We had the pleasure of participating in the largest European gathering around Kubernetes technologies and the CNCF: Kubecon Europe, which took place between March 20th and 22nd in Paris.
In this article, we will evoke the aspects that caught our attention during these 3 days of meetings, exchanges, keynotes, discoveries, and sharing among enthusiasts galvanized by cloud-native technologies.
AI is taking the lead
On the first day (March 20th), the morning was centered around the main keynotes, attended by almost all participants (around 12,000! A first at this scale). Priyanka Sharma welcomed us by congratulating the entire community on the 10 years of K8s open-sourcing and emphasizing AI's presence in the market and its implication for the future. The concept of "Irrational Exuberance" was at the heart of this keynote.
The interoperability of actors was also highlighted, followed by a demonstration of the LLM tool, allowing precise and rapid image recognition thanks to AI.
It's clear that AI is increasingly taking up space in the CNCF/K8s universe. There are now many tools using AI to manage observability, optimize resource configurations, or handle security aspects (image scanning, CVEs, etc.). In fact, many tools presented at various booths utilize AI. We have often heard, "if ChatGPT can do it, we can."
A lot of conferences
We also had the pleasure of attending numerous conferences on extremely varied topics, such as Cilium (network management), Vitess (DB), various storage solutions, WebAssembly, policy management, load balancing, OpenTelemetry, etc.
We can clearly see that those conferences had a lot of succes. I even had to follow one conference from the outside of the room (thanks to the direct subtitles service that helped us a lot to understand even if I wasn't directly in the room!) because it was fully filled.
We will leverage the discoveries topics and experiences to create new articles on this blog soon.
The only downside is that many conferences are held simultaneously, and we had to choose from numerous options. However, all the conferences are available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj6h78yzYM2N8nw1YcqqKveySH6_0VnI0
Booth part
At KubeCon, Sponsors are not on the same floors as the conferences. Initially, we thought it wasn't ideal, but they managed to find a way that works and that gives the opportunity to take part to conferences, with booths visits in parallel.
The intermediate floor, where all the booths were located, was really huge. We could see the full range of tools and projects related to the CNCF. At Kubecon, everyone has a booth: cloud providers, security actors, storage, network & service mesh, SaaS platforms, etc. So, it was the perfect opportunity to have exanges with technical and commercial people and get our favorites references's stickers and goodies.
Accessibility and inclusion
The organization's attention to accessibility was really present. From registration, strong emphasis was placed on the Code of Conduct, and this attention allowed as many people as possible to feel comfortable in this real "forum" atmosphere.
Conclusion
Participating in KubeCon was a truly enriching experience. We had the opportunity to explore the vast ecosystem revolving around the CNCF and its community, which was impressive.
For anyone hesitating to attend a KubeCon, we can only suggest it! Certainly, for those arriving without much experience with Kubernetes, it can seem very 'elitist'. But in reality, the community is truly there to help and involve everyone, regardless of technical level. Even if you're not a 'geek', you will come away from this KubeCon with plenty of new learnings and contacts that can be useful in your business!
This event also allowed us to grasp the current and future vision of the CNCF on its challenges, despite some shortcomings to note, and to discover a united, dynamic community composed of devoted enthusiasts. This sparks the desire to go even further!
We come away with a better understanding of the ecosystem and the state of the art, some paths to explore to refine our knowledges, great memories, cool exchanges, and even the desire to come back in a future edition (London in 2025 or Amsterdam in 2026)!