KubeCon North America 2018: Serverless Kubernetes and community led innovation!
Welcome to KubeCon North America 2018, and welcome to Seattle. It’s amazing to get the chance to welcome you to my hometown, and the site of Kubernetes birth. It was barely five years ago that Joe, Craig, and I had the first small ideas and demos that eventually turned into the amazing project and community. I’m honored that all of you over the years have chosen to invest your time, energy, and enthusiasm in Kubernetes, whether this is your first KubeCon or you’ve been here since the first one in San Francisco four years ago, welcome!
For the Azure Kubernetes team, KubeCon is especially exciting. It’s been a busy and fulfilling year, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has been the fastest growing service in the history of Azure Compute, that’s been quite a ride! With KubeCon here, it’s a great chance to meet up with our customers and community collaborators to celebrate all the incredible things.
For the Azure Kubernetes Service, we started with the journey of "how to make Kubernetes easier for our customers." For example, by letting Azure take care of deployment, operations, and management of Kubernetes APIs and leveraging integrated tools, Maersk was able to free their engineers and talents to focus on things that makes the most business impact. Furthermore, by taking advantage of a fully-managed runtime environment provided by AKS, Siemens Healthineers realized shorter release cycles and achieved its desired continuous delivery approach in highly regulated environment.
We're seeing more and more Java customers port their existing Java application stacks to AKS with little or no changes. Xerox, for example, was able to run their Java apps in containers with no code modifications and leveraged Helm chart to automate customer onboarding. As a result, for their DocuShare Flex Content Management platform they were able to reduce the provisioning time from 24 hours to less than 10 minutes, accelerating sales and customer onboarding.
While we’re discussing Azure Kubernetes Service, it’s great to see more and more Azure services bring their strengths to Kubernetes. Here at KubeCon, we’re announcing the general availability (GA) of the Azure Monitor for containers. The Azure Cognitive Services have also announced containerization of their cognitive APIs, allowing users to take advantage of core cognitive technology on-premise, at the edge or wherever your data lives. For the Azure Kubernetes team, it’s been an exceptionally busy month, starting with the announcement, at KubeCon Shanghai, of AKS in Azure’s China region. Just last week in Las Vegas, we announced the public preview of AKS virtual nodes which together with Azure Container Instances (ACI) helps customers realize and take advantage of a serverless container infrastructure.
But honestly, the service that we build is only one (albeit very important) piece of what we work on as a team. Of equal importance is the work that we do in the open source community to work with others to develop novel solutions to our customers problems. With help from the community, like the great folks at the open policy agent framework, we launched an open source policy controller for Kubernetes. This policy agent installs on Kubernetes clusters anywhere and can provide enterprises with assurances that developers will successfully build reliable and compliant systems. We also are announcing the Osiris open source project that enables efficient “scale-to-zero" for Kubernetes containers. This technology can power Functions as a Service, or any programming paradigm where you need rapid scale-up in response to customer traffic.
With Docker, Bitnami, Hashicorp, and others we’ve announced the Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB) specification. CNAB is a new distributed application package that combines Helm or other configuration tools with Docker images to provide a complete, self-installing cloud applications. To see what CNAB can do for you, imagine being able to hand out a USB key to KubeCon attendees that could install your complete application. Finally, we’re celebrating the adoption of the Virtual Kubelet project into the CNCF sandbox, as we continue to work with VMWare, AWS, hyper.sh, and others in the community to make nodeless Kubernetes a reality.
At KubeCon Shanghai, I talked about my thoughts on serverless Kubernetes and the evolution of cloud native development. It’s a future driven by our mission of “Kubernetes for Everyone,” this includes reducing the complexity of Kubernetes operations by running your API for you in AKS and developing ‘nodeless’ Kubernetes with virtual nodes. It also means working on tools like Draft, and the Kubernetes extension for Visual Studio Code, which has been installed by nearly 175 thousand people that make Kubernetes a more integrated, easy to use experience.
At KubeCon North America, I’m taking off my forward-looking cap, and instead talking about the development and maintenance of the Java, .NET, TypeScript, and Python clients for Kubernetes. Whether you’re interested in talking about the future of cloud computing, or adding features like port-forwarding to the TypeScript client. I’ll be around the conference all week at the Azure booth and in the hallway track.
When it comes to explaining Kubernetes, one of my favorites is the Children’s Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes. For this KubeCon, I’m incredibly excited to announce that Microsoft is donating the likeness of Phippy, and all of your favorites from the book to the CNCF. To celebrate, we’re sharing a special second episode of the Children’s guide to Kubernetes. You can learn about the core concepts of Kubernetes in a fun way!
Whether you’re joining us in Seattle for KubeCon, or watching the talk streams from afar, we’ve got some great resources to get you started with Kubernetes, including the recently published best practices we’ve gathered from our customers and a webinar I will be sharing on structuring Kubernetes project in production.
Welcome to Seattle!
–brendan
Source: Azure Blog Feed