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SEATTLE—The KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America event is a beacon for news, with vendors showcasing their wares and making multiple announcements.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon runs here from Dec. 11-13 and has brought 8,000 attendees and more than 187 vendors into the exhibit hall. Kubernetes itself is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is also the home now to 31 open-source cloud projects.
In this eWEEK Data Points article, we look at the major areas of innovation and new services announced at the conference.
Data Point No. 1: CNCF Continues to Grow
The CNCF itself continues to expand with new projects joining the foundation and existing projects providing new milestone updates. Among the new projects that announced they are becoming part of the CNCF is the etcd distributed key value store, which is a foundational element of Kubernetes. The etcd project was started by CoreOS, which was acquired by Red Hat for $250 million on Jan. 30.
The Vitesse project announced its 3.0 update at KubeCon. Vitesse provides a shared, distributed version of the MySQL database for cloud usage. The 3.0 update promises improved usability as well as performance improvements. For more information, go here.
The Rook container storage provider project announced stable support for the Ceph storage filesystem at KubeCon. Ceph versions can be deployed by the Rook operator, and there is initial support for automatic upgrades between the versions. For more information, go here.
Data Point No. 2: More End Users Are Joining CNCF
While developers and vendors are core to the CNCF’s growth, a primary constituent is also end users. At KubeCon, the CNCF announced that financial services giant Capital One is joining the foundation as a Gold End User Member.
“As a cloud-first organization, we recognize the value that cloud-native technologies at scale can provide,” Kapil Thangavelu, senior director of software engineering at Capital One, said in a media advisory. “We joined CNCF to share learnings with the community and drive greater adoption of cloud-native technologies across industries.”
Data Point No. 3: Cloud-Native Security Is a Key Concern
Multiple vendors announced security-related initiatives and updates at KubeCon to help organizations go beyond what is natively provided by the Kubernetes platform.
- Aqua Security announced that its container security platform has been certified to be compliant with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark for Kubernetes security. The CIS benchmark defines best practices and policies for Kubernetes deployments.
- NeuVector announced an expansion of its container security platform to support the containerd and CRI-O run-times. CRI-O is an implementation of the Kubernetes container run-time interface.
- Sysdig announced its Sysdig Secure 2.2 offering, which adds a new Kubernetes audit events capability to enable organizations to detect potential security issues, based on audit data. The new release is also able to integrate with the Kubernetes admission controller, enabling administrators to validate images more rapidly. For more information, go here.
- Twistlock launched its 18.11 platform update at KubeCon, integrating hybrid cloud service discovery capabilities based on the company’s open-source discovery tool that was announced on Nov. 13. The Twistlock 18.11 platform also includes serverless function support as well as support for the Istio service mesh project.
Data Point No. 4: The Istio Service Mesh Is a Big Deal for Networking Vendors
Networking in the cloud-native environment to date has often included scalability challenges. Among the emerging efforts to help improve the situation is the open-source Istio service mesh effort, which has been adopted by multiple vendor to help improve cloud-native networking.
- Google Cloud announced the beta availability of Istio on GKE at KubeCon in an effort to help accelerate the benefits of microservice architecture in a containerized infrastructure.
- A10 Networks announced its Secure Service Mesh solution for applications deployed in Kubernetes environments at KubeCon. The A10 Secure Service Mesh provides multicloud, centralized policy management and also comprehensive metrics, logs and analytics.
- F5 Networks announced its Aspen Mesh technology in an effort to provide an enterprise-ready implementation of Istio. More information on Aspen Mesh is available here.
Data Point No. 5: Monitoring and Visibility Into Kubernetes Clusters Is Important
Kubernetes provides multiple areas where users can find out about what’s running, though it’s often difficult to make sense of it all. That’s why there is an increasing landscape of vendors providing new and expanded capabilities to help improve visibility into Kubernetes deployments.
- New Relic announced its Kubernetes Cluster Explorer technology that provides organizations with multidimensional views in Kubernetes application cluster operations. The Explorer also provides advanced filtering capabilities to help administrators rapidly identify the root cause of any potential issue. For more information, go here.
Data Point No. 6: Commercially Supported Kubernetes Platforms Are Growing Too
The list of vendor solutions for Kubernetes tools continues to grow at KubeCon, with several vendors announcing new and expanded platforms.
- Oracle announced the Cloud Native Framework, an approach that spans public cloud (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), on-premises (Oracle Linux) and hybrid cloud deployment models. The framework also includes a new commercially supported serverless function-as-a-service offering. For more information, go here.
- DigitalOcean announced the availability of its Kubernetes as a Service offering, which provides a managed Kubernetes service with production-ready functionality and full customer support. For more information, go here.
Data Point No. 7: Serverless Is the Future
The trend toward serverless, also known as functions-as-a-service, is alive and well within the cloud-native community. The Knative project enables a serverless framework on top of Kubernetes and made news at KubeCon with the announcement that technology leaders including Red Hat, Google, SAP and IBM are committing to Knative as an open standard for building their commercial serverless offerings.
For more information on Knative, go here.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.