StackState had a blast at this year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon gathering in Paris! The discussions were in-depth, covering a wide array of topics and lasting much longer than in the past. This year, attendees seemed to have a considerably deeper understanding of the cloud-native ecosystem, probably attributed to its rapid growth. We also noticed a pretty dramatic evolutionary shift in the vendors at the expo hall, who were showcasing some truly progressive specialized solutions.

Kubernetes has changed the way many organizations approach the deployment of their applications. But despite its benefits, the additional layers of abstraction and reams of data can cause complexity around Kubernetes monitoring. We’ve seen so much of these challenges borne out in the results of the 2024 Observability Pulse survey. In the survey report, 36% of respondents say Kubernetes poses a challenge, and just 10% of organizations say they have full observability into their environments.

Another KubeCon has passed! Now that we have all (hopefully) recovered from the week in Paris with good food, wine, and catching up with colleagues, let’s talk about the important topics that took center stage at KubeCon EU 2024 this year. As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the initial Kubernetes release, it’s evident that the growth and positive impact of containerized computing have revolutionized the industry.

Ciara Carey reflects on her experience at the KubeCon event in Paris including her top 10 talks and current industry trends.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes (EKS) is a powerful solution for managing Kubernetes native applications in the cloud. Being a managed service by Amazon, it handles a lot of complexities of Kubernetes on its own. However, despite its robust features, organizations might seek EKS alternatives due to challenges such as cost considerations, specific feature requirements, or the desire for greater control over their infrastructure.

Last week – on the 15th of March 2024 – the Harvester team excitingly shared their latest release, version 1.3.0. The 1.3.0 release has a focus on some frequently requested features, such as vGPU support and support for two-node clusters with a witness node for high availability. As well as a technical preview of ARM enablement for Harvester and cluster management using Fleet. Let’s dive into the 1.3.0 release and the standout features…

Backstage is gaining wide adoption for platform engineering teams looking to build internal development platforms. After implementing Backstage, data has shown an improvement in 2X of code changes, and a decrease of 17% in cycle time making a huge impact on the business delivery pipeline for organizations. Backstage with its rich plugin ecosystem, makes it possible to get full troubleshooting and security coverage you need across your entire pipeline in a single dashboard and interface.

The collaboration between development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams is crucial for delivering high-quality software products and services efficiently. DevOps has emerged as a transformative approach that bridges the gap between these two traditionally siloed functions, fostering a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement.