KubeCon Barcelona: News & Upbound Updates

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June 4, 2019

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Rob Clark

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The Upbound team is fresh back from a busy show season in Barcelona, where we gave talks and exhibited at three conferences, including the largest KubeCon EMEA yet with 7,700 attendees; we really appreciate the energy and engagement in our projects from the broad cloud native and open source communities.

Our week started with the big news of Upbound’s partnership with GitLab. Both companies were pleased to announce and demonstrate Crossplane composing fully-managed services in Kubernetes: deploying the full GitLab app stack into multiple clouds. You can read the announcement from the New Stack and on GitLab, or watch the demo and learn more on the Crossplane blog.

The idea of extending the Kubernetes API to compose managed service dependencies resonated well with the audience at KubeCon, a major milestone towards building a Multicloud control plane. We had over 200 people join us at our MultiCloud event that we co-hosted with GitLab, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, and CockroachLabs. A big theme of the conference was about building on the solid foundation and ecosystem that has been established, and specifically rethinking APIs and using Kubernetes as a ‘cloud native platform for building platforms’. Indeed, Crossplane was highlighted as a prime example of using the Kubernetes API to expose resources outside of a cluster (databases, for example); if you can create objects in your cluster, you can have any resource there that you like. You can check out Bryan Liles’ keynote talk on this topic here:

But back to the beginning. We kicked off the week at Cephalocon, where the Rook 1.0 release and its support for Ceph Nautilus was the talk of the show. There are now over 45M downloads (and counting!) of the project, and an ever growing ecosystem of supported storage services. It was great to hear about all the interesting businesses and use cases that look to Rook for Cloud Native storage, from FinTech to fast-food; and how it is increasingly relied upon in production scenarios at scale. Check out the all-new rook.io website and detailed news on the blog.

Jared hosted a number of talks both at Kubecon and Cloud Native Storage Day, where a consistent theme was dealing with hybrid on and off premise environments and the need to address Cloud Native storage and portable workload issues.

All of our talks were very well attended, none more so than Illya’s talk on Operators, which had to be relocated at the last minute to a larger space for over 700 attendees, one of the most popular sessions at the conference:

We’re enthusiastic about how our projects integrate with the maturing Cloud Native ecosystem, and take the complexity out of authoring workloads that can actively use managed services from multiple cloud providers. If you’d like to keep in touch and learn more, we hope that you’ll engage with us in some way. You can listen to Bassam discussing Crossplane and the cloud ecosystem on the the Software Engineering Daily podcast, and connect with Upbound and our projects below. And, if you’re ready for a new challenge and want to be part of the next wave of cloud computing, we’re hiring!

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