KubeCrash Fall 2023

Danielle Cook, co-chair CNCF Cartografos Group, Fairwinds

Lisa-Marie Namphy, CNCF Ambassador

Eddie Wassef, VP, Chief Architect, Vonage by Ericsson

Multi-cluster Kubernetes environments are ubiquitous, silently driving essential systems at airports, grocery stores, hospitals, retail outlets, and warehouses. These systems are the backbone of modern life, and orchestrating them remains one of the most daunting endeavors of any distributed system design.

Join us as we unveil the hidden world of multi-cluster Kubernetes and introduce you to GitOps, the conductor of this symphony, offering a secure, efficient way to manage and update these critical systems at scale.

Whether you're new to the concept or a seasoned pro, today promises to provide valuable insights into orchestrations that underpin our everyday experiences. Listen on and take the first step toward mastering multi-cluster systems using a variety of products highlighted throughout the day. Join us to explore, learn, and transform the way you think about Kubernetes and its orchestration.

Destiny O'Connor, CNCF Deaf & Hard of Hearing Working Group

During this session, Destiny will present a new CNCF initiative that aims to create a pathway into cloud native for the deaf and hard of hearing.

As a deaf engineer herself, Destiny knows that diversity and inclusion foster vibrant communities where everyone contributes their unique perspectives and talents. The result: innovation that is more inclusive, higher quality, and a broader set of contributors. But when it comes to cloud native, we have yet to see universal representation of communities with disabilities. And visibility is key because, if you don't see individuals "like you" thriving in a particular field, it can be difficult to envision your own journey. This initiative aims at creating and supporting patterns and a pathway for deaf or hard of hearing individuals to become active open source community members who can serve as role models, motivating a new generation of engineers to join them on this journey. Join this session to learn why these initiatives are important and what you can do to help.

Abby Bangser, CNCF Platforms Working Group Lead, Syntasso

The hype train is gaining steam for Platforms and Platform Engineering and many companies are climbing aboard. Hear about the work the CNCF Platforms Working Group is doing to help keep the conversation on track.

Dinesh Majrekar, CTO, Civo

In today's dynamic computing landscape, enterprises often operate across multiple cloud environments to optimize resources and enhance resilience. This presentation explores how Kubernetes can be leveraged to address the challenges and opportunities of managing applications across diverse cloud platforms.

Discover essential strategies for achieving high availability and latency reduction in a multi-cloud setup using Kubernetes. Uncover the power of Kubernetes' native features and third-party tools in effectively monitoring and optimizing deployments in a multi-cloud environment.

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Flynn, Technical Evangelist, Buoyant

Linkerd has long had support for allowing communication across cluster boundaries that’s secure, independent of network topology, and completely transparent to the application. This support was designed for a world in which individual clusters were generally isolated from one another, and crossing the cluster boundary was a bit unusual — the kind of situation where you had a primary cluster and a failover, or a separate cluster in another AZ that you only wanted to use for special situations.

The world is changing, though. Now, it’s also common to see clusters used more like namespaces, with a single application spanning multiple clusters by design. Linkerd 2.14 brings powerful new tools to the table to handle this new world, with new features that support direct pod-to-pod communication across clusters, while preserving all the power of Linkerd’s workload-based identity, policy management, and sophisticated routing capabilities configured with the Gateway API. In this talk, we’ll break down how it all works and how it can help you in your multi-cluster world.

David Sudia, Director of Developer Relations, Ambassador Labs

In a multi-cluster architecture, you might separate your traffic by geography, customer, or another category, and it’s essential to get each request to the correct cluster for performance and compliance reasons. In this session, you’ll learn how to use Emissary-Ingress’ authentication extension to determine who a user is and where the request should go, and then reroute directly from Emissary-Ingress or provide that information to your mesh for routing.

Rob Koch (moderator), Principal, Slalom Build; Sabine Wolz, Senior Product Manager, Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation; Kasper Nissen, Lead Platform Architect, Lunar; Eddie Wassef, Chief Architect, Vonage.

Tim Ramlot, cert-manager maintainer, Venafi

cert-manager is an open-source X.509 certificate controller for Kubernetes. It automates certificate issuance for Kubernetes workloads. In this session, we will use cert-manager to set up a unified cross-cluster trust domain. Learn how to streamline TLS and mTLS certificate management, optimizing security and scalability across multiple clusters. Say goodbye to operational bottlenecks and embrace a more efficient Kubernetes environment.

Stevie Caldwell, Senior SRE, Fairwinds

Andy Suderman, CTO, Fairwinds

There are many Kubernetes best practices around security, efficiency and reliability, but are they being followed? In this KubeCrash session, Andy Suderman and Stevie Caldwell discuss how to use the open source policy engine, Polaris, to apply Kubernetes consistency. We will look into some recent examples where applications failed due to misconfigurations. Attendees will learn why Kubernetes guardrails are needed and how to put them in place.

Rob Reid, Technical Evangelist, Author, Cockroach Labs

Mission-critical applications are being modernized to create better, more frictionless customer experiences; expand and adapt to changing workload demands; and ensure business continuity. This talk focuses on how enterprises can use CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database, to achieve resilience through multi-region deployment. Learn how CockroachDB helps remove performance bottlenecks, scale globally while maintaining data locality, and survive virtually any type of outage!

Leo Pahlke, CNCF TAG for Environmental Sustainability

Cloud native computing has revolutionized how we build and deploy software, but it also significantly impacts the environment. The CNCF Technical Advisory Group for Environmental Sustainability (TAG ENV) aims to address this challenge by working with the community to develop best practices and standards for cloud native sustainability. In this talk, Leo will explore the TAG ENV's work. Attendees will learn about: 

• The Cloud Native Sustainability Landscape: an overview of all cloud native sustainability areas
• The Green Reviews Working Group: a group developing a framework for evaluating the sustainability footprint of cloud native projects
• Global Cloud Native Sustainability Week: nearly 100 local organizers who bring the cloud native community together to discuss sustainability

Join this talk to learn how the CNCF community is approaching cloud native sustainability and how you can support this effort by building greener systems in the cloud. 

Sean Schneeweiß, Software Engineer, Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation

Join us on a journey through our history of managing a fleet of Kubernetes clusters. Our journey began eight years ago with a single cluster for everyone. As the need for dedicated cluster grew, we realized the need for self-service and API-driven cluster provisioning, leading us to replace Terraform pipelines with Cluster API for managing Kubernetes with Kubernetes itself.

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By leveraging the extensibility of Cluster API, we now support multiple cloud providers and manage infrastructure and clusters the Kubernetes native way. Our journey has taught us valuable lessons about managing infrastructure at scale, and we are thrilled to share our insights with you. Join us to discover how we navigated the challenges of fleet management and achieved Kubernetes native multi-cluster management. Our ultimate goal is to move automation, desired state, cluster and infrastructure provisioning, as well as add-on management into Kubernetes. Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity to learn from our journey!