Cloud-Native Rejekts EU'24 Preview

Paris 2024 will mark my third KubeCon, and my first time at Rejekts to go along with it. In order to not get completely overwhelmed by two conferences back to back, I took a good look at the conferences’ schedules over the weekend, and identified a few talks and larger topics I will be focusing on:

• Kubernetes Networking and the Gateway API
• Platforms built on Kubernetes
• Kubernetes Deep Dives

Let’s have a look at a few talks from those topics, and why I picked them.

Kubernetes Networking and the Gateway API

At Rejekts alone, there will be three talks about the Kubernetes Gateway API - people want to move on from Kubernetes Ingress resources, it seems. The Gateway API represents the next generation of Kubernetes Ingress, Load Balancing, and Service Mesh APIs¹ and aims at being generic, expressive, and role-oriented.

What’s new in the Kubernetes Gateway API (Link) by Abdelfettah Sghiouar will give an overview of the current state of the Kubernetes Gateway API and its implementations and provide an opportunity to get updated on the project. Abdel is one of the hosts of the Kubernetes Podcast from Google, and I like his way of breaking down large or complex topics.

Once updated on the current state of the Gateway API, I am looking forward to Unlocking the Gateway: A Practical Guide from Ingress to Gateway API (Link), where Lior Lieberman and Mattia Lavacca will demonstrate how to migrate from Ingress to Gateway API using ingress2gateway. Both speakers are contributors to the Gateway API project, and I think we will be given very interesting insights about the Kubernetes Gateway API throughout the talk.

Platforms built on Kubernetes

The next topic I’m interested in revolves around platforms built on Kubernetes (I go by the title of Platform Advocate after all). We saw the rise of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) over the last year(s), and looking at conference schedules, people are still keen on building platforms!

Choose Your Own Adventure: The Perilous Passage to Production is an interactive session about going from dev to prod on Kubernetes, presented by Whitney Lee and Viktor Farcic, who ran a previous rendition at KubeCon EU 2023 already (Recording on YouTube). I missed it back then, so I’m dead-set on making it this time!

While it’s not a platform the audience will be building, it’s a still a production cluster, with all the building blocks and decisions you’d probably be faced with when assembling a platform - close enough for me.

If you are looking for a talk a bit more focused on delivering platforms to clients, No GitOps Pain, No Platform gain: Day 2 Challenges of Managing Kubernetes Fleets with GitOps (Link) might be right up your alley. Łukasz Piątkowski will talk about lived experiences with platform delivery to a multitude of clients, and the stories you’d expect in such a setting.

Kubernetes Deep Dives

As mentioned earlier, KubeCon 2024 will mark my third rendition, and almost exactly two years of working with Kubernetes. It won’t come as a surprise that I haven’t seen nearly all of the fancy things you can pull off with one of the largest Open-Source projects in the world.

And that’s exactly why I try to catch a few talks highlighting some of the more hidden knobs and levers of Kubernetes which I haven’t heard of before or at least haven’t used myself yet.

At Rejekts, these talks will be Don’t Do What Charlie Don’t Does - Avoiding Common CRD Design errors (Link) by Nick Young, From Fragile to Resilient: ValidatingAdmissionPolicies Strengthen Kubernetes (Link) by Marcus Noble, and The Storage Crashcourse - From CSI to Databases (Link) by Benjamin Ritter - mainly because deploying and configuring Rook, Ceph Clusters, and CSI snapshots in my homelab has been a humbling experience recently.

See you at Rejekts?

This is my personal list of talks to definitely attend, and who knows where I’ll end up spontaneously over the course of the two days at Rejekts 2024.

Which talks are you going to see? If you haven’t had a look at the schedule yet, now’s the time! If you’re attending, feel free to let me know in the comments or DM me on X/Twitter (@d_bodky), I’d love to have a chat - the hallway track is the most interesting one, after all.