KubeCon NA 2024 wrap-up: Don’t miss these major CNCF projects’ news

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is a massive event that brings thousands of like-minded people together offline, creates and enhances endless networking connections between them and software projects, sparks new ideas, and drives versatile collaboration. Even for those not attending physically, KubeCon comes with lots of significant announcements about the CNCF ecosystem and everything related.

I’ve made this overview of the remarkable news unveiled during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024, which happened in Salt Lake City, Utah, last week. Please note it focuses strictly on the news and announcements rather than what has been going on around the booths, in-person communication, etc. Still, reading it should help the community stay informed about ongoing changes and trends in the vibrant Cloud Native world.

Projects’ maturity updates

As you probably know, CNCF projects are classified into three categories: Sandbox, Incubating, and Graduated, depending on their maturity. KubeCon NA 2024 anticipated substantial progress for some of them.

Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) became a Graduated project. It entered the CNCF Incubator exactly 3 years ago, in November 2021. Today, it has seen 3,700+ individual contributors from 400+ organisations.

cert-manager became a Graduated project, too. It was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in November 2020. As user research quoted in this announcement suggests, “86 percent of new production clusters are created with cert-manager,” which is spectacular.

This brings the overall number of the CNCF Graduated projects to 29. Find all of them here.

wasmCloud became an Incubating project. It was accepted to CNCF in July 2021, and today, it boasts 100+ regular contributors representing 73 companies.

As for less formal maturity updates highlighted during KubeCon NA 2024, I’d like to mention two more CNCF projects:

  1. Cilium got a project journey report. These reports are created for the graduated CNCF projects to tell their stories in numbers from their arrival at CNCF to the present day. You can find all previous project journey reports (there are 12 of them) here.
  2. Argo got a documentary movie called “Inside Argo: Automating the Future”. In this 32-minute video, you can learn the story of this CNCF project firsthand — namely, from the well-known representatives of Akuity, CNCF, CodeFresh by Octopus Deploy, Intuit, and Red Hat, actively involved in the Argo community.

New certifications

When software projects get their official certification programmes, their maturity is outlined, too. Therefore, mentioning three new project-specific certifications CNCF announced during KubeCon NA 2024 is essential.

Certified Backstage Associate (CBA) is a new certification dedicated to Backstage. It’s an online multiple-choice exam focused on dealing with standardised internal developer platforms (IDPs). It has an associate level (hence, multiple choice), similar to existing KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) and KCSA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Security Associate), as well as other project-specific certifications (e.g., PCA for Prometheus and CAPA for Argo).

You can already enrol for the CBA certification here today. The CNCF blog features an announcement of this last addition as well.

Two other certifications, OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) and Kyverno Certified Associate (KCA), are dedicated to OpenTelemetry and Kyverno, respectively. Both of them will be available by the end of this year. Find more information here:

CNCF also announced two other certifications, both related to platform engineering. They are called Certified Cloud Native Platform Associate (multiple-choice) and Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineer (hands-on exam). The Linux Foundation Training and Certification website will provide further updates on their availability.

Big software releases

Several CNCF projects announced their important updates during the conference.

Jaeger v2 (Graduated) was released, highlighting its new architecture based on the OpenTelemetry Collector framework. This announcement will tell you more about its design and new features. The relevant GitHub release (also referred to as v1.63.0) is here. You might also be interested in the “Distributed Tracing with Jaeger and OpenTelemetry” talk that was presented at the conference.

Jaeger v2 new architecture, which is similar to OpenTelemetry Collector with pipelines for receiving and processing telemetry and extensions to perform other functions

KubeVirt v1.4 (Incubating) brought network hotplug, common instance types, NUMA topology support, and GPU assignment to GA. Find more details in the announcement, GitHub release, and the “KubeVirt: Enhancements and the Road Ahead” talk.

Keycloak 26 (Incubating) introduced full support for organisations, TLS server certificates hot-reloading, persistent session storage, advanced high availability, and OpenTelemetry tracing. Here’s its announcement and GitHub release (note that v26.0.5 is already available).

Prometheus 3.0 (Graduated) was released with a new UI, Remote Write 2.0, native histograms, and better OpenTelemetry protocol support. Learn more in this announcement, GitHub release, and the “Celebrating Prometheus 3.0: A Deep Dive with the Maintainers” talk. Based on Reddit users’ feedback, this release was the most awaited by the community (it managed to get 300 upvotes and dozens of thousands of views in 24 hours!).

PromLens-style tree view in a Prometheus 3.0 new UI

Interestingly, Dapr 1.15 was announced but not released during KubeCon NA 2024. It’s scheduled for mid-December, and you can prepare for the upcoming changes by watching the “Dapr’s Road Ahead: GenAI APIs, Distributed Scheduling at Scale and What It Means for Your Platform” talk.

Another prominent news is Helm 4. While it’s far from being ready, the development process officially began during the conference. By the way, this KubeCon marked exactly 5 years since the Helm v3 release! The current plan is to release Helm 4 around the next KubeCon NA in November 2025. Find out what you should expect from it and what not in the “The Path to Helm 4” talk.

Helm v4 development timeline

New projects

The following news don’t cover existing CNCF projects, but they tell us something important about the future. During KubeCon NA 2024, numerous Open Source projects applied to join CNCF Sandbox.

First, Red Hat made a truly bold announcement. This company decided to contribute “a comprehensive set of container tools” to CNCF. Namely, this set includes:

  • Podman Container Tools (here is the corresponding CNCF Sandbox application request), which comprises:
    • Podman, a tool for managing OCI containers and pods;
    • Buildah, an OCI images builder;
    • Skopeo, a tool for working with remote image registries.
  • Podman Desktop, a graphical tool for developing on containers and Kubernetes. Sandbox request.
  • bootc, implementing in-place operating system updates using OCI container images. Sandbox request.
  • composefs, providing a flexible mechanism to support read-only mountable filesystem trees, stacking on top of an underlying Linux filesystem. Sandbox request.

The maintainers of these Open Source projects even made a short video called “Podman to be contributed to CNCF!” in which they announced this move and invited the Cloud Native community to contribute.

Another submission came from the Microsoft Azure Core Upstream team. A week before KubeCon, they announced Hyperlight, “an open-source Rust library you can use to execute small, embedded functions using hypervisor-based protection for each function call at scale.” During the conference, they submitted this new project to the CNCF Sandbox. You can learn more about it from the “Hyperlight: Process VMs” lightning talk presented during Cloud Native Rejekts, the b-side conference for KubeCon.

Lastly, AWS announced the release of kro (Kube Resource Orchestrator). This project aims to simplify the use of custom APIs and resources (CRDs) with Kubernetes. Find out more about it on GitHub. While this specific project is not formally related to the CNCF, the announcement was also made during KubeCon, and the tool is not locked to the AWS ecosystem (i.e., applies to any Kubernetes clusters).

Other notable KubeCon announcements

CNCF released its Technology Landscape Radar, which is dedicated to two topics: a) multicluster application management solutions and b) batch/AI/ML compute technologies. Particularly, it highlights the usage of Argo CD and Cilium for the former topic and Apache Airflow, CubeFS, Kubeflow, and Fluid for the latter. This report shares complete details on the matter.

Celebrating the community was another essential part of KubeCon NA 2024. The winners of the annual CNCF Community Awards were announced in several categories: Lifetime Achievement (a new one, which was awarded to Tim Hockin, a Kubernetes co-founder), Top Committer, Chop Wood Carry Water, CNCF Lorem Ipsum (previously Documentarian), TAGGIE, and Lift and Shift. The full list of winners is available in the CNCF announcement.

Adobe became another winner as it got the CNCF End User Award “in recognition of its dedication to the advancement of cloud native development and notable contributions to the ecosystem.” The employees of this company have made 5,000+ contributions to 46 CNCF projects, which is undoubtedly impressive. Adobe also developed a reference architecture for its IDP, built on top of the CNCF projects (including Kubernetes, Helm, Argo, and Backstage). You can see the fruits of sharing this architecture with a broader community on the Cloud Native Reference Architecture website.

Finally, I have to mention the rising challenge for the Cloud Native community many of us might not expected. As it was vividly announced during the conference opening remarks, patent trolls are becoming more active in attacking the CNCF projects. As you can see from this slide, the number of NPEs (Non-Practicing Entities) assertions against Cloud Native projects rises each year:

CNCF is here to protect the Open Source technologies from those NPEs. At the same time, the organisation launched the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge, a special bounty program welcoming everyone from the community to help save CNCF software from patent trolls by contributing so-called “prior art.” More details are available here.

I’d like to finish the wrap-up with these global CNCF & Kubernetes community numbers from the KubeCon opening keynote. As for today, we have:

  • 200+ projects;
  • 17+ millions of contributions;
  • 255 thousands of contributors from 193 countries.

Isn’t it thrilling to see how big the Cloud Native community has become? As the latest KubeCon reassures, it keeps going steadily. To get an even better feeling of this evolution, watch 300+ videos with talks from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2024 on the CNCF YouTube channel — yes, they are already available.

P.S. If you’re reading this article, you’re probably interested in discovering and/or analysing the trends of Cloud Native technologies’ adoption. Please consider joining the 2024 CNCF Annual Survey, which was just launched. It focuses on CNCF Incubating and Graduated projects and associated challenges. Its results will be available for everyone and benefit a worldwide community. Don’t hesitate to contribute to it here.

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