Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies are part of the DNA of Adfinis. When the next KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU comes around, it is not a question of if, but who will attend the conference. Attending KubeCon is not just about getting in touch with new technology, products and methodologies, but also about meeting other users with a common interest in the tools we use on a daily basis, customers looking for business partnerships, and the people who keep the ecosystem running—namely, the maintainers.
This year’s KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU took place from 18 to 21 April at the RAI convention center in Amsterdam. The huge center was packed with all sorts of activities you can imagine when attending a conference. The first day – not yet part of the official conferences – consisted of several co-located events For Adfinis. We focused on two of them CiliumCon and ArgoCon.
CiliumCon
CiliumCon covered all topics which involve the Cilium product, eBPF technologies in general, and Kubernetes networking. We see a lot of value in leveraging Cilium’s capabilities for Kubernetes operators and users. For that reason, Adfinis has a business partnership with Isovalent, the company which built Cilium, a CNCF incubating project.
As an example of an interesting talk, the ‘New York Times’ showed how they use Cilium to design and secure a multi-tenant runtime environment.
ArgoCon
The co-located event ArgoCon took place simultaneously with topics spanning the entire ArgoCD ecosystem. ArgoCD is our tool of choice for all the heavy lifting on top of Kubernetes. We maintain our Helm charts which are constantly updated. Working on these charts simplifies our Kubernetes deployments. A very cool talk at ArgoCon showed how to preview and Diff your Argo CD deployments.
Kubecon
Wednesday was the official start of KubeCon EU 2023. As with any conference, some big keynotes took place at the beginning of the day, and then the crowd split into an almost endless list of different rooms where Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies were discussed. The vendor booths – where our partners RedHat, SUSE, HashiCorp, Gitlab, and Isovalent were present – opened up around that time as well with guidance for learning about new developments in the cloud-native area by using a “hands-on” approach.
Evening activities
The evening schedules were filled with interesting events. To highlight two of them: On Tuesday evening, Isovalent hosted the Hive Mind Mingle, which brought together many people who develop and use Cilium in a cozy atmosphere, allowing them to get to know each other’s use cases, problems, and architectures. The next day, the Swiss attendees gathered to discuss our local market.
Overall, KubeCon EU is an annual highlight allowing Kubernetes enthusiasts – like us at Adfinis – to fully immerse themselves in the vibrant and fast-moving Kubernetes ecosystem and talk to users and developers directly. We learn about new use cases, tools and how existing tooling adapts to new requirements. This experience is invaluable for anyone passionate about Kubernetes and the cloud-native community.
Our recommendations
Here are some of our favorite talks from KubeCon EU 2023:
Gateway API Project Update | Video – a quick introduction to what the Gateway API is up to and an update on what has been implemented and what is coming.
A Confidential Story of Well-Kept Secrets | Video – An excellent introduction to how Kubernetes secrets work, their challenges, and how to work around them. The talk was very AWS-centric, using the External Secrets Operator, AWS Secrets Manager, and AWS KMS.
Highly Available Routing with Multi-Cluster Gateways | Video – How to handle multi-cluster services using the Multi-Cluster Services API and the Gateway API. This presentation mainly covered the Google and AWS public cloud implementations.
Life of a CVE with Ingress-Nginx; Understanding the Project’s Release Cycle | Video – Interesting insights into how Nginx (the upstream project) and Ingress-Nginx build new releases. This is probably most interesting regarding how to get pre-release information about important updates.
How We Migrated Over 1000 Services to Backstage Using GitOps and Survived to talk About It! | Video – Two engineers talk about how they successfully moved backstage, what enabled them to do so, and how they benefit from backstage.
Telepresence Case Studies: From First Experience to Fast Feedback at Scale | Video – Essentially an intro-session to Telepresence – A tool that allows developers to interact with Kubernetes resources by routing traffic from the Kubernetes cluster to their internal development environment (allowing debugger and all), and then sending the request back to the Kubernetes cluster as if the application (or the new version of it) was already deployed to Kubernetes.
The Day We Delete(d) Production | Video – During scheduled maintenance, CERN’s platform team wiped out some productive Kubernetes clusters. They talk about how it happened, how they fixed it, and what they learned from it.
Unlocking Argo CD’s Hidden Tools for Chaos Engineering | Video – Learn how to efficiently simulate and plan large-scale rollouts with Argo CD, while avoiding common misconfigurations and chaos-causing scenarios. Recommended for those interested in GitOps operations and scaling cloud-native tools.
