. With more than 50 projects and 97,000 contributors, CNCF plans to expand its reach and bolster cloud adoption strategies for every organization.
Did you attend the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2020? How was your experience? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!