Hello, Cloud Gurus, I'm Nigel Poulton author of the Kubernetes book.
And welcome to Kubernetes This Month,
the show where we bring you right up to speed with what's been going on in and
around Kubernetes and we take a look at a couple of news highlights.
I've got 11 news quick bites for you this month. It has been a busy month.
First at the top of the list is Azure Kubernetes service,
which already has Kubernetes 1.19 in preview.
And it'll be defaulting to containerd as its standard container runtime,
when 1.19 eventually goes GA on the platform.
Now sticking with Azure and even more good stuff in preview this time,
AKS itself is in preview on Azure Stack HCI.
So more ways of bringing Kubernetes and AKS into on-prem
scenarios. Mirantis announced Docker enterprise container cloud,
and I'm going to quote directly from their announcement here because it is
impressive how many buzzwords they fit into one sentence.
Docker enterprise cloud,
and check this out is a multi-cloud management solution that gives you
one set of APIs and tools to deploy, manage, and observe,
secure by default certified,
batteries included Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure, public cloud,
private cloud, or even bare metal. Now, buzzwords aside,
we all actually know that Kubernetes can be hard as can choosing and managing
multiple clouds. So something like this, actually,
it might be just what the doctor ordered. Sticking with Docker, and Mirantis,
there's been talk of Mirantis running swarm on top of Kubernetes and a future
Docker enterprise release.
Now this sparked a debate in the community again about whether or not swarm is
still a thing. And I weighed in with my honest opinion of,
absolutely yes, it is alive and kicking.
Congrats to Chaos Mesh for its 1.0 release. And Odo,
the developer focused Kubernetes command line interface got a 2.0 release.
Now in a similar vein,
the Open Service Mesh got accepted as a CNCF sandbox
project. And I think we'll mention more about that in the deeper dive section.
Pure storage are acquiring Portworx to bolster that Kubernetes native storage
capabilities. I've been a personal longtime fan of both companies.
So I'm pretty excited for their shared future. And Chef,
Chef has been bought by Progress for nearly a quarter of a
billion dollars. So congrats to everyone involved there.
Last but not least the CNCF has released its transparency report for the
recent KubeCon EU event and more on that later.
And that wraps the news highlights for the month.
[Inaudible].
Alright. And this month deeper dive section,
we will look at the Open Service Mesh, joining the CNCF,
and I'll summarize the more interesting parts of the CNCF transparency report.
Okay. So it's hard to talk about Service Mesh without mentioning ISTIO. I mean,
it's a great technology with a bustling community and they've done a bunch of
rearchitecting recently. That's cleaned things up and simplified it quite a lot.
So in a lot of ways ISTIO is doing well. I mean,
I would go so far as to say it's probably the leading service mesh on both
adoption and features. So what's not to like, I mean,
why the need of yet another service mesh and the form this time of the open
service mesh? Well, it's not due to complexity because if it was,
we'd be hailing the simplicity of Linkerd, which by the way,
is a great service mesh. But it's not simplicity,
especially as ISTIO is getting easier.
The issue is about governance and standards and without getting into too much
detail,
but Google pretty much owns ISTIO and refuses to donate it to the
CNCF. Where like all the other projects,
it would be subject to the usual or the same rigorous shaking down and
governance that just about everything else in the cloud native space is subject
to. While something like that on the outside might not sound like a big issue.
I mean, it's not a technical defect.
It actually is a big issue for a lot of people. I mean,
we're trying to move away from technologies and stacks where a single player has
so much control. So for the open service mesh, well,
it's already donated to the CNCF and it is pretty much a reference
implementation of the service mesh interface spec.
So it's got openness and standards on its side,
but it'll be an uphill struggle if it wants to replace ISTIO at the top
of the hill.
Right then KubeCon EU this year was a virtual event as is the
upcoming KubeCon North America event. While I'm not a fan of virtual event.
I do know a lot of hard work goes into them and everyone is doing their best to
make them as amazing as possible. So I'll tip my hat to the organizers.
Anyway,
in total that were around 18,000 registrants with over
12,000, actually logging on and engaging in some way. In fact,
over half of the attendees spent more than 10 hours on the platform,
not surprisingly considering the virtual nature of the event,
but 72% of attendees were first timers though.
I will say the number was also really high at the last in-person KubeCon
in San Diego. So for me,
it's a real sign of growing adoption and interest in Kubernetes.
I've attended pretty much all of the KubeCons to date.
And I know that the community passionately cares about diversity and inclusion.
So it was magic to see that 74% of
keynote speakers identified as women or gender nonconforming.
Again, hats off to the organizers. And the keynoter's there. Though,
I will caveat that by saying the community as a whole still has a long way to go
because only 10% ish or even less than 10% of overall
attendees were women. While I'm not personally a fan of virtual events,
I guess I'd just love the in-person things too much.
I do wonder if there's a place going forward for virtual events,
even when we can get back to in person events,
because while the virtual event experience isn't as rich,
it is more accessible to a lot of people.
And maybe it's a safer experience for people who are in minorities
or who otherwise struggle and attending personal events. Time will tell.
Okay, Guru of the Month.
Last month I asked what best describes the role of a stateful sets governing
service.
And the answer was B it's a headless service that ensures pods managed by the
stateful set, get individual SRV records and the clusters DNS,
and this months winner is Lav Jain.
And hope I pronounced that right. Either way. Lav,
thanks very much for getting involved.
And we'll be shipping you a goodie bag in the post.
This week's question is in the forum link below,
and I'll see you again next month. Same cube time, same cube place.