A taste 4 open source at Kubecon CloudNativeCon Europe 2024
As already previewed here, Kubecon CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 is staged in Paris on 19-22 March this year.
The Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog took an early virtual tour of four companies showcasing their ‘wares’ on the conference floor this year.
Chainguard
Open source has taken over the world of software development. However, the largest trade-off still (arguably) persists i.e. security. Companies spend an enormous amount of time and resources patching and fortifying open source software in order to ship with confidence and compliance.
When something does go wrong, it’s not the third-party dependencies that get blamed – it’s developers and their products.
At KubeCon, Chainguard says it hopes to be engaging in conversations about how to flip the traditional security model right side up as a built-in process within the software development lifecycle, automatically reducing a company’s attack surface and eliminating classes of security vulnerabilities in the software everyone consumes.
Chainguard technical community advocate Adrian Mouat will be speaking at KubeCon on the topic of building container images the modern way while the company will be promoting their new free painless vulnerability management course to attendees.
Grafana Labs
According to the CNCF, 28% of organisations report Kubernetes is taking up to half their budget.
With Kubernetes and cloud costs becoming a bigger concern for users, they’re turning to observability to help gain better visibility into their infrastructure to improve resource utilisation and efficiency.
“Kubernetes Monitoring in Grafana Cloud monitors Kubernetes clusters by allowing users to visualise and analyse key metrics related to Kubernetes environments, track resource usage and gain insights into the behaviour of their applications within Kubernetes. At KubeCon EU, Grafana Labs will debut new updates to Kubernetes monitoring, including easier setup and deployment, simplified issue management, fine-grained cost monitoring etc.” notes the company, in a promotional statement.
As a contributor to both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, Grafana Labs engineers will take the stage at KubeCon to share more about the company’s recent contributions to these projects in addition to other open source investments.
Lightbend
Lightbend is coming to KubeCon Europe with its new executive team and focus on building, operating and securing low-latency systems at any scale while reducing cloud costs. Lightbend’s founder and CTO, Jonas Bonér, has recently been discussing what he refers to as the “Cloud-to-Edge Continuum” and the challenges developers face in building applications that need to run both in the cloud and at the edge, despite having wildly different requirements.
Lightbend has developed a fix for this by extending Akka – the toolkit Jonas originally created 15 years ago as a way to architect digital experiences we’re beginning to see with AI, IoT, Digital Twins, hyperscale cloud, and edge computing. Akka has a broad distribution, with customers including Tesco, ING, SKY, Tesla, Dream 11, GM and Norwegian Cruise Lines.
Lightbend will be showcasing a deployment with automaker Renault. It’s a story about using digital twins to transform manufacturing, real-time analytics and, ultimately, the car buying experience. Jonas, as well as new CEO Tyler Jewell and other members of the executive team, will be attending this year’s conference to share their vision for Lightbend’s future.
Pulumi
Pulumi, an Infrastructure-as-Code platform, promises to allow teams to manage and scale infrastructure, configurations, policies and secrets with programming languages. Pulumi enables companies to achieve speed, productivity and scale.
Pulumi has been used by top companies to manage large scale cloud architectures and now, Pulumi is bringing these gains to the generative AI (GenAI) space. The company has customers spinning up dozens of cloud accounts, deploying dozens of GPU-loaded Kubernetes clusters into each one and doing things with AI thanks to the scale of the cloud. Managing infinite compute and data with Kubernetes isn’t for the faint of heart, so a lot of folks are working on making it easier.
At KubeCon, Pulumi will showcase its role as the new abstraction in the GenAI stack that allows developers to tie together all the different pieces of infrastructure that goes into their GenAI product and manage it from a simple Python program.
