Throughout KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022, our team was able to speak to over 100 people from the cloud-native community to learn more about their thoughts and experience of the event. This blog will explore what the community thought was the hot topic of discussion at KubeCon + CNC NA 2022, which includes topics such as security, cost, and developer experience.

Check out the full video below:

eBPF

eBPF is a piece of technology that can run sandboxed programs in operating system kernels. It can safely extend the capabilities of the kernel without changing the source code or loading kernel modules. This technology remains complex but comes out as one of the hottest topics of KubeCon + CNC NA 2022. Some of the cloud-native projects using eBPF include:

  • Falco: The cloud-native runtime security project created by Sysdig uses the eBPF probe module for kernels to help in providing runtime security.

  • Cilium: This open-source project created by Isovalent uses the power of eBPF to provide networking, security, and observability of Kubernetes clusters and other container orchestration platforms.

  • Bumblebee: An open-source project by Solo.io that helps in building, running, and distributing eBPF programs by using OCI images. It makes eBPF more accessible to developers by allowing them to write eBPF code while taking care of space components that automatically expose data as metrics or logs.

Cost Management

The topic of cost management in Kubernetes was seen as a trending topic as it allows organizations with limited capital to grow effectively. Although we have modern pay-as-you-go solutions, analyzing the cost of the cloud is complex. Monitoring a cluster environment, scaling your resources, proper scheduling of pods and nodes, and implementing cloud-native best practices like DevOps and GitOps, are some points an organization can follow to keep their budget under control while running Kubernetes.

In our cost of cloud white paper, we discuss the complexity of cloud costs for businesses and alternatives beyond the hyperscalers. You can read more from our white paper here.

Developer Experience

Having a smooth development experience is essential for developers working with complex technologies and infrastructure. That being said, you can get an idea from our interviews how people are exploring various tools and technologies to get a streamlined developer experience, and this enthusiasm made it a trendy topic in this year’s KubeCon + CNC NA. In the cloud-native space, practices like GitOps, DevOps, and platform engineering play an important role in improving the developer experience and productivity in an organization.

GitOps

GitOps is a simple way of implementing Continuous Deployment for cloud-native applications. With GitOps, you will have git version control and a git repository containing declarative descriptions of the desired infrastructure for the production environment as a single source of truth. Of course, this is true for Kubernetes as well. This drove it to become a trending topic of discussion at KubeCon + CNC NA 2022. GitOps adoption in the cloud-native environment has grown by folds because of its ability to deploy and recover faster during an error, and the ability to manage deployment from the environment.

Argo and Flux are some of the well-known tools providing GitOps in the cloud-native ecosystem. Over the years, they have evolved to solve more complex use cases.

Observability

The ability to form an opinion about a system based on the insights generated from monitoring the system is known as observability. At KubeCon + CNC NA 2022, there was a range of sessions on monitoring and observability which helped it become a hot topic to speak about. Developers and business owners are interested in observability because it provides insight into whether their clusters are running smoothly. Observability can help users cut costs and analyze systems to scale accordingly to their needs.

Security

KubeCon + CNC NA 2022 brought light to the fact that a lot of people are figuring out ways to secure their systems. This awareness of security has been rising due to the sharp increase in the number of attacks.

Within security, runtime security is one of the key security types, as well as cloud-native security projects which people are leveraging into their tech stacks. Projects like Kubescape from Armo are fully open-source and provide an entire package of Kubernetes security. Then there are open-source companies such as Firefly who discusses security from the infrastructure drift perspective, and Komodor who provides an idea of how you can automate Kubernetes troubleshooting.

Kubernetes security is complex, yet it is helpful while managing Kubernetes at scale, as it provides you with the ability to prevent misconfiguration and detect vulnerabilities.

WebAssembly

WebAssembly, also known as WASM, is a piece of technology that helps in compiling application code written in different languages and running it within sandboxed environments. KubeCon + CNC NA 2022 brought exceptional enthusiasm for this topic with the announcement of the partnership between Docker and WASM.

With the exponential growth of WASM in the cloud-native space over the last year, a lot of projects and tools are now available to help with the use and development of WASM applications. Examples of this include runtimes such as WasmEdge, which is a powerful runtime for edge computing and cloud-native applications. Then there is Wasmtime, a standalone runtime that can be embedded into applications according to needs. WASM projects like wasmcloud provide a platform for developers to write code, and Atmo provides an easy environment for building self-contained WASM functions.

Conclusion

Come and join us at Civo Navigate in Tampa, Florida, from February 7th - February 8th to learn more about navigating and succeeding within the cloud native landscape. We will be joined by some of the brightest minds in cloud native, including an opening keynote talk from tech innovator and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak!