I’ve had a great second day at KubeCon (first proper day after yesterday’s co-located events), and thought I’d share some of the impressions.

Keynotes

The day started with an impressive sets of keynotes in an even more impressively-sized auditorium. There are around 12,500 people attending KubeCon Europe this year, and it felt like most of them fit into the huge area.

Vijay Samuel from eBay talked about the challenges in the monitoring space, and how their journey with AI took them from ‘throw everything at the LLM’ to ‘combine engineering with selected LLM’. At the end of the day, they managed to take their incident management to a new level by becoming more aware of the capabilities and limitations of AI.

Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux Foundation gave a great talk about the recent addition of Rust in the Linux kernel (only ~20k lines vs. the 30M lines in C, but it’s getting there)! I really like seeing Rust gaining that much traction, and wish I had a nail for that particular hammer in my day job.

Kasper Borg Nilssen from Dash0 treated us to a nice introduction to auto-instrumentation with OpenTelemetry (and Perses as dashboard solution). It was great seeing all these components work together so effortlessly, and reinforced my believe that we chose the right stack and approach for monitoring within the Alan project.

Explain GPUs in k8s like I’m 5

This excellent talk by Carlos Santana (AWS) isn’t quite suitable for a 5 year old, but instead took us on a journey to understanding the relation of drivers, device plugin, the container toolkit, kubelet etc. and how they need to be setup to enable scheduling workload on GPU nodes.

I’ve been thinking about setting up a small homelab, and this would be among the first things that I’d try to implement.

Google’s open source strategy for k8s

One of my favorite talks of the entire conference was by Google’s Jago Macleod, who took us on a journey through history to the beginnings of kubernetes, Google’s early and ongoing involvement, the relation to Borg, and the unifying nature of kubernetes as an adapter between the hardware and software layer.

The ultimate container challenge

Another all-time favorite was the excellent, interactive talk by Aurélie Vache and Sherine Khoury on OCI, Podman, Docker and other tools from the container world. They did a fantastic job at designing a challenging interactive quiz, with the answers to each of the 8 questions being explained in detail and with a quick demo.
I really enjoyed the way they involved the audience and managed to capture a lot of attention despite the late hour.