Cloud Foundry Goes to KubeCon: Community FTW!

Nicky Pike2024-12-028 min read

Ever wonder what happens when Cloud Foundry walks into a Kubernetes convention? Let's jump into the latest episode of Cloud Foundry Weekly, where Nick and Nicky discussed the vibe from KubeCon – complete with insights, announcements, and yes, the occasional battle with studio lighting.

The Return of the Cloud Foundry Crew

We are back, though not without some travel adventures. While Nick was recovering from his souvenir collection of VMware Explore Barcelona viruses, I was representing at KubeCon in Salt Lake City. As a note, the Cloud Foundry Weekly crew will be taking a well-deserved break.

Cloud Foundry Booth: Where Simplicity Wins

The Cloud Foundry booth drew over 400 visitors at KubeCon. While some came for the swag (ah, the legendary "swag goblins" – we see you!!!), many stayed for something more valuable: their first cf push experience. The reactions were priceless, especially when developers realized they could deploy applications without writing a novel in YAML.

The typical reaction went something like this:

"What do you mean, that's all I need to type?"
Types cf push
"Where's all the YAML? Infrastructure configuration? Wait, it built my app too??"
🤯 Mind blown 🤯

As the popular saying on the show goes, "Friends don't let friends write Dockerfiles." Consider VMware Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry (tPCF)/Cloud Foundry as the "Just Say No" campaign for unnecessary container configuration.

AI: Beyond the Hype

KubeCon's AI discussions broke away from the usual utopian promises, focusing instead on practical enterprise challenges. A significant portion of 2024-2025 infrastructure budgets are being redirected toward AI initiatives, particularly GenAI, prompting crucial conversations about scaling and sustainability. The CNCF is looking to meet these challenges head-on:

  • Managing astronomical data storage costs for large language models
  • Ensuring applications are quantum-safe
  • Addressing the real-world hurdles of AI implementation at scale

The infrastructure demands of AI workloads dominated many discussions, with database workloads leading Kubernetes deployments and teams grappling with the complex storage needs of large language models. The focus on observability and data movement patterns showed a welcome shift looking to go beyond AI hype to practical deployment strategies.

The conversations highlighted a growing maturity in how our industry approaches AI – moving from “AI all the things” to “AI the right things.” Though, as certain holiday commercials recently demonstrated, we might still have some work to do on the creative application front. The key takeaway? Successful AI implementation isn’t about checking boxes; it’s about delivering genuine value to users who can spot the difference.

CNCF's Stand Against Patent Trolls

In a bold move, CNCF declared war on those dastardly patent trolls by launching the "Cloud Native Heroes Challenge", essentially creating a bounty system for identifying patent trolls. It's a serious initiative wrapped in an engaging format, turning the community's technical expertise toward protecting open-source innovation.

The CNCF, in partnership with Unified Patents and the community, are banding together to ensure that those that contribute nothing aren’t able to weaponize the patent system against open source adopters.

Behind the Scenes: The Great Lighting Debate

In typical Cloud Foundry Weekly fashion, our hosts had a tangent discussion about the challenges of being bald on camera. Turns out, when you're blessed with a particularly reflective dome, overhead lightening can create quite the halo effect on a live stream. Who needs special effects when you've got natural head glare?

Project Party: Graduations and New Arrivals

The CNCF ecosystem marked its 10th year with significant project maturity and new contributions:

The CNCF ecosystem marked its 10th year with significant project maturity and new contributions. Solo.io made headlines by donating their Gloo API Gateway to CNCF live on-stage, a move that brings enterprise-level ingress control to the broader Kubernetes community. Built on Envoy and Istio foundations, it offers advanced traffic management and seamless integration with developer tooling through Backstage.

Solo.io’s contributions extended beyond the gateway, introducing their Ambient Mesh technology that solves the sidecar complexity issue that has challenged service mesh adoption. Completing their trifecta of announcements, they enhanced their AI Gateway with specialized LLM security controls, addressing the growing need for controlled AI service integration in enterprise environments.

The graduation ceremony celebrated several noteworthy projects. Cert-manager earned its diploma by bringing sanity to certificate management, while Dapr simplifies distributed applications across the cloud and edge for developers everywhere. KubeVirt v1.4 release was announced that features a number of anticipated features along with aligning Kubernetes v1.31, which makes the sixth time Kubevirt has stayed in lock-step with the Kubernetes release cadence.

Lastly, enter GUAC (Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition) from the Supply Chain Integrity Working Group. Announced in 2022 by Kusari, Google, and Purdue University to address multiple supply chain security and tooling challenges, GUAC transforms complex SBOM data into accessible graphs GUAC is designed to complement, rather than replace, existing tooling helping to aggregate and analyse information that was previously siloed. With features spanning REST API, GraphAPI, and CLI access, it’s comprehensive without being overwhelming. GUAC has gained industry and community backing with companies like Microsoft, Red Hat, Yahoo!, and others.

The KubeCon Awards: Celebrating Community Excellence

Notable award recipients included:

  • Lifetime Achievement Award: Tim Hockin
  • Top Committer Award: Joe Stringer
  • Loren Ipsom Award: Qiming Teng and Haifeng (Michael) Yao
  • TAGGIE Award: Nancy Chauhan
  • End User Awards:
    1. Adobe
    2. Capital One
    3. Reddit

Looking Ahead

The future's promising, with several exciting developments:

The Bottom Line

Kubecon 2024 Salt Lake City showed us that Cloud Foundry's focus on developer experience remains relevant, the community is stronger than ever, and that yes, maybe investing in non-glare lighting for video podcasts isn't such a bad idea.

Stay tuned for more episodes of Cloud Foundry Weekly – where we explore the world of Cloud Foundry with substance and style. While you are there, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button so that you get notified of upcoming episodes and important community information each week. Together, we are Unleashing PaaS Potential, One Episode at a Time.

P.S. Several YAML files were questioned during the making of this blog post, but all emerged stronger for it.