KubeCrash Fall 2024

Lisa-Marie Namphy, CNCF Ambassador, Director Developer Relations, Intuit; Danielle Cook, CNCF Ambassador, Co-chair CNCF Cartografos Group, VP StackGen

Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer, The New York Times

Devin Nance, Client Solution Architect, VMware; CNCF Blind and Visually Impaired WG member

Technology has become integral to modern life, but its impact on individuals with blindness or visual impairment has been particularly significant. For these individuals, assistive technologies empower them to navigate cities independently, participate fully in the workplace, and contribute meaningfully to society. Yet, public awareness of the profound impact of technology on people with disabilities is often limited.

The newly-founded CNCF Blind and Visually Impaired Working Group (BVIWG) aims to bridge this gap. It provides individuals with blindness or visual impairments a platform to exchange ideas and build a supportive network while raising awareness among the broader community, promoting inclusivity and accessibility in technology development.

Whitney Lee, CNCF Ambassador

Adel Zaalouk, CNCF Cloud Native AI WG Technical Lead; Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

In this lightning talk, we'll explore the CNCF AI Working Group's efforts to streamline the integration of artificial intelligence within cloud native ecosystems. Learn about key initiatives and activities within the group. Whether you're new to AI or a cloud-native veteran, this talk will provide a quick overview of how the CNCF is driving innovation at the intersection of AI and cloud-native computing.

Avni Sharma, Senior Product Manager, Intuit Developer Platform; Todd Ekenstam, Principal Software Engineer, Intuit Developer Platform

After running 3,000+ microservices and monoliths on Kubernetes for the last four years, Intuit is building its next-generation AI-native paved-road platform that will enable its developers to define app intent, and the platform will take care of the rest, thereby alleviating the developers from the K8s cognitive overload. We will share our end-user perspective on using Kubernetes and why abstracting networking and compute infrastructure and utilizing AI-powered application autoscaling will enable developers to focus more on what they excel at: writing code. This improves platform maturity and provides developers with an internal developer platform to deliver a delightful developer experience. Attending this talk will teach you how open-source projects, such as Open Application Model, Istio, Karpenter, Argo Rollouts, and Numalogic/Numaflow, can be integrated and extended to build your AI-native application platform, thereby paving a path for increasing our developer velocity by 25%.

Flynn, Linkerd Tech Evangelist, Buoyant

“Platform engineering” tends to bring to mind an army of highly-technical people running around spending their every waking hour carefully tending to the platform. We get this sense that “the platform” is this highly-tuned, finicky, fragile thing just waiting to crash, that needs all these very serious people to keep it running.

Suppose it weren’t like that? Suppose, instead, that we could tie together some open-source projects in a solid, robust way so that they just worked, and once they were working we could trust them to keep working.

Let’s take a look at that world. We’ll start with Linkerd running on k3s: that gives us a rock solid substrate for computation with zero-trust security protecting everything we do and observability and reliability for our entire application. We’ll layer on ArgoCD for progressive deployment and GitOps to bring stability to engineering our application, and we’ll show how to use everything together to build a straightforward, robust, scalable developer environment that doesn’t get in your way… no army required!

Jason Dobies, Director Edge Engineering, SUSE; William Rizzo, Lead Architect Consultant, SUSE

Deploying software to the edge presents unique challenges due to a diverse array of configurations, devices, network conditions, and environmental factors. Whether it's deploying nodes in telecom sites, IoT devices in remote locations, or edge servers in factories, ensuring the reliability and security of these deployments is paramount. These unique aspects of edge computing highlight the need for a robust and thorough platform engineering approach to ensure the ongoing interoperability of an edge deployment’s disparate components.

In this session, we will summarize the role that edge validation and CI/CD toolchains play to ensure compatibility and maintain consistency across distributed edge infrastructures to address challenges such as limited bandwidth, intermittent connectivity, varying compute capabilities and stringent security requirements and discuss emerging practices, trends and technologies.

Jon Dodkins, Head of Platform, Birdie; Guy Menahem, Co-Founder of The Platformers Community; Simon Forster, Independent Technical Architect, Financial Services, Jason Johl, Staff Product Development, Intuit; Mey Beisaron, Senior Platform Engineer, Forter

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Platform engineering unlocks significant opportunities for organizations, but the journey is not without its challenges. In this end user panel discussion, industry leaders will share real-world experiences and explore the common pitfalls that end users encounter as they adopt new technologies, train teams, and scale their operations. Join us to learn practical tips and strategies for steering clear of the most costly platform engineering mistakes, ensuring a smoother and more successful implementation.

Stevie Caldwell, Senior Engineering Technical Lead, Fairwinds; Brian Bensky, SRE, Fairwinds

Fairwinds SREs Stevie Caldwell and Brian Bensky will present essential strategies for optimizing Kubernetes to achieve peak performance and scalability. They’ll cover key areas such as resource allocation, efficient cluster management, and fine-tuning your Kubernetes environment to handle high-demand workloads. The talk will also explore best practices for auto-scaling, monitoring, and troubleshooting within Kubernetes clusters. Attendees will gain actionable insights on how to streamline their Kubernetes deployments, reduce costs, and improve the overall reliability of their containerized applications, ensuring their infrastructure can scale effortlessly with growing demands.

Lauren Rother, VP of Product, StackGen; Cesar Rodriguez, VP of Engineering, StackGen

In this talk, we will explore the process of auto-generating Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and seamlessly integrating it into ArgoCD for continuous deployment. Lauren Rother and Cesar Rodrgiez will discuss the iimportance of maintaining consistent and reproducible infrastructure environments and highlight tools and techniques that enable the automatic generation of IaC, reducing the manual effort and potential for errors. The focus will be on how these auto-generated configurations can be directly integrated with ArgoCD to ensure that infrastructure changes are automatically and consistently deployed across environments.

Hazel Weakly, Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm

Feature flags are amazing for derisking code and separating deployments from releases! However, ironically, for all of the enablement platform engineers do to build continuous delivery, our own infrastructure rarely gets to benefit. But! What if you could put Feature Flags into ArgoCD? What would that look like? How would it work?
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Join Hazel in a fast paced talk as she goes over how feature flags might work for infrastructure and how one can integrate them into ArgoCD. We'll demonstrate this with a proof of concept of tying together a feature flag for the frontend, backend, and infrastructure in a seamless way.

Katie Lamkin-Fulsher, Senior Product Manager, Platform and Open Source at Intuit

In the fast-paced world of software development, build failures can significantly impede productivity, leading to frustrating bottlenecks and delays. At Intuit, our developers faced this challenge head-on, spending time troubleshooting build issues on our Jenkins platform. We introduced a solution that leverages the power of generative AI to revolutionize the build debugging process.

This talk will unveil a cutting-edge tool that harnesses gen AI to provide intelligent summaries of build failures, empowering developers to pinpoint root causes rapidly. By analyzing complex build logs and distilling them into concise, human-readable insights, this tool has slashed troubleshooting time by 60%, enabling our developers to iterate faster on code changes and pipeline modifications.

Join us as we explore gen AI's transformative potential in build automation, unlocking new levels of developer productivity, and paving the way for more efficient and collaborative software development practices.

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Lisa-Marie Namphy, CNCF Ambassador, Director Developer Relations, Intuit; Danielle Cook, CNCF Ambassador, Co-chair CNCF Cartografos Group, VP StackGen

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