OpsGuru is all set for KubeCon San Diego 2019

For the 3rd year in a row, the OpsGuru team are going to KubeCon North America in San Diego. This will be the second year for myself, but ever since attending my first KubeCon last year, I have been looking forward to another KubeCon North America. It has become my favourite conference because KubeCon and CNCFCon is such a vibrant congregation of a diverse set of cloud-native technologies. As technologies evolve so quickly, it is important to catch up with the different use cases, to understand how end-users envision leveraging the different tools and to capture the different challenges that will engender further evolution of the landscape.

Because of OpsGuru’s heavy commitment and contribution to the open-source community, a number of OpsGuru’s team members are going to San Diego to learn and share first hand the advents in the CNCF landscape. From a few years ago where Kubernetes takes the limelight of the CNCF landscape, we are seeing the continuous fervent interest in other cloud-native technologies. On top of Kubernetes, the OpsGuru team is also excited in pursuing the events on the following disciplines.

Service Mesh

Service mesh has undoubtedly become an even hotter topic than last year. It is not an accident that Istio receives a lot of press these days. As microservices get more complex and the deploying targets spread across different providers and hybrid environments, a separate control plane to manage the service-to-service communication becomes increasingly necessary. While Kubernetes is the trusted solution for scheduling containers and workloads, a scalable service management plane is needed to truly realise the value of containerised infrastructure. Next week is, in fact, the inaugural ServiceMeshCon, we are excited to see how the community adopts and develops the service layer!

Observability

Along the same vein, while deploying Kubernetes has become increasingly easy because of the stability of the project and the different managed Kubernetes services, being able to leverage the orchestration platform and operating on it is a different discipline. #Day2Ops is OpsGuru’s core belief as scalable and sustainable operations are even more important than the initial architecture for long-term success. We place a lot of emphasis on observability stack because sustainable operations cannot be done without robust observability support. The forerunner of observability stack so far is Prometheus, but we are also excited to catch up with the progress of the OpenTelemetry project that is the result of merging OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects last year.

Kubeflow / Machine Learning on Kubernetes

Most people understand the benefits of machine learning. However, the entry barrier to sustainable machine learning remains high. The principle of #MLOps -- the application of DevOps tenets to data science -- is attractive; however, making the tooling available, fostering collaboration between the different stakeholders in machine learning is still a challenge.

We have been deploying Kubeflow in our client projects because running data processing pipelines and machine learning workflows on Kubernetes makes so much sense from the resource management and ecosystem perspective. We are ready to get more in-depth in the Kubeflow, to learn and contribute to the projects.

Yay to Cloud-native Open Source Community

The OpsGuru team is naturally interested in deep-diving into technologies because of our engineering background. But one major goal of going to KubeCon is to immerse ourselves in the community and have scintillating exchanges with contributors, end-user and prospective adopters. After all, technologies are only valuable if we can see them employed in solving real-world problems. If you are going to KubeCon San Diego and are interested in meeting the OpsGuru team and brainstorming a solution employing the myriad of technologies, please DM us on our Twitter handle @OpsGuruTeam, or contact us at [email protected]. Even if you cannot make it to KubeCon this year, we are always around to chat with you through both channels. We look forward to hearing from you!