KubeCon / CloudNativeCon NA 2023 Event Recap

Chicago was the center of the cloud-native conversation during KubeCon/Cloud-Native Con NA 2023. Over 8,000 in-person attendees made their way to the McCormick center to explore Kubernetes, cloud-native technologies, and everything else the Cloud Native Computing Federation had in store.

Gen AI was Top-of-Mind

Generative AI was a hot topic, from the software vendors that incorporated it into their products to enterprises trying to figure out how to use the technology safely, securely, and cost-efficiently. Hand-in-hand with the generative AI conversation is the data powering it.

You can’t have good AI without a solid data foundation, but the massive data sets required for these use cases are challenging to manage. A strong data strategy and governance are critical factors in getting the most out of existing AI/ML technologies and new generative AI implementations.

While Kubernetes was not initially built for AI, its adaptability and the open-source community backing it up allows it to be a powerful infrastructure component for cloud-native solutions. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was built on top of thousands of Kubernetes clusters.

Other trending topics included WebAssembly, the growing contributions of enterprises to open-source projects, observability, platform engineering, infrastructure-as-code, and, of course, keeping everything secure.

KubeCrawl + CloudNativeFest

The Cloud Native Computing Federation and the Linux Foundation certainly know how to throw a great party! One of the highlights was the mobile DJ booth that had a bubble blower attached, and it also featured jugglers, tarot card readers, an augmented reality climbing wall, and liquid nitrogen ice cream.

Datavail’s Got Swag

We were thrilled to find out that Datavail swag got featured on The Cube’s Savvy Swag segment – our Beer for a Year giveaway and Datavailopoly, the only board game by DBAs, for DBAs, were both shown off in the video. Watch it here.

KubeCon Session Highlights

With 100s of sessions going on between KubeCon and its co-located events, it’s hard to single out highlights. Here are a few of the many interesting sessions from this conference (slides are available on the linked pages for many of these sessions):

• Real-Time Caching for Cloud Native Applications with Redis
• Patterns of Multi-cluster Kubernetes
• Kube-Costbusters: Optimizing Kubernetes Clusters for Efficiency and Epic Savings!
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
• Where’s Your Money Going? The Beginners Guide to Measuring Kubernetes Costs
• Scaling Kubernetes Networking to 1k, 5k…100k Nodes!?

Many of the sessions at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon NA 2023 were recorded, and are available on the Cloud Native Computing Federation’s Youtube page here.

We’re looking forward to KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2024 – in the meantime, you can see other events that Datavail will be attending on our events page.