What happens when you send two of your colleagues to attend two of the most exciting events in the cloud-native world? You get a lot of insights, learnings, and fun stories to share. That’s what happened when Philip Welz and Nico Meisenzahl traveled from Germany to the US and France to join the MVP Summit in Seattle and the KubeCon EU in Paris last month within two weeks. In this post, we will give you a glimpse of their journey and the highlights they picked from the 153 posts they shared in our internal “MVP Summit & KubeCon diary” thread.

Also, when you’re traveling around the world for two weeks and attending two major conferences, there’s a good chance you’ll get sick – which is why this post arrives a little late. 😉

MVP Summit

Our first destination of our two-week journey was Seattle, or more precisely, the Microsoft HQ in Redmond. As the whole MVP Summit is fully under NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) we can’t share any details. But there is a bright future ahead of us! Microsoft is planning some great things in the space of AI, Azure Kubernetes Service, and other areas.

In addition to attending sessions of the Product Groups, we were also able to schedule some 1-1 meetings with the AKS Engineers and Product Managers to provide feedback and discuss some future topics and ideas.

Apart from the official agenda, we had a lot of fun (and parties) with our fellow MVP colleagues. 🎉

After that, we headed to Paris for KubeCon. However, KubeCon is not just a single event. It’s rather a week with many other events happening around it. Here is a brief summary of the whole week: Bonjour!

Cloud Native Rejekts

Cloud Native Rejekts is the place to be prior KubeCon! It’s an awesome community event, mainly driven by Microsoft Azure, giving a second chance to the many wonderful, but rejected, talks from KubeCon. This year Rejekts took place in an e-sport location and had about 200 people from the community joining to hear some amazing talks and have a conversation – with quality coffee always accessible. ☕

Azure Day with Kubernetes

The must-attend event for anyone in the Azure and Azure Kubernetes Service ecosystem. It is the perfect opportunity to talk to AKS product managers and engineers. This year, the event was held at a location befitting its status 😉. Azure Day with Kubernetes is also the day of new features and announcements. Here you can find a summary of the most important ones:

• Retina is a cloud-agnostic, open-source Kubernetes Network Observability platform that helps with DevOps, SecOps, and compliance use cases. It provides a centralized hub for monitoring application and network health and security.
• Kubernetes AI Toolchain Operator (KAITO) add-on for AKS allows running specialized machine learning workloads like large language models (LLMs) on AKS more cost-effectively and with less manual configuration.
• Copacetic, a CLI tool for directly patching container images using reports from vulnerability scanners, is being integrated into Azure Container Registry.
• Artifact sync – automatically pulls new images into your Azure Container Registry.
• AKS is getting Container image integrity support for Notary and cosign by sigstore (coming soon).
• AKS IMDS restriction for higher security without the need for network policies.
• Disable SSH on AKS nodes to prevent user access.
• Bootstrap completely network-isolated clusters without any egress requirements.
• Kernel live patching & Container optimized hosts with Azure Linux Nodes.
• AKS Control plane metrics via managed Prometheus with pre-configured Grafana dashboards.
• PromQL-based metrics explorer integrated into the Azure Portal.
• Recommend AKS alerts powered by AI & dynamic AI-powered alert thresholds to reduce noise
• Open-Source Fleet Workload Placement Scheduling and Override powering Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager got open-sourced.
• Azure CNI static block IP allocation supports optimized scalability by allowing direct Pod IP access via VNet IPs, allocating IPs from one subnet to nodes and CIDR blocks to pods from another subnet for scalable network management.
• A long list of preview features went GA – some of them:
  • Trusted launch support
  • Kubernetes 1.29 support
  • Deployment safeguards
  • Cost analysis add-on for AKS
  • Azure CNI overlay dual stack Support
  • AKS support for 5K Node limit by default for standard tier clusters

KubeCon & CloudNativeCon EU

This year KubeCon EU was the biggest ever, with more than 12,000 attendees joining on-site in Paris from all over the world. It showed the growing popularity and adoption of all CNCF projects as the leading platform for cloud-native applications.

Here are our insights and views from the three days of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon:

• It was time to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Kubernetes! 🎉
• Artificial intelligence (AI) was a prominent theme throughout the whole conference, with many keynotes and sessions dedicated to exploring how Kubernetes can enable and support AI workloads. AI was everywhere!
• The FluxCD project’s future was a significant discussion point before KubeCon. Thankfully, with the backing of the CNCF, numerous companies declared their support for Flux, as announced on the first day.
• Internal developer platforms (IDPs) are a thing! IDPs were widely discussed and the technology is now ready to be used. IDPs aim to provide a consistent, standardized, and self-service experience for developers while reducing the complexity and overhead of managing infrastructure.
• WebAssembly (WASM) was another hot topic, as it promises to bring faster, safer, and more portable code execution. Running WASM workload on Kubernetes majors, especially with the announced open source project SpinKube. The rising star!
• Sustainability was a recurring theme, as the cloud-native community is becoming more aware and concerned about the environmental and social impact of their technologies.
• Security stays important but gets less attention than the years before. Maybe it is just time to implement the tooling available. 🔥

Furthermore, our colleague Nico joined a talk on “Cilium – Connecting, Observing, and Securing Service Mesh and Beyond with eBPF” as part of the Cilium Maintainer Track. He talked about “Cilium in the wild” where he highlighted three different Cilium use cases:

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Some more impressions from KubeCon:

Overall, the two-week conference trip was a great experience, but also a bit exhausting. 😉 If you would like to find out more details or get started with the implementation, please feel free to contact us! Also, don’t miss to follow our blog for more cloud-native insights!