KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2023 kicked off this week in Shanghai. It is the premier event for developers, technologists, and technology leaders in Asia concerning all things Kubernetes, cloud native, and open source. The event attracted over 2000 attendees and 20 sponsors and included 150 sessions.
Jim Zelmlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, kicked off the event by underscoring the role of open source software, its community, contributors, and its impact on empowering the most critical projects in the world in many domains. He mentioned some of the projects to watch in the coming years. This included RWKV, the first open source Large Language Model (LLM) entering the foundation, Common Cloud Controls, a cloud standard that will improve specific security and control measures across the financial services industry, and Kubeflow, a CNCF project that makes the deployment of Machine Learning (ML) workflows on Kubernetes simple, portable, and scalable.
Also, during the keynote, Zelmlin pointed out the top challenges ahead. This included cybersecurity, global collaboration, and enabling developers at scale. He clarified the foundation’s mission of building an ecosystem for everyone to thrive, including contributors, end-users, and vendors, while creating markets and opportunities.
After that Keith Chen, general manager of the Linux Foundation APAC, highlighted the growth the Kubernetes community has gone through during the past few years, with over three million contributors and seven thousand companies contributing to the project today.
In addition, he pointed out that as Kubernetes became mainstream and considered the OS of the cloud, we are moving towards the Cloud Native + era, including things like AI, Edge, and IoT.
InfoQ sat with Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF, and talked about the event, its relevance to developers, china-specific projects, and trends.
InfoQ: What are some of the China-specific projects or trends we should watch?
Chris Aniszczyk: I think around 30 projects in CNCF were born in China. If you look at some of these projects, they are solving interesting cases. For instance, You have things like KubeEdge which is about stretching Kubernetes to work in different small environments. Whether it's supporting communication via satellites or communication on edge devices.
I've personally been doing a lot of research on WebAssembly and some interesting projects are coming out of China that has a very active community. So things like Quasar from Huawei. I'm personally interested in it because it's taking advantage of essentially a new API in containerd to do sandboxing whether it's a container or a virtual machine. I don't think there's one pattern outside of the general stuff running at a reasonably large scale here.
InfoQ: Where do you see us going with the convergence of Cloud Native, AI, and Edge?
Aniszczyk Most AI platforms like Open AI behind the scenes run on a massive Kubernetes environment. We do see ourselves as the substrate that empowers people to run AI at scale.
In some ways, we'll use Kubernetes to orchestrate everything. So I see us as the glue to do all these things together.
We're getting a lot of feature requests for Kubernetes to support GPUs. All of our projects are getting these kinds of AI-specific feature feedback into our projects.
I don't think there's anything necessarily different that we need to do outside of just supporting large-scale environments and interfacing with GPUs.
Edge is a little bit different because Edge is more about smaller workloads and constrained environments. In Cloud Native, we have a variety of people trying to strip stuff out of Kubernetes and using OpenTelemetry to monitor things.
We're a toolbox of a variety of different projects and we sit in the bottom layer to let people do what they want with it. Run edge-based workloads, and run AI workloads, or whatever the case may be.
At the end of the day, we want to run all different types of workloads, observe them, and secure them.
This is the first time the event is back in person in China, as it has been only virtual since the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
A series of pre-event programming, including co-located events, coincided with the conference, such as IstioCon, ONE summit regional day, and Cloud Native open day.
The conference sessions and keynotes will be available on the YouTube channels for the Linux Foundation and CNCF in the coming weeks.
The next CNCF conference is KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023. It is a hybrid event in Chicago and will run November 6 - 9.