Container Orchestration Moves Forward at Cloud Native Computing Event

BERLIN—The CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe 2017 event held here March 29-30 brought together vendors, developers and users interested in the evolving space that defines itself as cloud native computing. The big news out of the event was the formal approval of Docker’s containerd runtime and CoreOS’ rkt (pronounced “rocket”) container runtime as Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects. There was also a lot of talk about security, with multiple sessions providing users with guidance on what to do and what not to do in order to deploy containers securely. In this slide show, eWEEK looks at some of the highlights of the CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe 2017 event.

At CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe, Patrick Chanezon, member of the technical staff at Docker Inc., explained what containerd is all about and why Docker decided to contribute the container runtime project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Brandon Philips, CTO of CoreOS, detailed what the rkt (pronounced “rocket”) container runtime helps to enable and why his company also made the decision to bring the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The big release that was unveiled at the event was the new Kubernetes 1.6 milestone. In a keynote address, Aparna Sinha, product management team lead at Google, provided an overview of some of the highlights of the release.

Security was a hot topic at the event. In a session led by Andrew Martin, a DevOps lead in the UK government, attendees were given guidance on the tools and techniques to use to securely deploy containers and audit containers that are already running.

Among the multinational vendors that are now big backers of Kubernetes is China-based Huawei Technologies. In a keynote presentation, Ying Xiong, chief architect of Huawei’s cloud platform, explained why his company uses Kubernetes and what technologies are being built to further extend its capabilities.

Steve Sandke, principal architect at Salesforce, explained in a CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe session how his company is now making use of Kubernetes as part of its development pipeline.

Among the consumer technologies now being enabled by Kubernetes is the Philips Hue smart lighting system. Mark van Straten, senior developer at development firm Q42, talked about how Philips embraced Kubernetes and how the system has been architected to aid the smart home revolution.

The CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe 2017 event boasted a strong group of sponsors, including Intel, Cisco, Google and IBM, among other IT vendors.