KubeCon EU 2024: Crossplane Highlights and Key Technical Takeaways

This year’s KubeCon Europe, held in the vibrant city of Paris, was an amazing event with topics showcasing the future trajectory of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies.

We were excited to connect with the community at the Crossplane project and Upbound booths. Seeing all the interest and questions and the increasing adoption of Crossplane was an amazing experience.

My highlight of the event was meeting the long-term contributors and newcomers to the project at the Crossplane booth and having great conversations. More about it later in the recap.

Let’s dive into the key takeaways, spotlight technologies, and memorable moments from KubeCon 2024.

Technologies and Trends

AI: The New Frontier in the Kubernetes Ecosystem

AI is becoming increasingly important in the cloud-native ecosystem. Almost all the keynotes referenced artificial intelligence and machine learning in some way. The intersection of AI and Kubernetes is a hot topic, with sessions exploring new ways of provisioning resources and increasing automation and productivity through AI-driven insights.

As AI enhances the efficiency and speed of software development within CNCF projects, these projects also aim to support and improve AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML) processes. This cycle creates a healthy ecosystem and thus standardization of AI tooling and platforms.

Crossplane for example helps provision the cloud infrastructure needed for AI/ML workloads. Read more about it in this blog or watch a webinar.

The interesting part about the AI focus was the increased emphasis on foundational technologies such as Kubernetes and how they are evolving to support AI workloads and infrastructure. After all, AI is just another workload that needs to be provisioned and managed.

A few interesting AI related talks:

• Running GPU workloads on Kubernetes
• Optimizing Performance and Sustainability for AI
• How to build ML infrastructure with CNCF Projects

Observability: Maturing and Expanding

Observability projects such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Jaeger and more show strong signs of maturity and adoption. The community is converging on common standards for metrics, tracing and logging.

Crossplane kicked off an initiative to add higher-level metrics.

I enjoyed the workshop about setting up OpenTelemetry tracking and observing the metrics and traces with Jaeger. If you are interested in the workshop, you can find the repository here.

Crossplane makes it easy to deploy an observability stack on Kubernetes using a dedicated configuration.

Platform Engineering: Stealing the Spotlight

Platform engineering generated a lot of buzz at KubeCon 2024. In the opening Keynote of Platform Engineering Day, our CEO Bassam Tabbara revealed the best-kept secret in the platform engineering space.

An interesting panel discussion between Platform Engineering practitioners showed how the infrastructure provisioning space has been affected by recent events and has evolved over the years. The panelists shared their experiences and hopes for the future of the industry. One key takeaway was that, as the space is still growing and standards are still being defined, there is an increasing need for interloper ability between tools and platforms.

Crossplane was front and center in the platform engineering discussions. Here are a few highlights:

• Interview with Jared Watts, Founding Engineer at Upbound, to learn more about the project. Interview with Jared Watts about Crossplane - ITQ Live at KubeCon 2024
• Viktor Farcic, Developer Advocate at Upbound, was signing his new book Crossplane: The Cloud Native Control Plane at the Upbound booth. The book is a comprehensive guide to Crossplane and how to use it to manage cloud infrastructure.

• Kubernetes can be used to build platforms that provision and manage infrastructure, but is it the right tool for the job? This is a thought-provoking question that was explored in the talk Why Kubernetes Is Inappropriate for Platforms, and How to Make It Better. The talk, co-presented by Stefan Schimanski, Senior Principal Engineer at Upbound, was an exploration of the limitations of Kubernetes as a platform and how to overcome them to build a more robust and flexible platform that is multi-cloud and multi-tenant.
• The talk from Philippe Scorsolini, Senior Software Engineer at Upbound, about E2E testing of Crossplane was a real treat. We learned how to use the Kubernetes e2e-framework for testing Crossplane and what the benefits of doing so are.
• Jared and Philippe gave an excellent talk about Crossplane Intro and Deep Dive - the Cloud Native Control Plane Framework; a must-watch for anyone interested in Crossplane.
• Viktor talked about Crossplane Observability and Traceability for Effective Multi-Cloud Management

Personal Highlights and Reflections

KubeCon 2024 was a whirlwind of learning, networking, and inspiration. My highlight was connecting with the community and learning about their experiences, challenges, and successes with Crossplane. One very interesting conversation stood out to me, where a user shared how they are concerned with testing their infrastructure provisioning code. We discussed various testing strategies and how to improve the testing story for their specific use case.

What was amazing about this interaction was the level of care that went into the testing strategy and how they are looking to improve it. Treating infrastructure no different than the application code with increasing test coverage and quality.

Another very popular question was how to migrate from Terraform to Crossplane. We have some great resources that could help you with that here, particularly this one-page overview explaining how to optimize Terraform with Crossplane.

I visited the Dagger booth and had a great conversation with the maintainers, including a demo of how to use Dagger to assemble a complex application. This is something I will be playing with soon.

It was a pleasure to see projects such as Flux, Backstage, and many more with a strong presence at KubeCon. Discussing the future of the projects and how they are evolving was a great experience.

Finally, visiting the Tailscale booth and learning about their new features reminded me how easy it is to use their product to ssh into my Mac from my Linux box and run more demanding workloads on it.

Upbound co-hosted an Open Source Soiree Party with our friends from Nirmata and Akuity. The party was a great success, with many people attending, and the clear highlight was the Crossplane-themed macarons.