Kubernetes EU 2021 edition - 123dev #19

Posted on September 24, 2021  •  3 minutes  • 626 words

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Wings (1927)

The gif is from a silent film I’ve never seen but it won the first ever Academy Award (1930). Ninety years later I would have a hard time reproducing that shot, and I love the vision someone had to make it happen. It reminded me of one of Clark’s laws; I’ll list all three for you here:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The future of conferences

While I think Kubecon is one of the best virtual conferences I’ve been wondering a lot about the usefulness of conferences in the future. What are the benefits to have thousands of people stop their normal work schedules to spend a week focused on learning and networking. Wouldn’t it be better to let people focus on learning when it fits their schedule best and network more intentionally instead of who happens to be online or close to their physical location in the moment?

For me an ideal conference platform would:

1. Centralize content so I can keep up to date on lots of companies and topics
2. Give me a way to schedule my time to watch content and learn new things (future and past content)
3. Connect me with people interested in the same topics at the same time
4. Meet new people in small groups

One of the biggest drawbacks to virtual conferences is the lack of shared experience. If a virtual conference can solve that problem it could make the synchronous time investment worth it. IMO shared experience is one of the things Twitch and Fortnite do really well.

Links

If you’ve never read the Kubernetes Resource Model I encourage you to do so. It’s a design doc from the early-ish days of Kubernetes and really helps to explain some of the fundamental principles of Kubernetes and how “Kubernetes is not just API-driven, but is API-centric.”

community/resource-management.md at master · kubernetes/community · GitHub Kubernetes community content. Contribute to kubernetes/community development by creating an account on GitHub.

kcp was one of the more interesting announcements I saw from Kubecon EU which really leans into the API patterns described above. It takes my favorite part of Kubernetes—the API—and strips out the resources you don’t need if you’re not running a cluster. Lots of people are looking to use the Kubernetes API to drive the rest of their infrastructure and this is a better place to start than a stripped down Kubernetes cluster.

GitHub - kcp-dev/kcp: kcp is a prototype of a Kubernetes API server that is not a Kubernetes cluster - a place to create, update, and maintain Kube-like APIs with controllers above or without clusters. kcp is a prototype of a Kubernetes API server that is not a Kubernetes cluster - a place to create, update, and maintain Kube-like APIs with controllers above or without clusters. - GitHub - kcp-dev/kcp: kcp is a prototype of a Kubernetes API server that is not a Kubernetes cluster - a place to create, update, and maintain Kube-like APIs with controllers above or without clusters.

Many environments could benefit from policy as code. There’s great work happening in this space but not very much adoption that I’ve seen. This post gives you some ideas of policies you can use beyond the usual “don’t deploy on Friday” that I typically see.

Open Policy Agent: The Top 5 Kubernetes Admission Control Policies — blog.styra.com These are the top five Kubernetes admission control policies that you should have running in your cluster right now.