KubeCon 2017 Europe

KubeCon was held in Berlin this spring. As this is a developer focused conference it was most definitely a Tee-Shirt conference. Intel had a small booth where we had continuous demos of Secure Clear Containers and Kubernetes Federation. Intel was a Diamond Sponsor of the event. The big announcement was the release of Kubernetes 1.6 with its added features.

• Rolling updates with DaemonSets
• Beta release of kubernetes federation
• improved networking functionality and tools
• Improved scheduling
• Storage Improvements
• New adm tool for enterprise customers.

The biggest buzz around the show was default networking, storage and security. Typically Kubernetes chooses configurability over convention, which leads to longer setup time and variability in deployments specify around networking and storage. Security is a hot topic/issue with all container technologies, not just kubernetes.

One of Kubernetes biggest complaints is it is hard to get up and running, especially around network configurations. With 1.6 some network aspects come configured out of the box. For example etcd comes installed and configured (Service Discovery), CNI is now integrated with CRI by default and a stand bridge plugin has been validated with the combination. This decreases the amount of time and variability in previous releases. These are welcomed changes in the distro.

Another big issue with Kubernetes and Containers in general is lack of support of storage. Kubernetes is taking a clue from OpenStack here
and are supporting more Software Defined Storage options. Kubernetes gives the ability to plugin to Ceph, Swift, Lustre and other basic Storage sub-systems. But they are not planning on supporting a storage solution themselves. The announcement at KubeCon was an increased focus on Persistent Volumes. It will be interesting to see how a focus in this area will change the community from compute focused to complete solution focused. Time will tell if it takes.

As I worked the booth for two days and attended sessions which were standing room only,  it was good to interact with developers and hear their problems and concerns about working in the data-center. There was interest in the Kubernetes Federation demo which was somewhat problematic, but gave plenty of talking points. The Secure Clear Containers got lots of traffic and buzz. Many of the conversations were around secure as it is still a major problem with containers in general. Everyone was looking for what was available in the security area.

On a personal note I got the opportunity to meet a long lost cousin from the Pulsipher/Pulsifer side of my family. He was excited to see another Pulsipher and thought he was the last of his family out there. It was fun to share family stories and he got to hear about our common Ancestor which came into the Americans in the 1640s. It was also a great technical contact as he works for Spotify and works as the Director of Security in their data center.

DWP