KubeCon Chicago Takeaways

Paralus Community Expansion, Adoption of Platform Engineering Practices, Generative AI takes Center Stage and The Birth of MultiTenacyCon

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA which was hosted at the McCormick Place in the windy city aka Chicago witnessed an unprecedented gathering of over 15,000 attendees creating an electrifying atmosphere that continues to reverberate through the cloud-native community. The event was a convergence of groundbreaking insights, innovative technologies, and collaborative discussions, shaping the future of Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystems.

Multi-Tenancy

Implementing Multi-tenancy patterns is becoming increasingly prominent helping drive maximizing resource utilization, reducing operational overhead , and enabling seamless collaboration—all while ensuring the isolation and performance required by each tenant.

At every KubeCon, the day before the opening keynote is reserved for co-located events. These are focused on specific topics of interest. This year included the inaugural Multi-TenancyCon where practitioners shared real-world challenges and innovative solutions around implementing multi-tenancy for K8s environments.. The collaborative spirit exhibited during the conference hints at a broader movement within the community, emphasizing the value of shared learnings and collective problem-solving. The Rafay team collaborated extensively with CNCF to support this co-located event.

Adoption of Platform Engineering Practices

A big shout-out to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) TAG App Delivery team for publishing their “Platform Engineering Maturity Model“. Rafay’s Saim Safdar, Head of Open Source and Developer Relations was closely involved in this exercise providing key insights to the working group around how customers are thinking about and operationalizing Platform Engineering.

One solution that could be the answer to speeding up modernization efforts is providing self-service capabilities for Kubernetes and cloud environment resources to your developers.

Rafay’s integration with tools like Backstage, an open source platform for building developer portals, allows engineers and data scientists to deploy, view and monitor all their workloads in any environment. This is particularly useful for AI/machine learning (ML) applications, where setup and maintenance can be complex.

A Quest towards Optimal Developer Experience

We had the great opportunities to talk to dozens of folks who attended the BackstageCon. This year, BackstageCon was a co-located event and it emphasized the importance of Developer Productivity with Generative AI, leveraging LLM like ChatGPT to automate routine tasks, generate code, find answers, and boost developer productivity.

Most of the conversations at the event circled around DevEx Metrics to Drive Developer Productivity. A key measurement of developer experience is how good you perceive you are at your job because feeling good at your job is highly motivational and signals both a lessened cognitive load and an optimized flow state.

Generative AI Takes Center Stage

The keynote on developer productivity increase through platform engineering and Generative AI stole the KubeCon event. According to Gartner, by 2026, more than 80 percent of enterprises will have used generative AI APIs, models and/or deployed GenAI-enabled applications in production environments, up from less than 5% in 2023.

Rafay recently launched GenAI infrastructure templates to help platform teams enable AI development, jumpstart LLM adoption and build automation for cloud environments and Kubernetes – accelerating time-to-market for AI apps.

Kubernetes Needs a Complexity Budget

The Kubernetes project releases new software versions on a regular four-month cadence. New releases can include additional features, bug fixes, and security enhancements, all of which are critical for infrastructure running in production environments.

Kubernetes core maintainers should weigh the benefits of proposed new features against the additional complexity they would bring.

“The more complex something we add is, the more of our budget that we eat up. And when the budget runs out, bad things happen,” @thockin. Innovation stops, and users drift to other solutions. Kubernetes co-founder advised at this year’s KubeCon.

Team Rafay’s Dual Booth

Rafay was supporting two booths at the Solutions Showcase. We had the opportunity to meet with attendees at the “Rafay Booth in the main show floor” and at the “Paralus booth” at the CNCF showcase.

Paralus CNCF Sandbox Project

Paralus community had a privilege to meet with the k8s community and participated in the inaugural multitenancyCon. Naveen Chakrapani and Thomas Labarussias shared real-life examples, and step-by-step strategies to fortify multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters against potential threats and breaches. CNCF OS tools such as Falco and Paralus can help enhance security by detecting threats in your infra in real-time, simplify cluster management, and streamline RBAC operations.

We love the recent version of Cloud Native Landscape 2.0! that includes the ability to filter and zoom into specific technologies and has a comprehensive Trail Map.

Are you looking for a CNCF OS tool to simplify cluster management and streamline RBAC operations? Make sure to use Paralus in the search filter.

Until we meet again at KubeCon Paris!

We will carry forward the insights and feedback we’ve garnered here in Chicago. The dialogue doesn’t end with the closing of the conference doors; it’s just the beginning. We invite you to continue these conversations with us. Until we meet again, let’s keep pushing the envelope in our respective fields, inspired by the collective wisdom of KubeCon 2023. And remember, whether it’s for your infrastructure needs, code migration from dev to prod or lack of centralized automation slows application delivery, Rafay is here to support you. See you in Paris!

Vote for Rafay DevOps Dozen Award Best Kubernetes Platform/Service

If Rafay accelerated your organization’s innovation by empowering your developers to increase deployment rates and helped you rapidly provision new environments, vote for us in DevOps Dozen Award 2023.