After those three days at KubeCon, we’ve seen and heard a lot of interesting ideas. You can read about our first day here, about our second day there, and about our third day there. If we had to do a short recap, here are the points we would list.

First of all “Cloud native” seems to be the buzzword of the year. Not just cloud anymore, but cloud native! What does it mean? Instead of just deploying your application to the cloud, it should fully use the cloud.

Then, Kubernetes. It is a mature solution in itself. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt left about that. Even if this is the case with Kubernetes, the majority of the ecosystem around it is not mature yet, and that’s a bit of a problem. We saw a lot of tools and some that were presented during talks are still WIP and some demos completely failed. If you’re surfing the Kubernetes wave, please be careful with the tools you choose, and don’t loose yourself adopting a fancy/non-working tool that will bring your infrastructure down. Continue to master what you do without being trapped by the hype brought by certain solutions.

Deployment, CI and CD. Well, not so much. There are a few projects out there and several different approaches (kubectl apply, a bit of Jenkins around it, deployments from inside the cluster, several black boxes like CodeFresh…), but not one thing that everyone is doing/using. We are currently looking at Jenkins-X and hope we’ll be able to build our CI/CD stack using it.

For monitoring, use Prometheus. It’s pretty much what everyone is using.

Service mesh. One of the big things this year, everybody is talking about it, Istio seems to be taking the lead. It’s still moving fast, though and not enough people are truly mastering this in a production setup.

Development environment. Well, “LOL” would do it maybe. This is clearly not a priority yet. Some teams and projects (like Telepresence) have started working on this, but there is still road ahead.

GitOps. Everybody is going this way. Versioning, of course. But also using Git events to pilot things.

Things are beginning to move on the security side of things. Companies are starting to notice there is work to be done, startups are appearing with different services.

And, finally, multi-clusters. We felt a few people are using multi-cluster, but it’s often done by hand. That doesn’t seem mature at all. Maybe a subject we’ll hear more about in the future?

In any case, we had a really great time during this KubeCon in Copenhagen, we saw many interesting talks and discussed with lots of people!