containerd Is 1.0! And Other KubeCon Updates

KubeCon and CloudNative Con are both in full swing in Austin, TX, this week (just months after the city was overtaken by container nerds for DockerCon in April). The co-located events are sponsored by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), whose goal is to drive adoption of cloud-native computing practices, and to support and foster the growth of open-source projects that align to cloud-native practices.

So many awesome and useful projects are under the CNCF umbrella, including Prometheus, a monitoring platform; containerd, a container runtime that sits at the heart of tools like Docker; and perhaps most notably, Kubernetes.

For me, a big announcement is that containerd has reached 1.0! Docker donated the container runtime to the CNCF in March 2017, and since then, contributors from dozens of companies have worked together to push containerd to 1.0.

While it’s mostly an invisible detail to end users, containerd is doing the heavy lifting in many modern container tools, executing and supervising containers, dealing with networks and storage, and image distribution. You can read more about this awesome accomplishment in Docker’s blog post.

It’s clear that Kubernetes has asserted a top position in the container orchestration space; earlier this year, Azure announced their managed Kubernetes solution AKS, followed by Amazon showing off their managed solution EKS a week ago at re:Invent. And at DockerCon EU in Copenhagen this October, Docker -- which offers its own orchestration solution, Swarm -- announced that native Kubernetes support was coming to Docker itself.

Hot off of the re:Invent announcement, it’s no surprise that engagement and support for the CNCF was a big announcement today. Over 31 new members joined the CNCF, with companies like Datadog, HPE, Grafana, and InfluxData (InfluxDB). Endorsement and support by so many big and well-respected companies is a testament to the maturity of cloud native technologies, and especially the Kubernetes ecosystem.

One exceptional detail about KubeCon and CloudNativeCon that I want to give special mention is their commitment to diversity scholarships. This year’s attendee numbers reached over 4,000, and 103 attendees were able to attend through a diversity scholarship, which allows people from underrepresented or economically disadvantaged groups to attend the conference.

103 attendees here this week received diversity scholarships! This is the largest investment in diversity for ANY conference EVER — thanks to this incredible committee, @googlecloud, @Azure, @awscloud & @twistlockteam 👏🏼 [LIVE from #KubeCon + #CloudNativeCon] pic.twitter.com/GtxNCjb1g5

— CNCF (@CloudNativeFdn) December 6, 2017

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js In a survey of attendees, it’s clear that Kubernetes usage is growing rapidly among engineering teams and companies of all sizes, with an astounding 75 percent stating that they’re using Kubernetes in production in one form or another.

Be sure to follow the conferences online for more announcements and top-notch technical content. If you’re not in Austin, you can still attend remotely by catching the keynotes online:

• Thursday, December 7 9:00 am - 10:40 am Central Time

• Friday, December 8 9:00 am - 10:40 am Central Time