KubeCon NA 2022 Recap – Kubernetes gets Serious
Watch six of the best Weaveworks sessions from KubeCon NA 2022, covering everything from enterprise best practices to progressive delivery and sustainability.
All the (Weaveworks) action from KubeCon NA 2022
KubeCon North America 2022 has recently wrapped up – and the Weaveworks and Flux team were there in Detroit throughout. We were involved in some fascinating sessions, videos of which you can watch on YouTube now – just scroll down to see the links and descriptions below.
Kubernetes Gets Serious
As usual, the event represented an incredible gathering of Kubernetes vendors and users, suggesting that the rise of the platform continues – especially in the all-important enterprise space.
As Paul Curtis, Principle Solutions Architect at Weaveworks, pointed out, “it is obvious that Kubernetes has moved into the production deployment phase with the majority of users. The tools to ensure a secure environment, the tools to manage applications as they are promoted into production, and the troubleshooting of those deployments are now the focus of many attendees and sponsors. We know how Kubernetes will help – now it’s implementation time.”
It's an observation that was reflected in many of the sessions that took place, as the enterprise world moves from experimentation with Kubernetes and its associated tools to working out what best practices look like, now and into the future.
Weaveworks Sessions
The Weaveworks and Flux team delivered and took part in a number of sessions at KubeCon, many of which reflected the theme of Kubernetes’ growing maturity – and what that means for teams tasked with managing it in enterprise environments. You can watch (or rewatch) some of them below.
Toward Full Adoption of GitOps and Best Practices at RingCentral
This case study covers RingCentral’s adoption of GitOps in the company’s all-important AI department. Tamao Nakahara, VP of Developer Experience at Weaveworks, teamed up with Ivan Anisimov, Director of Engineering at RingCentral, to explain how the business has adopted GitOps best practice in their pursuit of faster innovation and delivery – while simultaneously saving money, boosting security and improving overall reliability.
Flux + Observability: Featuring Prometheus Operator and Pixie
A key benefit of GitOps is the ability to iterate quickly, but when things don't work as planned, you often need granular information from numerous sources to diagnose the problem. In this session, Somtochi Onyekwere explains how, by using Flux, Prometheus Operator and Pixie, you can achieve wide-ranging observability of your deployments.
Lightning Talk: Green(Ing) CI/CD: A Sustainability Journey with GitOps
In this Lightning Talk, Weaveworks software engineer, Niki Manoledaki, outlines the nature of the sustainability problem in CI/CD, before explaining the results of an investigation into how various operational tools and techniques can be applied to reduce your infrastructure’s carbon footprint.
Moving Towards Environmentally Sustainable Operations with Cloud Native Tools
This panel discussion sees Niki joined by Weaveworks’ Chris Lavery, Intel’s Marlow Weston and Red Hat’s William Caban, to discuss how cloud native tools and patterns (including GitOps) can help measure and reduce emissions, especially for telcos moving to a container-based platform for 5G.
GitOps with Flux and OCI Registries
In this demo, Scott Rigby and Soulé Ba of Weaveworks explain how you can use OCI registries as a source to deploy workloads with Flux. They cover the deployment of charts and Kubernetes manifests from an OCI registry, signing and verification of workloads and automatic updates to the configuration repository, among other things. They also present the Flux OCI as source architecture, so you can understand what's going on under the hood when using registries for your GitOps source.
Automate Your SLO Validation with Prometheus and Flagger
Another look at Prometheus, this time from Sanskar Jaiswal and Kingdon Barrett, who together show how the monitoring tool can be used in conjunction with Flagger to validate and test progressive canary deployments. They focus on how the two tools can help you automate progressive delivery – and how you can use them alongside KEDA to simulate real-world conditions during canary analysis.
What are Micro VMs? And why Should I Care?
MicroVM technology is used by AWS as a core building block for some of its services - but what exactly is it? Are MicroVMs just tiny virtual machines? In this Lightning Talk, SUSE’s Richard Case explains what microVMs actually are, while outlining some of their most pertinent use cases and current microVM open-source implementations.
Complete DR of Stateful Workloads, PVs and CSI Snapshots via Flux and Vault OSS
With GitOps, managing the recovery of stateless workloads is almost effortless. Yet when it comes to stateful workloads and disaster recovery (DR) on persistent volumes, there’s a little more to do – especially if you’re going to provide for their recovery in the event of a ‘black swan’ or cluster-ending catastrophe. In this session, Kingdon Barrett outlines GitOps strategies for managing DR and bringing your risks back within tolerance.
How to Achieve (Actual) GitOps with Terraform and Flux
Weaveworks’ Priyanka Ravi and Crayon Group’s Robert Strand used this session to explain how you can use Terraform as part of a GitOps pipeline. Aimed at real-world practitioners, their talk includes an in-depth look at the new Flux Terraform Controller, along with a demo based on a common use case implementation.
Until Next Time
Pandemics notwithstanding, KubeCon seems to get busier every year. But what we observed this time around was as Kubernetes evolves, the ecosystem – and cloud native software in general – seems to be getting more and more firmly embedded in the world of business technology. What started as an in-house project at Google and swiftly became an open source darling is now not just the de facto way to build and run distributed software, but also the driving force of a burgeoning commercial ecosystem – one that the often relatively conservative world of enterprise technology now sees as a fundamental part of IT infrastructure.
For Weaveworks and many other companies like us, this is great news. As Darren Madams, Weaveworks’ Solution Architect, concluded after the event, “…the partner ecosystem was great, with representatives from AWS, Red Hat and Microsoft all in attendance – and willing to talk about how we can all work together to solve real-world problems.”
So there’s no question that Kubernetes is on the up, especially in the enterprise, where a thriving service and support ecosystem is crucial.
Learn more about Weave GitOps Enterprise and how it can help you automate, optimize and control your Kubernetes deployments.
To find out more about how we can help you put GitOps to work in your organization, please book a meeting today.
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