Posted on May 15, 2018

With KubeCon now behind us, here’s a snapshot of what was accomplished at our most jam-packed show to date. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 had the largest attendance of any past CNCF event with more than 4,300 contributors, end users, vendors and developers from around the world gathering for over three days in Copenhagen, Denmark to further the education and adoption of cloud native computing, and share insights around this fast growing ecosystem.

The annual European event grew by three times last year’s event in Berlin. It was incredible to see the growth of contributors and projects vying to be part of the community. But most impressively was the growth in the End-User Community, which is now at 52, and spans across a number of industries including finance, healthcare, automotive, technology, government, insurance and more.

However, even with the massive growth in the End-User Community, it was apparent walking through the expo hall and overhearing conversations and the excitement about new projects that weren’t around just a little while ago, a sea of laptops covered in stickers and not a suit in site, that this is still very much a developer conference.

Once again, the conference co-chairs, Liz Rice and Kelsey Hightower, rocked the house in every way possible, from rockstar-level keynotes to curating an amazing list of speakers from companies like Adidas, Booking.com, Checkfront, eBay, Lyft, New York Times, Norwegian Tax Administration, Spotify and The Financial Times, covering emerging trends around serverless, hardware hacking, service mesh, machine learning and APIs of the future. They were essential in keeping this a true developer conference.

Welcoming diversity at KubeCon

While education and collaboration are vital to the future of the cloud native ecosystem, it is imperative to CNCF’s success that everyone in the community that wants to participate feels welcome to do so regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, race, ethnicity, age, religion or economic status.

To increase and encourage multiple perspectives, CNCF – aided with generous donations made by AWS, Google, Helm, Heptio and VMWare – offered 62 diversity and need-based registration scholarships.

We also partnered with Google and Heptio to host a diversity luncheon & program with engaging discussions focused on how to recruit more women + underrepresented groups into tech, the role of mentors and perceived gender biases around soft and hard skills in the workplace.

Two ladies talk in front of audience representing Google and Heptio for diversity lunch event

The May 1st EmpowHer Evening Event, sponsored by Google Cloud, gathered attendees to discuss ways to increase inclusivity in our fast-growing ecosystem, how to get involved with different cloud native projects, and network with others in the tech industry from around the globe.

The very first CNCF End-User Award

As mentioned earlier, the growth of the End-User Community has been tremendous and we can proudly say that CNCF has one of the largest end-user community membership of any open source foundation.

Members of the CNCF End-User Community have an official voice and the ability to help shape the future of the ecosystem. To recognize this rapidly growing community, we announced the first ever Top End-User Award. The recipient, Bloomberg, was chosen by its peers in recognition of major contributions to the cloud native ecosystem

It’s truly exciting to see how fast this community is growing. And in case you missed the massive job board at the show – the market is hiring!

Technical leadership

KubeCon was the center of a lot of exciting news being announced from the end-user, vendor and project communities, but we’d be remiss not to highlight some of the major technical announcements from the community, which help advance all projects and companies in the cloud native ecosystem.

Red Hat introduced the Operator Framework, an open source toolkit designed to manage Kubernetes native applications in a more effective, automated and scalable way.

To much excitement, the CNCF Serverless Working Group released version 0.1 of CloudEvents, which is an industry-wide project designed to ease serverless event and tooling interoperability. It’s expected to be proposed as a CNCF sandbox project in May.

Also, Google Cloud announced Stackdriver for Kubernetes monitoring, which will be available in production sometime in version Kubernetes 1.10. Google Cloud also announced it will be open sourcing gVisor, a sanboxed container runtime.

All Attendee Party at Tivoli Gardens

We’re also proud to say that our events team out did themselves with one of the all-time best All Attendee Party at the beautiful Tivoli Gardens. We ate. We drank. We continued conversations about Cloud Native, and some of us even went on rides!

Keynote and session highlights

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

“Last week at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen, we saw an open source community coming together, full of vim and vigor and radiating positive energy as it recognized its growing clout in the enterprise world.

The hotel and conference center were buzzing with conversation. Every corner and hallway, every bar stool in the hotel’s open lobby bar, at breakfast in the large breakfast room, by the many coffee machines scattered throughout the venue, and even throughout the city, people chatted, debated and discussed Kubernetes and the energy was palpable.” Ron Miller, TechCrunch

“That optimism was on display this week at the latest edition of a conference called KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The event drew… 4,300 other attendees from around the world.

CNCF says it now has 20 projects – including Kubernetes – in some stage of development. Just as critically, CNCF now counts every major cloud service provider as a member. Over the past 12 months, Dan Kohn, executive director of CNCF, said he has been surprised by how quickly industry partners, many of them cloud platform rivals, have bought into the movement and joined the foundation.” Chris O’Brien, VentureBeat

“Today, the furor over Kubernetes (and containers, generally) is loud, and rightly so: Containers mark a demonstrably better way to build applications, with Kubernetes the runaway leader for making it easy to manage those containers at scale.” Matt Assay, TechRepublic

“”I do think Kubernetes in particular has driven a level of consistency across the industry that we’ve never seen,” [Jason] McGee [CTO, IBM Cloud Platform]. “You literally can go to any public cloud now and all the on-premises environments and have a pretty high success rate at taking a workload and running it in another place.

While the workload movement that Kubernetes enables is not a live migration, that’s not necessarily what every organization needs or wants. What Kubernetes and the container ecosystem provide is a standard application packaging approach, though other things are still needed to fully enable portability, according to McGee.” Sean Kerner, eWeek

CNCF News

That’s a wrap!

Save the Dates!Register

now for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China 2018, scheduled for November 14 – 15 at the Shanghai Convention & Exhibition Center of International Sourcing, Shanghai, China.

Register now for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018, scheduled for December 11 – 13 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, Washington.