Review KubeCon Europe 2021
SUE’s experienced cloud-native experts work daily with Kubernetes and regularly provide K8s training. Logically, we wrote a review about KubeCon Europe 2021.
SUE: “If you talk about container deployment and cloud native solutions, you quickly end up with Kubernetes. To date, it is the container orchestration tool most widely used by the open source community. As with many open source projects, there is a conference for it: KubeCon!”
“Unfortunately, KubeCon Europe 2021 was still virtual, but the advantage of online conferences is that you can watch a missed session afterwards! Perhaps one of the sessions below is something for you?”
#1 Automating your home with K3s and Home Assistant
“What was interesting to see is that there were multiple meetings this year that focused on edge solutions. One was about automating your home with Home Assistant, which runs within a K3s cluster. K3s is a lighter version of Kubernetes that you can run very well in an edge environment. Ideal for running in remote locations where resources are limited. It was nice to see how device plugins and node feature discovery were used to determine where a pod should run. To then be able to use the device that is linked to a node for the application.”
#2 Petabyte scale logging with Fluentd and Fluent Bit: a use case from intuit
“With many Kubernetes clusters, it is sometimes difficult to gain a good insight into what is happening in your environment and applications. It is therefore useful to keep track of logging and metrics of your application (and possibly nodes). During this session it was nicely explained what is involved when you want to collect logging on a large scale, what you have to take into account, and what the possible pitfalls are.”
#3 Multi-tenancy vs. multicluster: when should you use what?
“This was not really a presentation, but more of a discussion panel. Still interesting, because it was discussed when it is best to opt for multi-tenancy and when to use a multi cluster. Or a combination of both. Because not everything in Kubernetes can be limited within a namespace. Think, for example, of custom resource definitions or persistent volumes.”
#4 Taking bare metal to the clouds with Tinkerbell
“Our experts where really looking forward to this session, because in one partical assignment we will be setting up Kubernetes on-premise, on bare metal. This means that Kubernetes is not deployed virtually, but on its own hardware, directly at OS level. Cloud providers also see that customers are working on this and want to help. Such as Amazon EKS Anywhere, Azure Arc, VMware Tanzu, etc. The session was a bit of a disappointment in the end, because it mainly discussed why the project exists and not how it actually works. Nevertheless, the Tinkerbell project can be interesting to use bare metal for customers, just like you use instances in the cloud.”
#5 Making dynamic admission control even more dynamic using WebAssembly
“During KubeCon, there were also quite a few meetings about security aspects within Kubernetes. One of them was this one. The presentation showed that companies still find it difficult to get their security policy in place and that it is still not being addressed properly. They see this at SUSE too, which is why they came up with Kubewarden. Kubewarden is a policy engine for Kubernetes and has the policy-as-code mindset. Policies can be written in a programming language that is already known to an organization, as long as it can be converted to WebAssembly. A fun session and definitely worth it!”
