Kubecon North America: Mandatory AI and a new TechRadar

KubeCon in Salt Lake City cannot ignore the current AI trend. However, the program committee has done a great job. Unlike at other events, the AI theme did not completely take over the agenda.

Nevertheless, there were AI announcements: First of all, there is a new project called Envoy AI Gateway. It is still quite young and the developers are calling for collaboration. The software is based on the Envoy Gateway project, which comes from the API world. In the background, however, it is about enabling certain applications to communicate with each other. From Envoy's point of view, AI is a fundamentally new application that deserves separate treatment. A simple example is the implementation of so-called LLM routes (LLM - Large Language Model) within such a gateway.

When it comes to API gateways, there are various products and projects vying for users' favor. One of these is Gloo from solo.io, which is now a project under the auspices of the CNCF. CEO and founder Idit Levin completed the outstanding pull request on stage in front of thousands of applauding spectators. solo.io offers not only the normal API gateway but also one with AI in the name, which specializes in application development and operation. In concrete terms, this means providing a single API for accessing the various service providers: OpenAI, Mistral AI or Gemini.

Last but not least , SUSE has kept its promise from the summer: SUSE AI is now available and the technology stack has been finalized. SLE Micro, SUSE Rancher Prime RKE2 and Neuvector Prime were already known. Also included is the Nvidia GPU operator for managing these chips in Kubernetes. The AI components initially include Ollama, a platform for installing and managing the LLMs, and Open WebUI, the associated interface for web users. Milvus is used as the vector database.

And the prize goes to...

The community also celebrated itself and its members. Firstly, there is the End User Award, which goes to companies that have had a particularly strong positive influence on the development of the cloud-native ecosystem. This year, the award went to Adobe. Employees of the company are actively involved in the development of CNCF projects. These include Kubernetes, Open Telemetry and Envoy. In total, there are 46 projects.

In the Community Awards, this year's top committer prize went to Joe Stringer for his contributions to the Linux kernel, eBPF and CNCF projects. In the Lifetime Achievement category, newly introduced this year, the award went to Tim Hockin, one of the fathers of Kubernetes.

Finally, there is a new CNCF Technology Radar. The last documented version is three years old. The CNCF surveyed 300 selected developers in the third quarter of this year and came to the conclusion, among other things, that companies should take a look at ArgoCD and Cilium for multi-cluster management. In Tech Radar parlance, this puts them in the "Adopt" category: they have a level of maturity and penetration that minimizes the risk for new users. In the area of compute for AI and co. there are four recommendations: Apache Airflow, CubeFS, Kubeflow and Fluid.

(dahe)