KubeCon + CloudNativeCon with project innovation and call against patent trolls

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) in-house exhibition, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, now exists in four versions. One is the European version, the most recent edition of which took place in Paris in March – heise reported. The next one will take place in London at the beginning of April 2025. There is a version tailored to the Chinese and Asian markets and now also one for the Indian subcontinent. Currently, the North American version of the conference is taking place. This year, over 9,000 participants have made their way to Salt Lake City, the capital of the US state of Utah. From November 12 to 15, it will be the center of cloud-native and Kubernetes. The overarching theme is "Scaling to new heights" – Scaling to new heights.

In the opening speech, however, the focus was initially on open source software in general and its protection. heise reported on the Linux Foundation's new approach to so-called patent trolls at the Open Source Summit EU in September 2024. As announced at the time, the CNCF is now calling on the community to help – – Anyone interested can contribute their mite in the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge. In concrete terms, this means assigning a patent that the participant should check for its actual validity. There are also video instructions and tips on how to proceed. Of course, there is also something to be won: up to 3000 US dollars. All participants receive either a T-shirt or a water bottle with the words "Cloud Native Heroes" on it.

Afterwards, however, it was back to Kubernetes and co. Primarily, there was news from the project corner. Dapr and cert-manager have now reached a new level of maturity and can call themselves "graduated". To do so, they have to meet a whole series of requirements. There are currently 15, including documentation, project organization and a high probability of survival. cert-manager is used to manage X.509 certificates for encrypted communication in the cloud-native world. Dapr is a runtime environment for distributed applications. It provides APIs for the necessary functions such as message exchange, workflows, password management and cryptographic operations.

Consolidation has been taking place for some time in the area of observability and telemetry. The CNCF has now sidelined four projects alone. In official language, by the way, this is called "archived". The announcement of Jaeger version 2.0.0 also fits in with this. On the one hand, this new major version is a natural development. Strictly speaking, it is identical to version 1.63.0, but a major innovation is the use of the so-called Open Telemetry Collector as the basis for the Jaeger components. According to their own statements, the corresponding projects have repeatedly used or exchanged the same source code in the past. This "duplication" is now a thing of the past. At the same time, this step also reflects the fact that OpenTelemetry has established itself as the de facto standard for collecting and providing telemetry data.

The final step is a version of Keycloak. Another de facto standard: this time in the area of open source software for IAM (Identity and Access Management). Keycloak is often used here as an identity provider and enables single sign-on, finely granulated authorizations and strong authentication, among other things. The following innovations are interesting in version 26: the X.509 server certificates can be replaced without restarting and the data about the logged-in users is now stored in a database. This means that they can still be accessed after a restart and Keycloak requires less memory at runtime. There is also a technical preview of the integration with OpenTelemetry.

(mho)