Five Talks We're Waiting for at KubeCon Europe 2024

Bonjour Kubernauts! Kubecon Europe is less than a month away, and it’s coming to the city of lights. The MetalBear team will be joining the fun in Paris this year, and we’ve prepared a list of five talks that we’re particularly excited about.

What’s New at KubeCon This Year? #

Every year, the event unveils transformative tech trends that are making waves in the tech ecosystem, causing end-users, developers, engineers, and stakeholders to reflect on the past and how these trends can impact their future. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024 promises to spotlight several groundbreaking projects that have flourished within the Kubernetes ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, the main buzzword this year is AI.

Priyanka Sharma, executive director of CNCF, highlights the results of the synergy between AI and K8s, pointing out that generative AI and LLM leaders such as OpenAI, HuggingFace, and Nvidia have all built their foundations on Kubernetes. This symbiotic relationship is set to unfold further at KubeCon 2024, showcasing the transformative power of Kubernetes within the AI landscape.

Talks Worth the Wait #

KubeCon EU is going to feature a whopping 186 talks spanning a variety of subjects. Out of those, we’ve shortlisted five that we’re particularly excited about:

• First and foremost, MetalBear’s own Tal Zwick will be doing his talk, When They Go High, We Go Low – Hooking Libc Calls to Debug Kubernetes Apps . Tal will be doing a technical deep-dive into mirrord, discussing the low level techniques and Rust tricks we used to build it, as well as giving an overview of how cloud development teams can use mirrord to tighten their development loops. If you’re interested in stepping up your team’s development workflow a notch or two, give this one a listen.

• Kat Cosgrove, Noah Abrahams, Seth McCombs, Ian Coldwater, and Natali Vlatko will be playing a Kubernetes-themed D&D game in Dungeons and Deployments V2: The Clusters of Chaos . We love the concept and can think of no opponent more fearsome than a Kubernetes-related outage.

• Of course, we had to put an AI talk on this list, and we found a good one. Rajas Kakodkar and Amine Hilaly will be discussing the Future of Intelligent Cluster Ops: LLM-Azing Kubernetes Controllers . In this session, they will explore how LLMs can be used to automate and simplify Kubernetes cluster operations. Accompanied by a live demo, they will showcase how to “talk” to a Kubernetes controller powered with an LLM to perform tasks such as auditing and upgrading clusters, simulating chaos scenarios, scanning for vulnerabilities, and monitoring cluster health.

• Uncover ways to rethink the platform engineering ecosystem in the session by Stefan Schimanski, Sebastian Scheele, and Mangirdas Judeikis, Why Kubernetes Is Inappropriate for Platforms, and How to Make It Better . In this talk, they will propose how teams can extend Kubernetes and adapt its architecture to fit two new personas at the center: the service & API provider and the self-service consumer. We love the bold, contrarian claim in the title, and having tinkered some with extending Kubernetes in mirrord for Teams we think this can be a really powerful tool for development teams.

• We love the problem of whole-application testing, especially when the application is a telco behemoth. This talk by Hiromu Asahina and Kentaro Ogawa will describe how Testing K8s Cluster and VNFs in Telco Staging Environments works at NTT . In this session, they will showcase how multiple teams, vendor tools, and complex setups make it difficult to operate the workflow and integrate CI/CD processes in testing telecom staging environments, and present an experimental implementation of how to manage a Telco staging environment using GitOps and Cluster API.

All the keynotes and sessions will be recorded and made available on the CNCF YouTube channel , so you don’t have to miss out on anything. For more details on the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 agenda, please visit the event schedule .

We’ll be there too! #

Aviram Hassan and Tal Zwick from the MetalBear team will be at KubeCon EU this year (it’s Aviram’s first time in Paris!). If you have any tips or just want to chat about mirrord or cloud development philosophies in general, feel free to connect with them! You can also book a personalized demo slot with our team to discuss your unique needs and how mirrord can be tailored to meet them. À bientôt!