Blog

As we jump into 2020, we wanted to share a reminder and quick overview of CNCF’s webinar program. These webinars are hosted by members, CNCF incubating and graduated projects, and CNCF SIGs. Anyone can register to attend, and they are then posted on the CNCF YouTube channel.

CNCF webinars are a great, free opportunity for the cloud native community to learn about not only CNCF projects but other open source, cloud native technologies and trends in the community. 

Who hosts the CNCF webinars? 

Platinum, gold, and silver members can host. We also host webinars from graduated and incubating projects, which each have the opportunity to present twice a year on release launch details or updates.

Note that projects from the CNCF Sandbox are not able to hold webinars, but a CNCF member organization may still talk about an open source sandbox project during their company’s webinar. 

CNCF SIGs are able to host one webinar per year.

What are CNCF webinars about? 

Webinar topics are similar to what you could expect to see during a session at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Any platforms, tools or technologies discussed are open source and work with CNCF projects. 

The purpose of the CNCF webinars is to educate the cloud native community. Webinar topics vary depending on the target audience — whether developers, architects, CIOs, and/or CTO — so there is a vast range of topics available! Webinars are not product pitches.

CNCF offers English language webinars every Tuesday 10am-11am PT, Wednesday 10am-11am PT, and Thursday 9am-10am PT. While Chinese language webinars are typically scheduled for Wednesday or Thursday, 10am Beijing time.

To register for any upcoming webinars, you can check out our website and click on the webinar to sign up. We also offer recordings of past webinars so if you cannot attend one live, no worries!

Do you have any questions about webinars? Have a look at the in-depth guidelines if you are interested in hosting. Or, reach out to us at webinars@cncf.io!

 

Guest post originally published in KubeMQ by Oz Golan

Background

Most enterprises are adopting Kubernetes as a result of the endless benefits it offers. It is adopted for seamless container management; it provides high scalability and enhances communication / messaging. It can also allow for the addition of many lifetime applications when building a microservice. This means enterprises can make lots of changes as the project expands with little effort

There is a high volume of traffic flow of messages in microservice architecture that is orchestrated by Kubernetes. Managing heavy traffic can pose major challenges, so enterprises have to give a lot of thought on how to effectively manage the heavy traffic in the system before deploying in Kubernetes. This implies that the operational and architecture requirements that are needed to support the production environment have gained significant focus. In a new microservice, each data model is disengaged from the rest of the system. But a project can grow bigger into thousands of microservices, which means the messaging traffic would grow into millions of messages every day. Therefore to achieve an effective messaging system between microservices, a robust communication mechanism must be adopted.

Some enterprises attempt to solve this communication gap in Kubernetes using a Point-To-Pont connectivity system such as REST. However, REST can create restrictions and other complications in the messaging structure of the services. If there is no proper messaging solution, then there would be a need to carry out maintenance each time requirements are changed. Carrying out frequent maintenance is expensive, time-consuming, and unreliable. This problem cannot be solved by REST because of the many restrictions that come with it.

To solve the problems in microservices architecture and Kubernetes, a messaging queue system must be deployed for effective management. A messaging queue system re-architects the stack and deploys a single focal point of communication for better communication. This ensures that each service communicates with the message queue broker in its own language. The message queue system would then deliver the messages to the services waiting for it.

Building a well-managed messaging solution

We are happy to announce that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is funding a new Kubernetes bug bounty program to reward researchers who find security vulnerabilities in Kubernetes’ codebase, as well as build and release processes. The program is being launched by the Kubernetes Product Security Committee, a group of security-focused maintainers who receive and respond to reports of security issues in Kubernetes, in concert with bug bounty program vendor, HackerOne. After having won the community-led RFP, HackerOne had their team pass the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam as part of the bootstrapping process. 

As a CNCF graduated project, it is imperative that Kubernetes adhere to the highest levels of security best practices. Back in August 2019, CNCF formed the Security Audit Working Group and conducted Kubernetes’ first security audit, which helped the community identify issues from general weaknesses to critical vulnerabilities, enabling them to address these vulnerabilities and add documentation to help users. 

To continue to drive awareness of Kubernetes’ security model and reward ongoing efforts in the community to secure Kubernetes, discussions began at the beginning of 2018 to launch an official bug bounty program. After several months of private testing, the Kubernetes Bug Bounty is now open to all security researchers. 

For information on the scope of the program and how to get involved, check out the Kubernetes.io blog. 

Launched in 2007 with a mission of making customer service easy for organizations, Zendesk offers products involving real-time messaging, voice chat, and data analytics. All of this was built as a monolithic Rails app, using MySQL database and running in a co-located data center on hardware the company owned. 

That system worked fine for the first seven years or so. But as Zendesk grew—the company went public in 2014 and now has 145,000 paid customer accounts and 3,000 employees—it became clear that changes were needed at the infrastructure level, and the effort to make those changes would lead the company to microservices, containers, and Kubernetes.

“We realized that just throwing more and more stuff into a Rails monolith slowed down teams,” says Senior Principal Engineer Jon Moter. “Deploys were really painful and really risky. Every team at Zendesk, some of whom were scattered in engineering offices all over the world, were all tied to this one application.”

Moter’s team built some tooling called ZDI (Zendesk Docker Integration), which got developers set up with containers almost instantly. There were just a couple of options for orchestration at the time, in the summer of 2015, and after some research, Moter says, “Kubernetes seemed like it was designed to solve pretty much exactly the problems we were having. Google knows a thing or two about containers, so it felt like, ‘all right, if we’re going to make a bet, let’s go with that one.’”

Today, about 70% of Zendesk applications are running on Kubernetes, and all new applications are built to run on it. There have been time savings as a result: Previously, changing the resource profile of an application could take a couple of days; now, it takes just a minute or two. Outage resolution happens with self-healing in minutes instead of the hours previously spent patching things up. 

Having a common orchestration platform makes it way easier to have common tooling, common monitoring, and more predictable dashboards, Moter adds. “That has helped make it easier to onboard people and follow standard sorts of templates, and to set up monitors and alerting in a fairly consistent manner. And it helps a lot with on-call. We have offices scattered around the world, so for people on-call, it’s daytime at one of our offices all day.”

The benefits have been clear, and Zendesk is happy to share its learnings with the rest of the community. “Having so many companies that either compete with each other, or are in different industries, all collaborating, sharing best practices, working on stuff together,” says Moter, “I think it’s really inspiring in a lot of ways.”

For more about Zendesk’s cloud native journey, read the full case study here.

While the CNCF makes every effort to ensure the comfort, health, and happiness of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendees, there were some attendees at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Seattle 2018 who felt overwhelmed or unhappy.

Some of those attendees were brave enough to share their experiences and this led to the creation of the Well-being working Group (WG). As the largest ever open source conference, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is breaking new ground which provides an excellent opportunity for us to learn how to take care of attendees at scale.

Partnering with OSMI for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2019

While members of the Well-being WG were compiling a list of suggestions for future CNCF events, Dan Kohn, CNCF’s Executive Director, came across an organization called Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMI).

OSMI’s motto is “changing how we talk about mental health in the tech community,” This volunteer-led organization, engages in a range of activities including producing various open source resources to help both employers and employees navigate mental health issues in tech.

The Well-being WG and OSMI then teamed up to create a ‘conference handbook’, which first appeared at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2019 in Barcelona. The handbook listed helpful tips for how conference attendees could help both themselves and others to remain well during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Several hundred copies were distributed during the event at the OSMI booth, which is staffed entirely by volunteers from the Well-Being WG.

In addition to the handbook, Dr. Jennifer Akulian who works closely with OSMI, gave a talk on mental health in tech and there was a very well attended community organized panel session.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2019 in San Diego

After positive feedback from the conference in Barcelona the WG decided to repeat the program in San Diego, alongside extra activities from CNCF including more accessible quiet rooms, free massages, and the puppy palooza. All of these items were listed on the conference’s ‘Keep Cloud Native Well’ page which will be a standard fixture for future events.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Amsterdam 2020 and beyond

At San Diego a huge number of people expressed interest in joining the Well-Being WG to both shape and deliver future working group activities. The general feeling is that we’ll be going ‘bigger and better’ in 2020. If you would like to be involved, you can either join the WG mailing list directly or contact the CNCF at info@cncf.io.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 was our largest event to date with record-breaking registrations, attendance, sponsorships, and co-located events. With nearly 12,000 attendees, this year’s event in San Diego saw a 49% increase in attendance over last year’s event in Seattle. Sixty-five percent of attendees were first-timers.

We’ve published KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 conference transparency report. 

Key Takeaways:

• The conference had 11,891 registrations, a 49% increase over last year.
• 65% were first-time KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendees.
• Attendees came from 67 countries across 6 continents.
• More than 55% of attendees participated in one or more of the 34 co-located events.
• Feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive, with an overall average rating of 4.2 out 5.
• We received 1,801 submissions – a new record for our North American event – and 2,128 potential speakers submitted to the CFP.
• The three-day conference offered 366 sessions.
• Of the keynote speakers, 58% identified as men, and 42% as women or non-binary/other genders.
• CNCF offered travel support to 115 diversity scholarship applicants, leveraging $177,500 in available funds.
• 2,631 companies participated in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, of them were 1,809 End User companies.
• Keynote sessions garnered 3,804 live stream views.
• The event generated more than 15,000 articles, blog posts, and press releases.

Save the Dates for 2020!

After a massive 2019, we’re looking forward to bigger and better KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in 2020.

We’ll be in Amsterdam from March 30-April 2, Shanghai from July 28-30, and Boston from November 17-20.

We hope to see you at one of or all of these upcoming events!

Announced in May 2018, the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) program was designed as an extension of CNCF’s Kubernetes training offerings which already includes certification for Kubernetes administrators. By adding this exam to the CNCF certification line-up, application developers and anyone working with Kubernetes can certify their competency in the platform. This certification has been extremely successful with over 5,300 individuals registering for the exam and almost 2,400 achieving certification.

To match other CNCF and Linux Foundation certifications, the CKAD is extending the expiration date of the earned certification from 24 months to 36 months! That means that if you met the Program Certification requirements, your certification will remain valid for 36 months rather than the original 24 months. 

To maintain your certification, the requirements have not changed. Certificants must meet the renewal requirements, outlined in the candidate handbook, prior to the expiration date of their current certification in order to maintain active certification. If certification renewal requirements are not completed before the expiration date, certification will be revoked. 

If you have already been awarded a CKAD Certification, you should have been contacted. If you have any questions, please reach out to trainingpartners@cncf.io.

The Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam certifies that users can design, build, configure, and expose cloud native applications for Kubernetes. Interested in taking the exam? Have a look at the Candidate Handbook and the Frequently Asked Questions for more information! 

Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Falco as an incubation-level hosted project.

Falco, which entered the CNCF Sandbox in October 2018, is an open source Kubernetes runtime security project. It provides intrusion and abnormality detection for cloud native platforms such as Kubernetes, Mesosphere, and Cloud Foundry. 

Given the opaque nature of containers, organizations require deeper insight into container activities. The Falco project was created by Sysdig to better understand container behavior, and to share these insights with organizations, allowing them to protect their container platforms from possible malicious activity. 

“Runtime security is a critical piece in a cloud-native security story and essential for anyone taking cloud-native security seriously,” said Kris Nova, Chief Open Source Advocate at Sysdig. “Access control and policy enforcement are important prevention techniques, but runtime security is needed to detect threats that evade preventions.” 

By leveraging open source Linux kernel instrumentation, Falco gains deep insight into system behavior. The rules engine can then detect abnormal activity in applications, containers, the underlying host, and the container platform. In the event of unexpected behavior at runtime, Falco detects and alerts, reducing the risk of a security incident. It can send these alerts via Slack, Fluentd, NATS, and more. 

Main Falco Features:

• Strengthen security – Create security rules driven by a context-rich and flexible engine to define unexpected application behavior.
• Reduce risk – Immediately respond to policy violation alerts by plugging Falco into your current security response workflows and processes.
• Leverage up-to-date rules – Alert using community-sourced detections of malicious activity and CVE exploits.

Notable Milestones:

• 257% increase in downloads
• 8.5 million downloads 
• 100 percent increase in commits year-over-year
• 64 committers
• More than 2000 GitHub stars
• 55 contributors, including engineers from Frame.io, Shopify, Snap, and Booz Allen Hamilton 

Since joining the CNCF sandbox, the Falco community has focused on making the project easier to adopt. Project maintainers have implemented a governance model, which sets guidelines and standards for both contributors and maintainers to ensure the project’s compliance and health. Falco was also made available in the Google marketplace. The Falco community also created an operator that is available in the OperatorHub.io.

“Runtime container security tools like Falco provide the visibility necessary for development teams to feel safe plugging them into their stack,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO/COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “During its time in the Sandbox, Falco has seen impressive growth and end user adoption, and we look forward to seeing the advancements the community continues to make.” 

While in the Incubator, Falco will focus on moving to an API-first architecture, which enables the community to begin developing integrations with other tools, including Prometheus, Envoy, and Kubernetes.

As a CNCF hosted project, joining incubating technologies like OpenTracing, gRPC, CNI, Notary, NATS, Linkerd, Helm, Rook, Harbor, etcd, OPA, and CRI-O, Falco is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach.

Every CNCF project has an associated maturity level: sandbox, incubating, or graduated project. For more information on what qualifies a technology for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria v.1.3.

To get started with Falco, visit its Falco GitHub page. To get involved, attend the weekly office hours calls to discuss feature work, open issues, and repository planning.

Learn more about Falco, visit www.falco.org.

Following our BIGGEST KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event yet, we wanted to share a snapshot of the notable highlights and news from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2019 in San Diego! This year we welcomed 12,000 attendees from around the world who attended compelling talks from CNCF project maintainers, end users, and community members.

Our flagship North American event grew by more than 33% with 4,000 more attendees than last year’s event in Seattle. At the conference, CNCF announced a number of news items including:

• Its ever-growing ecosystem has hit over 500 member companies.
• A brand new CNCF job board.
• A slew of new platinum and gold members. 
• $200,000 in credits from Amazon Web Services. 

Turns out 12,000 seats is… a lot.#kubecon pic.twitter.com/Rp3TtOBYGo

— Jabe: Triune Spirit of XMas Past, Present, Future (@cyetain) November 19, 2019

#kubecon has come a long way since a handful of card tables outside of a ballroom. pic.twitter.com/72c1zZQa2f

— Chuck Svoboda (@Chuckernetes) November 19, 2019

This was the second and final event of Bryan Liles and Vicky Cheung as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-chairs! They took the stage to announce project updates and introduced a number of project maintainers from Helm, OpenPolicyAgent, Vitess, and more.

You can always count on @bryanl to bring a top notch sneaker game to #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/p8e5wDWozV

— Jorge Castro (@castrojo) November 19, 2019

The project announcements are legit my favorite part of #KubeCon. So unbelievably cool to watch these projects grow over time.

— Luc Perkins (@lucperkins) November 19, 2019

“The @CloudNativeFdn is more than just software …it’s about cultivating an ecosystem we can all work with” – @bryanl #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/ZWh4COZeOG

— Sam Coren 🛸 (@samcoren) November 19, 2019

During the opening keynotes, we heard from Director of Ecosystem, Cheryl Hung who discussed CNCF updates including reaching over 500 members, the new job board, and Kubernetes Community Days. She spoke alongside a number of our new platinum members. Erin Boyd from Red Hat and co-chair of SIG-Storage talked about what’s next for Rook and cloud-native data storage. Microsoft Azure’s Lachlan Evenson discussed confidential computing for Kubernetes and became the first to show YAML onstage at KubeCon. 

“Raise your hand if this is the first #KubeCon you’ve attended” @dankohn1 https://t.co/BUBsNtRIPd pic.twitter.com/gZxe8KbmnZ

— Aaron W ☁️ (@as_w) November 19, 2019

“#Kubernetes is the mining table of the DevOps ecosystem.” Loving the #Minecraft metaphor by @dankohn1 in his opening keynote at #KubeCon + #CloudNativeCon. A warm welcome to all the first time attendees too! (Which were majority of the 8000+ room!) #Day1 pic.twitter.com/jTwBIoz6Bb

— Priyanka Sharma (@pritianka) November 19, 2019

If you want to bring #kubecon home with you, check out https://t.co/63xJ2BD5s4! @oicheryl pic.twitter.com/yBlufAluuz

— Bridget Kromhout (@bridgetkromhout) November 19, 2019

Great to see @oicheryl introducing the newest @CloudNativeFdn Platinum members: @Arm , @NetApp, and @PaloAltoNtwks! #kubecon pic.twitter.com/1RjDmPjNUv

— David Williams (@DavWilliams) November 19, 2019

Love the CNCF updates, they always have great graphs and data 😍 Look at that CNCF member company growth! #kubecon2019 #KubeCon #CloudNativeCon @oicheryl pic.twitter.com/VLCVjrjWzA

— Kaslin Fields (@kaslinfields) November 19, 2019

“Since all great ideas come from coffee, let’s keep Kubernetes caffeinated” –@erinaboyd

Erin’s keynote reminded me of the Swedish practice Fika… great ideas come from community conversations over coffee.#KubeCon pic.twitter.com/Kw1nGjdnna

— Jabe: Triune Spirit of XMas Past, Present, Future (@cyetain) November 19, 2019

Continuing to Embrace Diversity in the Ecosystem

CNCF offered travel support to 115 diversity scholarship applicants, leveraging $177,500 in available funds. This generous scholarship funding was provided by Accenture, AspenMesh, CarGurus, Inc., Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Decipher Technology, Google Cloud, MUFG (Union Bank), Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, and VMware.

How seriously awesome is it that we have so many diversity scholarships, and more every year?! I love this community! #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/rIFvvlFeH1

— Noah Abrahams (@Noah_Abrahams) November 21, 2019

We also had a great time at the EmpowerUs lunch, Speed Networking + Mentoring Sessions and Diversity lunch and hack!

Check out some of the @comcast #KubeCon #CloudNativeCon team at the EmpowerUs lunch today. Believe it or not this is only half of us! Thank you all for coming out and for showing your support. I appreciate you! pic.twitter.com/fUt6CCYazG

— Shilla Saebi 🥑 (@ShillaSaebi) November 22, 2019

Hanging at the #Diversity Lunch at #KubeCon in #SanDiego. #inclusion #opensource #Kubernetes #community pic.twitter.com/Emgxciv731

— Jen Madriaga (@JenInnovate) November 20, 2019

Keep Cloud Native Well! 

We got to hang out with puppies and dogs during the Puppy Pawlooza! 

Best. KubeCon. Ever. 😍 pic.twitter.com/tYiQ9iTPzC

— Benjamin Elder (@BenTheElder) November 20, 2019

We also had a quiet room and chair massages, as well as the Open Sourcing Mental Health booth that was manned by volunteers aimed at making sure that everyone felt safe and comfortable.  

Conferences can be hard if you’re introverted or anxious, and #KubeCon is a pretty big, long conference. Make sure you actively think about self care. It’s ok to hide in your hotel room for a while or find a quiet space if you need to.

— Rich Burroughs (@richburroughs) November 19, 2019

Hey #KubeCon, be sure visit the @OSMIhelp booth! Take some time off to relax and chat about #MentalHealth!@mrmrcoleman @andrew_randall @CloudNativeFdn pic.twitter.com/5jh6xYccjp

— Chris Lentricchia (@IAmCippino) November 19, 2019

Volunteering together with @dankohn1 for the @OSMIhelp booth today #KubeCon pic.twitter.com/C33oKiMgGS

— Jordan Hamel (@jordanjohnhamel) November 20, 2019

Community Awards!

We announced the 2019 Community Awards Winners! A lot of well-deserving community members were shown appreciation with the Chop Wood Carry Water, Top Ambassador and Top Committer awards! 

Congratulations !!!! 🎊 thank you for your contributions!! 💕 pic.twitter.com/XKndSaZLHu

— Michelle Noorali (@michellenoorali) November 20, 2019

So proud of @karenhchu & @LachlanEvenson! We all appreciate them, and it’s great for them to be recognized by the #kubecon community! pic.twitter.com/nM4uU13D1i

— Bridget Kromhout (@bridgetkromhout) November 20, 2019

Congratulations to @fredbrancz for well deserved award! #KubeCon https://t.co/TEXrnbaE0S pic.twitter.com/bFGXepFPS9

— Lili (@LiliCosic) November 20, 2019

All Attendee Party!

Rain or shine, we had a great all attendee party at Gaslamp Quarter. The evening was jam-packed with music, lights, entertainment, food from dozens of restaurants. 

新蛋校友 old @Newegg “classmates” in the school of hard ecommerce in a pre-cloudnative world. Shout out to @CloudNativeFdn for putting on a a great all attendee party that rivaled re:play for the right mix of fun and community socializing. #KubeCon #CloudNativeCon #OpenTelemetry pic.twitter.com/d7q7h6XYBA

— Jordan Hamel (@jordanjohnhamel) November 21, 2019

All attendee party went wet 🙂 #Kubecon19 #CloudNativeCon #kubecon #kubernetes #containers pic.twitter.com/lIrzIOPCX9

— Boris KJ-Vallejo (@masterbokj) November 21, 2019

Keynote and Session Highlights

All presentations and videos are now available to watch. Here is how to find all the great content from the show:

• Keynotes, sessions and lightning talks can be found on the CNCF YouTube.
• Photos can be found on the CNCF Flickr.
• Presentations can be found on the Conference Event Schedule, click on the session and scroll to the bottom of the page to see the PDF of the presentation for download.

Save the Dates!

Register now for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, scheduled for March 30-April 2, 2020 at the RAI Amsterdam in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Register now for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2020, scheduled for July 28-30 at the Shanghai Expo Centre, Shanghai, China

Save the date for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2020, scheduled for November 17-20, 2020, in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Guest blog by Pankaj Gupta from Citrix 

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon San Diego 2019 was the place to take stock and ponder the progress being made with Kubernetes. It was also the place to learn the art of possibilities with Kubernetes – the new paradigm of building applications for faster release cycles, modularity, and portability. Unsurprisingly, it was being driven by the many Kubernetes Knights – who, clad in the armor plating of their service meshes, are charging forward with great speed and agility, lancing their way through everything we thought possible, scaling the towers and breaking down the walls of the castle as they press forward on their microservices crusade.   

How far Knights have taken Kubernetes can be summed up by the following key data points from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA ’19.

160,000 pods scale in production @Ebay

Ebay now has a staggering 160,000 pods in production spread across more than 60 clusters. This is an enormous number of microservice instances. And they are not alone. Several enterprises report tens of thousands of nodes in their environments – Nordstrom (60k); Yahoo (36K); Lyft (25k). This sort of hyperscale deployment was once only the purview of the largest public cloud providers and now the enterprise is adopting it to deliver consumer services. 

What a long way we’ve come in 5 short years of Kubernetes. It is truly inspirational to see that the promise of microservices as a highly scalable architecture is here today and growing strong. Imagine what scale will be possible next?

1 million new containers a day @Uber

One million new containers in batches are launched every day at Uber – sometimes at the rate of 1,000 per second.  This is a mind-boggling number of new containers. To manage and run this number of containers is amazing but to start them en masse is breathtaking and perfectly illustrates the extreme ephemeral nature of microservices at scale. 

To launch this many containers on demand shows that the Kubernetes has matured and delivers the agility and velocity that customers require for large production environments. Moreover, while the sheer scale of launching 1 million pods is amazing, doing it repetitively is priceless and doing it every day without breaking anything is truly a state of nirvana. 

450 new pods in the blink of an eye @Uber

30 seconds is the time taken for Uber to launch 40,000 pods across 8,000 nodes with their optimization. That is ultrafast at scale. In the time it takes the human eye to blink (approx. 300 ms) it is possible to bring up 450 microservice instances. 

Once again, this stretches the boundaries of what was thought possible only a short while ago for autoscale and highlights the real-world velocity to respond to change. Of course, when you are dealing with the ephemeral nature of microservices at this ultrascale you have to make sure that the rest of your infrastructure can cope with this sort of change. Can yours?

100,000 sidecars for service mesh @Lyft

Lyft has 100,000 sidecars in its service meshes. This is huge and shows service mesh has arrived at scale. Offering great observability, granular traffic management, and enhanced security, it is not surprising that service mesh has emerged as the most sought after microservices architecture over the last 18 months. This level of deployment shows that service mesh has moved out of the realm of the aspirational into reality. It is not just real, but real at scale running production grade services. 

11,000 Walmart stores – Kubernetes moving to edge

This is the number of stores that Walmart will take Kubernetes to in the near future. The world’s largest retailer is shifting their microservices and service mesh to the edge, closer to the point of sale, to improve the customer experience. This bold shift to the edge is the biggest indicator that Kubernetes is mature enough to leave the data center and becoming hugely distributed. Next time you visit Walmart, look for containers in aisle K8s.

F-16 fighter jet soaring high with Kubernetes

The US Department of Defense has deployed microservices into the F-16 Fighter, one of the most advanced war planes in human history. Kubernetes has helped them to evolve their legacy, manual software processes and enabled them to deploy software faster and more reliably to bring new capabilities to the pilots quickly. Perhaps F-16s with Kubernetes should be called K-16s?

These data points highlight the power of Kubernetes and the velocity of innovation it can bring. The outstanding scalability that Kubernetes offers has to be matched by the accompanying infrastructure. Inspired by these scales, Citrix has recently tested that it’s possible to keep pace with the change events associated with a 50,000 pods creation across 1,000 nodes with a single instance of Citrix ADC VPX proxy to deliver applications. The tests illustrated that the Citrix ADC comfortably outpaced the speed of deployment and had a lot of spare capacity for growth. In reality, customers will use multiple instances of proxies like Citrix ADC to manage and scale their workloads to the extents discussed above, but Citrix just wanted to push limits to the extreme with a single proxy instance. 

The Kubernetes Knights have shown us what’s possible today and, in the spirit of chivalry are generously giving back to the community as they open source many of their advances. But, how far can Kubernetes go? Where will the next Kubernetes deployment be – an interplanetary spacecraft? Nobody really knows, but wait for KubeCon 2020.