KubeCon EU 2024 Research Interests

I will be attending KubeCon EU next week in Paris, France. Aside from attempting to eat my weight in pain-au-chocolat, I will be looking for things along the following lines of inquiry.

Platform Engineering

I maintain that platform engineering is more than mere developer experience or having an internal developer portal application. To me it is the culmination of years of experience in building robust, scalable, efficient and easy-to-operate infrastructure to run applications.

Platform engineering is where I see real, tangible benefits to organisations of all sizes. It's where the disparate threads of Agile, DevOps, SRE, cloud-native, and all the other buzzwords the tech industry loves to throw around all come together to make something genuinely useful and just a little bit boring.

I'm putting together a research series on this topic that I hope to make broadly public, assuming the funding model works out. If you'd like to be involved, please get in touch by emailing [email protected].

VMware Alternatives

As I wrote after KubeCon NA last year, the operators have arrived and I want to learn about what they're up to. Specifically, I want to hear how the Broadcom changes to the VMware ecosystem are affecting them and what they're looking at in response.

We've received inbound inquiries from organisations exploring VMware alternatives and they're keen to see what's possible. From our preliminary research, there are multiple paths forward, which is a little challenging to navigate, but also good news. Good because it means there are options that suit most circumstances, and customers don't have to suddenly change their entire approach to infrastructure after receiving an estimate of 5x what their bill was. These kinds of economics open up all kinds of possibilities, and projects that would have struggled to get approval 12 months ago are a slam dunk now.

I am particularly keen to hear from people who've been co-locating virtual machines with containers using technologies like KubeVirt. A chat with my friends from Red Hat is definitely on my agenda.

WebAssembly

I remain quite positive about WebAssembly. The Byecode Alliance has so far negotiated the complexities involved very well. There is a solid consensus from those building this ecosystem that fundamental compatibility is important if Wasm outside the browser is to succeed. Those who've splintered off the standards path have not gained much traction, and the agreement to collaborate appears to be holding firm.

Wasm is underappreciated because it is still very early for the technology. The component model is stabilising and more languages are starting to support it, but it remains very complex and highly technical. We've yet to see enough very visible, clearly useful worked examples of the technology, but I am confident they are not far away.

Wasm is generally developing at the pace I expected when I first started covering the field in earnest a couple of years ago. Of course, I've been watching the tech for much longer than that. It has all the hallmarks of becoming an overnight success after the years of hard work has been done to get there.

Funding Open Source Maintenance

Across all of my work runs a common theme: how will all this open source work get funded so that it can continue? Every now and then a vendor announces a new license as they attempt to find a way to stay viable selling a product people use for free. I've written detailed reports on the business of open source and the topic remains the subject of lively discussion.

Solutions remain elusive. A great diversity of alternatives is being explored, of which I hope to learn more. I am particularly curious to learn about European initiatives such as the German sovereign technology fund and what results are being achieved.

I will be looking for systemic lessons, ways that succeed that can be assembled into something more resembling a holistic approach. The piecemeal, atomised attempts of the past couple of decades don't seem to be making great progress towards ensuring the people who maintain critical open source software are able to feed themselves and their families, or to keep a roof over their heads.

AI, GenAI, etc.

I remain profoundly sceptical of the value of generative AI. Vendors are talking about little else, which is extremely frustrating, as customers themselves mostly have other concerns. I will not be seeking any information about what vendors are doing with AI, in fact, quite the opposite; I will be trying my best to avoid such discussions.

Onwards!

If you'll be in Paris for the show, do come and say hello. I will have my usual array of stickers to give out to those who meet me in person.