KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2017 wrap-up

• By Neil McAllister

It was a jam-packed and eventful week at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017 last week. In all, 4,100 attendees descended on Austin to talk all things Kubernetes and cloud-native, and CoreOS was front and center as a Diamond Sponsor of the event. Check out our blog post from Wednesday where we recap some of the Day 1 highlights.

The week's proceedings coincided with our announcement of Tectonic 1.8, the new version of our enterprise Kubernetes platform that will ship later this month featuring industry-first Open Cloud Services. Throughout the three days of the conference, we had lots of stimulating discussions with customers looking to adopt Kubernetes securely and efficiently.

Celebrating community

In an evening session on Wednesday, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced this year's Community Award winners, which reward community members, developers, and advocates who have made significant contributions to the cloud native ecosystem. CoreOS's Brandon Philips (@BrandonPhilips) and Dan Gillespie (@ethernetdan) were both honored to receive awards in the new "Chop Wood/Carry Water" category for all-around participation across the ecosystem.

Congratulations to all those honored in this year's CNCF Community Awards, including CoreOS's Brandon Philips and Dan Gillespie.

Thursday highlights

Thursday got off to a sweet start with a pancake breakfast hosted by The New Stack and a panel discussion that included CoreOS's Erica Von Buelow. Among the takeaways of the talk were that we have definitely entered the age of applications built on Kubernetes, with service meshes, framework as a service (FaaS), and serverless computing being big topics among enterprise customers.

On the other hand, it was clear from the discussion that barriers still exist that prevent some organizations from adopting Kubernetes. Regulatory compliance is one, particularly for financial firms and government contracts. But was also apparent that the Kubernetes community needs to do more to encourage growth of a broader and more diverse ecosystem, particularly among geographically dispersed participants.

Once the pancake plates were cleared, the Day 2 crowd was treated to keynotes from Google's Kelsey Hightower, Chen Goldberg, and Anthony Yeh. Red Hat's Clayton Coleman was on hand to discuss making containers "boring," yet attendees perked right up again when HBO's Illya Chekrygin and Zihao Yu came onstage to discuss how the cable network used Kubernetes to stream Season 7 of its hit series Game of Thrones. Rounding out the morning's proceedings were talks by Tigera's Spike Curtis and Heptio CEO and Kubernetes founder Craig McLuckie. You can browse the event's full schedule here.

CoreOS takes the stage

KubeCon was also the CoreOS team's time to shine. In addition to our team of experts in attendance at KubeCon – ranging from our founders who sit on the CNCF governing board, to engineers involved with leading various projects and Kubernetes SIG Groups – CoreOS hosted a number of talks and panels throughout the show, including:

CoreOS CTO Brandon Philips talked about raising the conversation from container orchestration to application lifecycle management.

To hear more about managing apps on Kubernetes with the new Open Cloud Services that will ship with Tectonic 1.8, sign up for a live webinar with CoreOS's Rob Szumski on December 20 at 10:00 a.m. PT. The talk will also be available on demand after the live portion concludes.

Sign Up Free webinar

Into 2018 and beyond

In all, KubeCon was another busy and informative event from CNCF and its organizers. It was especially exciting to see how rapidly the community has grown, with interest in cloud-native technologies already surpassing all expectations.

What do we expect the New Year will bring? CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi has a few ideas about that. Suffice it to say, however, that the strong turnout and presentations at this year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America demonstrated once again the huge energy and enthusiasm around the Kubernetes and containerization ecosystem, and we see no signs of those forces waning.

We look forward to seeing more of you at future events throughout the year. Subscribe to this blog to stay up to date with all CoreOS events, meetups, and appearances as we head into 2018 and onward.