Last week, the cloud-native community gathered in Salt Lake City, Utah, for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024. Practitioners, tech leaders, and vendors explored the latest innovations and technologies defining cloud-native computing.
This year's theme, "scaling new heights", focused on enhancing scalability, efficiency, and security to enable teams and organizations in the AI era as the Kubernetes project turned 10 this year.
Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, and Chris Aniszczyk, the CNCF's CTO, kicked off the event by underscoring the community efforts to combat patent trolls and announcing the cloud native heroes challenge, a community-driven program for practitioners to help protect the ecosystem from patent trolls, and a partnership with unified patents.
In addition, the CNCF announced the release of the return of the technology radar landscape, a detailed report that examines the maturity of key tools and technologies in the ecosystem, and a set of cloud-native reference architectures. Both are intended to provide guidance and promote the adoption of cloud-native technologies in organizations.
Some of the key announcements include:
- The graduation of Cert-manager, which is a project that helps issue and renew TLS and mTLS certificates. The project has wide adoption across the cloud-native ecosystem as it simplifies the lifecycle management of X.509 certificates in Kubernetes platforms.
- The graduation of project Dapr, a distributed portable runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient distributed systems that run across the cloud and edge. The project provides APIs for communication, state, and workflow to simplify the process of building production-ready distributed applications.
- Release of KubeVirt v1.4. The tool provides a unified platform that enables developers to build and deploy applications regardless of the underlying infrastructure, including application containers and virtual machines. The new release includes generally available features such as GPU assignment, support for Non-uniform Memory Access (NUMA), and common instance types.
- The premiere of Inside Argo: Automating the Future. The documentary film goes into the making of the open-source project and how it grew from a single engine to a set of tools to simplify and automate Kubernetes deployments.
- New certifications, including the Certified Backstage Associate (CBA), were announced during the event. OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA), Kyverno Certified Associate (KCA), and Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineer (CNPE).
The certifications are designed to focus on the skills that are increasingly essential to organizations adopting cloud-native technologies and go beyond Kubernetes as they provide a way to demonstrate competence in hands-on experience building, maintaining, and observing cloud-native applications and platforms.
Recordings of the conference sessions and keynotes are available on the CNCF YouTube channel.
The last KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2024 will occur next month in New Delhi. This is the first time such an event will be held in India. It will be held from December 11-12.
Next year, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe will take place in London, England, from April 1-4, North America in Atlanta, Georgia, from November 10-13, China in Hong Kong from June 10-11, and for the very first time Japan, from June 16-17.
