At this year’s KubeCon EU 2021, some things were the same — it was still virtual which meant it attracted a huge turnout of a more broadly international audience — and some things were different — like that almost everyone’s bought into Kubernetes and cloud native architecture, it’s now just how they use it. Another KubeCon tradition, The New Stack hosted a live pancake breakfast to reflect on the maturity of Kubernetes particularly around data persistence and storage.

Our Publisher Alex Williams hosted this year’s very early discussion (at least for him) with Itzik Reich, VP of technologists, and Nivas Iyer, senior principal product manager, both at Dell Technologies, along with pancakes regular Cheryl Hung, VP of ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The adoption of GitOps, improvements to APIs and the increasing reach of virtual machine language WebAssembly (Wasm) are influencing the developer experience, and ultimately, how DevOps teams reach their application-deployment and -management goals. These were among the more talked-about themes at Cloud Native Computing Foundation KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU

Putting it all into context, Alex Williams, founder and publisher, and Joab Jackson, managing editor, of The New Stack, are the hosts of this The New Stack Makers podcast. The featured guests are Bryan Liles, principal engineer, VMware and Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem, CNCF.

A major part of improving developer velocity is about getting the most out of an observability platform. While that is a commonly held assumption, this best practice is also a far-reaching goal for many DevOps teams.

Hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, this The New Stack Makers — podcast recorded during a virtual pancake breakfast — features a discussion on improving observability for developers. The featured guests were Zain Asgar, general manager, Pixie and New Relic open source and CEO and co-founder of Pixie Labs, Roopak Venkatakrishnan, engineering manager, Bolt (an e-commerce retailer tool), Ihor Dvoretskyi, developer advocate, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Christine Wang, senior solutions engineer, Grafana Labs.

As GitOps moves beyond improving how code repositories are managed for continuous integration/continuous integration (CI/CD), the security component of GitOps has become more of a pressing issue as the use of Git, and GitOps, becomes more widely adopted. The open source community should also play a critical role in improving GitOps.

Hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, this recording features Om Moolchandani, co-founder and CISO/CTO, for Accurics, Cindy Blake, senior security evangelist, GitLab, Frank Kim, fellow, SANS Institute; Sanjeev Sharma, head of platform engineering, Truist Financial and Katie Gamanji, ecosystem advocate, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Developers just want to know if they have a vulnerability before putting code into production. But often, the answer back is not what the developer wants to hear.

More analysis is needed, the software security group will often reply, said Meera Rao, senior director of product management at Synopsys, in this latest episode of The New Stack Makers, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack,

Rao is the creator of a new intelligent orchestration technology that helps developers get their issues resolved without a long wait. That long wait is remedied by relying on Synopsys’ system to let developers know what’s wrong and whether specific security holes require immediate fixing or not.

What we do know about Kubernetes? It’s a raw, gaping maw. It’s not meant for most of us. What is needed? Access to the grinding, digital gears that make what we know of as distributed architectures.

Istio is an example of a management layer for Kubernetes, said Zack Butcher, part of the founding engineering team at Tetrate, a service mesh company. He joins Varun Talwar, co-founder at Tetrate for a discussion about the service mesh Istio and its role in the management of highly distributed networks, including, of course, Kubernetes in this The New Stack Makers podcast. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Joab Jackson, managing editor for The New Stack, we speak two of the fabled conference’s key organizers about what to expect and what the organizers’ goals are: Priyanka Sharma, general manager for CNCF and Stephen Augustus, engineering director and head of open source at Cisco.

This is no business-as-usual KubeCon conference, of course. Last year’s KubeCon EU was cancelled just a few weeks before the event was scheduled to take place. Then, many question marks remained during the early days of the pandemic about not only the future of conferences but how workers in the IT industry would continue to live and work. As it turns out, this year’s event is virtual, of course, and at the very least, there is no shortage of talks and events.

All told, for KubeCon, experts from organizations including Adobe, Apple, CERN, Nvidia and OVHcloud will deliver more than 100 sessions, keynotes, lightning talks, and breakout sessions. There will also be more than 60 sessions hosted by project maintainers – spanning beginner-level introductions, end-user case studies and technical deep dives.