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Five Enterprise K8s Projects To Look For at KubeCon London

If you’re heading to KubeCon Europe in London this April, chances are you’re not paying to sample the food. You’re going for the sessions and specifically to get your fingers on the pulse of the latest innovations in the cloud native ecosystem.

When you visit the schedule page to build your itinerary, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. There are more than 300 talks to choose from (selected through a grueling process from more than 2,500 submissions).

Despite the huge number of talks, there are still many awesome, vital, game-changing open source projects that have thriving communities of contributors and individuals, but minimal or zero coverage on the event agenda.

Some are relatively mature; some are newer, but they don’t have a significant role on the the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) KubeCon EU schedule this year.

For every OpenTelemetry or Prometheus talk (35+ talks between them), there’s a vCluster talk (one).

For every eBPF or Kubeflow session (22 talks between them), there’s a Kairos session (one).

You’ll also find nothing at all about backup tool Velero, sustainability tool kube-green, networking supertool Multus, data store Kine or bare metal provisioner MAAS. Not a thing.

So let’s take a minute and shine a light on a few projects that, as an enterprise adopter of Kubernetes, you need to know about.

Cluster API, or CAPI to its friends, definitely falls into the “mature” camp; it started back in 2018. It’s the power behind multicluster Kubernetes, enabling you to declaratively provision and manage clusters, just as Kubernetes declaratively provisions and manages its own resources. Cluster API is extensible; a host of CAPI providers exist, enabling you to manage clusters in different clouds and other infrastructure environments.

CAPI matters because we live in a multicluster, multi-environment world — of course, we need a way to lift ourselves up and orchestrate across clusters. And CAPI does that in an open source way that’s completely in line with K8s and its API-driven, declarative, extensible approach.

You’ll find CAPI today inside Spectro Cloud’s Palette, Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu and many other products. It’s definitely making an impact on enterprise Kubernetes. And it’s actively maintained, with new releases in just the past few weeks. But with just 3,700 GitHub stars, it’s not exactly in the limelight.

For the lowdown on Cluster API, read our blog post.

And at KubeCon, you’ll find just a couple of talks mentioning CAPI. We’d put this one from New Relic on our schedule.

KubeVirt is the most popular solution for bringing VM workloads into your Kubernetes clusters. As a project, it’s been going for more than eight years, but lately development and adoption have increased as enterprises look for an exit strategy from proprietary vendors’ price increases.

While KubeVirt may not yet be a household name, it’s racked up more than 5,000 GitHub stars and is used by Nvidia, Cloudflare and some big enterprises that we’re not allowed to tell you about. On the contributor side, it has some pretty big guns too, including Red Hat, and you’ll find it baked into various K8s management platforms in some way.

If you’re committed to cloud native and you’re looking for a home for your VMs — like thousands of businesses, large and small — you need to be aware of KubeVirt.

At KubeCon you’ll find just three talks that mention it. We’d recommend this one from Red Hat and Nvidia. In the meantime, we recommend reading this blog post.

vCluster enables you to create “virtual clusters” — environments that look and feel like a full-fledged Kubernetes cluster but run within a single host cluster. vClusters can be stood up and torn down in seconds, and have very little overhead. They also are truly isolated from each other.

These qualities solve some real-world Kubernetes pains. vClusters are ideal for ephemeral dev environments because they don’t leave your engineers waiting half an hour for a cluster to get to a ready state, and you aren’t therefore tempted to leave the vCluster up and running after the testing is done. The isolation attributes address the frustrating weaknesses of namespaces such as resource names spanning all namespaces.

Some vendors have gone so far as to say that you no longer need multiple clusters, you can just run one big cluster and use virtual clusters to segment. We’re not totally convinced by that argument (and our research exhibits that the number of clusters is trending up) but we certainly believe that vCluster is a great tool for certain use cases, particularly when you’re providing Kubernetes as a service (KaaS) to dev teams.

Since Loft Labs created vCluster, it’s racked up 8,000 GitHub stars, but you’ll only find one talk at KubeCon, from Loft.

In the meantime, read up on this classic blog post from our archives to get started.

Kairos is a software factory for building customizable bootable images, primarily intended for use in edge computing environments. You put your preferred OS and Kubernetes distribution in and get secure, immutable images out — making it a vital foundation for success in many edge use cases.

While it only has 1,200 GitHub stars, the contributors are building advanced capabilities like Trusted Boot, and Kairos is already in use in demanding environments like European railways.

In 2024 Kairos became a CNCF Sandbox project, putting it in the spotlight. But if you head to KubeCon, you’ll have to head to the Project Pavilion to meet the team or catch the five-minute Lightning Talk on Tuesday.

You might want to check out this blog post to get the background.

At the past couple of KubeCons, you couldn’t move for talks about AI, and in London there are 25 talks on the AI/machine learning (ML) track.

We know that K8s folks are embracing AI in all kinds of ways, including with cluster ops assistants like K8SGPT, but we also know that this is a community that understands security and privacy and loves a little #selfhosted and #homelab action.

So it’s a surprise not to see any talks (from a read of the titles) focusing on how to run AI models for local inference in the cluster. Whether for privacy reasons or far-edge deployments, there are lots of use cases where you can’t have data shipped off to the cloud or central DC for analysis.

This is the use case that LocalAI targets, a trending project with over 30,000 GitHub stars. It provides a drop-in replacement REST API that’s compatible with OpenAI API specifications. You can see how it unlocks value for tools like K8SGPT in this blog post.

The breadth of the cloud native ecosystem has always been both its killer advantage and its Achilles heel. Our 2024 State of Production Kubernetes research found that navigating the ecosystem was the No. 1 challenge for enterprise adopters.

So let’s use this opportunity at KubeCon to step away from the crowded keynotes discussing the usual projects and turn our attention back to the challenges we’re trying to address and the innovative projects being built to solve them.

And let’s do what we can to support those projects, not only through the usual routes of contributing code or funding but also through choosing platforms that are non-opinionated and make it easy to adopt innovations. This idea of choice is one of the guiding principles behind our Palette platform. Take a look.

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StarlingX 10: Support for Dual-Stack Networking at the Edge

StarlingX has always been a great edge-computing cloud platform, but it can also be helpful in the core.

StarlingX, the open source distributed cloud platform, has officially launched its much-anticipated version [website], marking a significant milestone in its evolution. Released Wednesday, this modification brings many new functions and enhancements to improve performance and user experience across various applications, particularly in Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, and edge computing environments.

One of StarlingX [website]’s standout elements is its support for IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking. This enhancement allows individuals to operate both protocols simultaneously, ensuring compatibility as the industry transitions from IPv4 to IPv6, which is ongoing in many sectors.

While StarlingX has long-supported IPv6 networking, until now it didn’t work with dual network stacks. Now, “The latest enhancements now allow individuals to switch between single-stack and dual-stack networking configurations to allow using both IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces,” wrote Ildikó Váncsa, the Open Infrastructure Foundation‘s director of community, in a post on the StarlingX blog,.

Since StarlingX is often used by telecoms, whose data centers still often run IPv4 while their 5G mobile networks rely on IPv6, this new dual-stack support is a valuable addition.

This latest release also boasts a new Unified Software Management Framework, which simplifies the platform’s deployment and management. consumers can now perform updates and upgrades through a single interface, accessible via REST API or CLI, streamlining operations for single and distributed cloud installations.

Specifically, the framework uses OSTree to install new software while the host continues running on the existing file system. Thus, a simple reboot then transitions to the new software, significantly reducing downtime compared to previous methods. It also enables simultaneous deployment of patches and updates. In short, this is a pure win.

Under the hood, StarlingX [website] includes an upgrade from its underlying Linux kernel version [website] to [website] This change enhances performance and expands support for a broader range of hardware platforms and device drivers. This revision is based on the latest Long Term Support (LTS) Yocto Linux distro release. Yocto is a well-regarded, customizable embedded Linux.

As a result, the platform’s scalability has been significantly improved. It can now manage up to 5,000 remote sites per system controller, up from 1,000 in previous versions. This enhancement is crucial for large-scale deployments, making it easier to operate extensive networks.

This release also comes with Kubernetes’ Harbor as its container registry. Harbor is an open source registry. It secures artifacts with policies and role-based access control (RBAC). Harbor also ensures images are scanned and free from vulnerabilities; it also signs images. This enables individuals to securely manage cloud native artifacts such as container images and Helm charts.

As you’d expect, StarlingX continues integrating newer versions of various open source projects, including Kubernetes up to version [website], ensuring consumers can access the latest technologies within the platform.

The improved Kubernetes support is critical because StarlingX relies on a Kubernetes service, NUMA-aware Memory Manager, to prevent worst-case memory latency. This memory slowdown can happen when StarlingX’s cores run under a high load.

While all this strengthens StarlingX’s hand as an edge cloud, it would be a mistake to “pigeon-hole” StarlingX as an edge cloud, revealed Paul Miller, CTO of Wind River, which commercially supports the project.

“Every single piece of cloud infrastructure in the Boost Mobile network from the core to the center, over 20,000 sites, [is] all based on StarlingX” via Wind River Studio Operator, Miller told The New Stack.

He’s not the only one happy with StarlingX’s latest changes. “We are delighted to see the launch of StarlingX [website],” mentioned Shuquan Huang, technical director of 99Cloud, an open source cloud provider, in a statement. “This release is a pivotal achievement in our quest to offer an enterprise-grade, open source distributed edge cloud platform.”.

Those interested in exploring the new elements or deploying StarlingX [website] can now download pre-built Debian Linux ISO from the StarlingX repos. If you haven’t used StarlingX before, I highly recommend that you first go over the project documentation.

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Microsoft Launches Visual Studio 2022 v17.13 with AI-Powered Enhancements and Improved Debugging

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2022 [website], introducing significant improvements in AI-assisted development, debugging, productivity, and cloud integration. This improvement focuses on refining workflows, enhancing code management, and improving the overall developer experience.

One of the functions in this release is GitHub Copilot Free, which provides 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests per month at no cost. Copilot has also been improved with AI-powered feature search, enhanced multi-file editing, and shortcut expansions, making it easier to navigate and optimize code. These AI-powered improvements are already receiving positive feedback from developers. Hugo Augusto, an IT consultant, commented:

Adding AI directly inside VS is the biggest addition Microsoft has made in a while. I'm surprised every day at how good the suggestions are and how it understands the context of the source to provide those suggestions.

Another user shared their experience with GitHub Copilot Free, emphasizing how much it has improved their workflow:

I have been playing around with GitHub Copilot Free, and I have to say, it's been a game-changer for my workflow. The advanced debugging elements in Visual Studio 2022 [website] are also nice.

Alongside AI improvements, Visual Studio 2022 [website] introduces new productivity functions. Developers can now set default file encoding, use a more accessible horizontal scrollbar, and quickly navigate recent files in Code Search. There is also an option to indent wrapped lines for superior readability.

Debugging and diagnostics have also seen major enhancements. AI-generated thread summaries in Parallel Stacks simplify debugging complex applications, while the profiler now unifies async stacks for .NET profiling and introduces color-coded CPU swim lanes for easier performance analysis. IEnumerable Visualizer has been updated with syntax highlighting and Copilot-powered inline chat, making LINQ query debugging more efficient.

For Git people, this version allows developers to add comments directly on pull requests from within Visual Studio. Additionally, AI-powered commit suggestions help catch potential issues early, ensuring higher code quality before merging.

Furthermore, web and cloud developers can now integrate .NET Aspire with Azure Functions for easier serverless application development. Docker Compose introduces scaling support, offering more control over containerized environments. In addition, front-end developers can extract HTML into Razor components, improving code structure and maintainability.

Moreover, Database developers using SQL projects can now take advantage of SDK-style project support in SSDT, improving debugging and schema comparison. Visual Studio also preserves font preferences across themes, ensuring a consistent interface.

More information about the elements can be found in the release notes.

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