In late Sep 2023, we had the opportunity to speak, present and participate at DevOpsCon 2023 in New York City. In this blog, we will briefly describe what we presented at the conference and our observations about the event itself.
DevOpsCon is a global conference focused on CI/CD, Kubernetes Ecosystem, Agile & Lean Business. If you live outside the United States, you may want to attend one of their conferences in other cities such as Munich, Singapore, London and Berlin.
This year's conference in New York was held at the Marriott near Brooklyn Bridge which is a fantastic location, literally right across from the Brooklyn Bridge and NYU Engineering.
Our goals at this conference were very simple
- Educate the attendees about various approaches for secure access to Kubernetes clusters and their pros/cons.
Our Presentation
Secure developer and operator access to Kubernetes clusters is a big deal for organizations. Paralus, an open source project has been a major contributor of innovative solutions to address this challenge.
Teams that ignore this issue or handle this poorly not only have to deal with major security and compliance issues, but also land up significantly impacting their application developer velocity.
Here is the title of our presentation and we also had a live demonstration to help the attendees understand how this worked behind the scenes.
Learnings
We also had the opportunity to meet and speak with many of the attendees who were at the conference. Most of the attendees were from the greater NY metro area and some were from Boston and the DC area. There were three common themes that bubbled up constantly.
Kubernetes - Part of a larger infrastructure
Most had Kubernetes resident applications leveraging managed services (e.g. RDS managed database etc.) in cloud providers. They said they were struggling with creation and ongoing management of these complex environments.
Acute need for developer self-service
Developers seem to be struggling with lack of self service for test beds and other environments. This said this was impacting their development velocity.
Generative AI
Everyone seems to be talking about it. But, they are also struggling to get started and seem to be unsure where to apply it first in their applications. Most were of the opinion that the first and logical use case would that of a co-pilot.
Conclusion
Organizations looking for a standalone, open source alternative can use Paralus. This is a CNCF project sponsored and maintained by the Rafay Team.
The event organizers will provide a live stream of my presentation and live demo. This should be available to everyone very soon.
