KubeCon EU 2024 Tech Trends: GitOps, AI Hype, Debuggability & More
This blog is authored by the Intuit Open Source team. Interested in learning more about Intuit’s contributions to open source? Follow us on LinkedIn.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe just concluded in Paris, France with over 12,000+ attendees, a new record! Our team had so much fun spending time with friends, partners, and colleagues while learning about the latest open source software (OSS) developments in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
A few notable trends stood out for us at Intuit, from the obvious inclusion of AI everywhere you look, to the surprise topics that saw attendee lines out the door (we’re looking at you app manifests). Here we recap some of the trends and highlights we noted in between bites of our CNCF-branded macarons.
#1 Kubernetes turns 10 years old: expansion of GitOps and Service Mesh
Kubernetes celebrates their milestone anniversary of ten years on June 6, 2024, which was cause for much celebration throughout the event. Priyanka Sharma, executive director of the CNCF, kicked off the event with a nod to how far Kubernetes has come with support from the open source community, leading to widespread industry adoption.
“Look how far we have come in ten years. Together, as a community, we have built up Kubernetes and Cloud-native to power the majority of web applications. Some of the largest brands in the world rely on Kubernetes and Cloud Native — Spotify, Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation Group, Airbus, Deutsche Bank, Intuit, McDonalds, Disney, Apple, Adidas, Zalando.”
Priyanka Sharma, Executive Director CNCF
GitOps and Service Mesh were two complementary technologies dominating the event with many sessions, ranging from product and feature updates to best-practice learnings. We enjoyed hearing about longstanding GitOps projects like Flux, how end users like DHL use GitOps to operationalize machine learning at scale, and our team here at Intuit shared some of our experiments and future-looking GitOps ideas at our session — “Space-Age GitOps: The Rise of the Humble Pull Request”.
Service Mesh has always been a popular topic but seemed to have a sort of renaissance this year with talks spanning Kuma, hands-on tutorials for Gateway API, and an interesting comparison of Cilium and Istio for sidecar-less meshes. We use Istio extensively at Intuit and were proud to contribute to this year’s trend by sharing our experiences scaling self-serve service mesh (quite the tongue twister) for over 300+ clusters.
#2 Backstage, KCL and Argo see huge growth: community building at the forefront
Backstage took the #1 spot in highest growth among the top open source projects measured by number of commits by end user, with KCL and Argo next in line. Among the top contributed projects, a clear theme emerged: the importance of community. The hallmark of open source is how people come together across geographies, companies, and with varied skill sets, all in pursuit of one common goal: to build the best software possible.
Backstage featured a number of community-driven talks during the BackstageCon side event. During one of the more inspiring ones, Spotify’s Andre Wanlin shared his journey from Zero to a Top Contributor for Backstage. In his own words:
“I approached Backstage with zero TypeScript experience, zero React experience, zero Node experience — so I did not know the tech stack whatsoever…I started out with something simple, logging issues… I logged issues so that other contributors or the maintainers could pick that up.”
André Wanlin, Software Developer at Spotify
We were also excited to see community talks on Argo on how the project has grown into the powerhouse it is today as a collection of tools for getting more done with Kubernetes — running workflows, managing clusters, and doing GitOps right. As founders and maintainers of the Argo project, we’re reminded every year how important our community is and how Argo wouldn’t be what it is today without their support!.
#3 The AI hype train continues
We expected AI to take center stage at this year’s KubeCon EU and it did not disappoint. Presenters described inventive solutions that combine the advantages of both AI and Kubernetes. As expected, this was primarily from a software applications perspective, but there were a few from a hardware perspective as well. NVIDIA’s talk on Accelerating AI Workloads with GPUs in Kubernetes saw mass attendance and Kevin Klues, distinguished engineer at NVIDIA, talked uniquely about the role of Kubernetes in the AI revolution.
“We are in the midst of the next Industrial Revolution from self-driving cars to real-time Health monitoring and smart cities. AI is powering it all and at the heart of this revolution are GPUs and the platform that provides applications access to them. For many, Kubernetes has already become this platform.”
Kevin Klues, Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA
Like all tech companies, Intuit has been engaging in a number of AI experiments and we shared some of our work building a new Kubernetes native stream processing platform and our work on developing an AI-powered paved road platform for running the 3000+ microservices we operate.
#4 Debuggability is the new sports car
“We run about 315 kubernetes clusters…what does it take to observe such a large fleet of clusters? It is challenging to observe it because there are constant moving parts. The pods are getting resized, the nodes are getting resized constantly because of kubernetes resource optimization strategies. Now add to it the Change Events that we have.”
Anusha Ragunathan, Principal Engineer at Intuit
Everyone’s favorite new topic of the event was debuggability. Whether it was tracing, logging or telemetry, one goal became clear: how do we make it easier for developers to debug their applications? Intuit’s Anusha Ragunathan and Lili Wan presented “Prompt: Help Me Debug a Cluster!” sharing learnings from Intuit’s use of golden signals to help alleviate common problems platform engineers face when debugging a cluster.
We also saw many sessions around distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry standards. We heard about new project updates directly from the OpenTelemetry Team and saw examples of implementations in a distributed tracing tutorial session presented by leaders at Red Hat, AWS, Apple, and Coralogix.
Big week for the OpenTelemetry project!
Honorable Mention: Minecraft
Last but not least, we were delighted to see all of the kids show up for Kids Day where the worlds of Minecraft and Kubernetes merged in a fun and engaging workshop!
We’re incredibly proud of our Intuit team and the 11 sessions they led at KubeCon Europe, and we’re excited for KubeCon NA in November 2024! If you’re interested in learning more about Intuit Open Source please follow us on LinkedIn, we’d love to hear from you. And, if you’d like to join our team and work with us, please take a moment to join our talent community!
