We’re very excited to announce the Keynote Speakers and Daily Themes for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 in Salt Lake City beginning November 12 -15. If you haven’t registered yet, it’s not too late.
Get ready to deep dive into the cloud native universe, where industry experts will share insights on the hottest topics shaping the future. Each day will be dedicated to a unique theme, ensuring a rich experience.
Kicking off keynotes on Wednesday, November 13, the spotlight will be on groundbreaking advancements in artificial intelligence and platform engineering, with industry leaders from NVIDIA, Coreweave, Capital One, CERN, Google, Lunar, Intel, and more.
Thursday’s keynotes will center on security, one of the most critical aspects of the cloud native ecosystem. Expect to hear from experts from Microsoft, Broadcom, Red Hat, NYU, and Purdue University.
Finally, Friday is all about the community and celebrating KuberTENes with thoughtful presentations from industry leaders representing Adobe, Heroku, Google, Solo.io, Red Hat, and more. Each will share their visions for the future of cloud native.
Whether you want to level up your knowledge or connect with like-minded professionals, these sessions will inspire and empower you. Explore the entire schedule, and keep reading for a detailed keynote description.
Wednesday, November 13
Themes: Artificial Intelligence and Platform Engineering
Multicluster Batch Jobs Dispatching with Kueue at CERN
Ricardo Rocha, Lead Platforms Infrastructure, CERN & Marcin Wielgus, Staff Software Engineer, Google
With the skyrocketing demand for GPUs and problems with obtaining the hardware in requested quantities in desired locations, the need for multicluster batch jobs is stronger than ever. During this talk we will show how you can automatically find the needed capacity across multiple clusters, regions or clouds, dispatch the jobs there and monitor their status. We will discuss the setup in both fixed-size on-prem environments, fully autoscaled clusters running on clouds and mixed, hybrid environments. In the end we will present what a recent effort for a multi-cluster setup looks like at CERN, do a quick (but impressive) demo, and share the lessons learned during the deployment.
Open Source-powered Cloud Native Creates the Future (sponsored)
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, Chief Executive Officer, SUSE
When Kubernetes first started out it was a place of potential and early adopters jumped all over it because of the openness. Now, more than 10 years later – an eternity in software – the cloud native space approaches adulthood where early adopters still abound, but large regulated industries are now depending on its technologies, and everyone in between wants to find their place in this world. Along the way, edge solutions, AI, virtualization, and other technologies started building on top of them. SUSE has always been at the heart of the open source community, and CEO DP van Leeuwen says he sees that commitment only getting deeper in future. SUSE developers have made significant contributions for decades, and DP will explain why he believes so passionately in open, community-based standards based on Kubernetes for the new innovations in AI and the edge.
Take a Peek Under the Hood of Cloud-Native AI at Scale
Chen Goldberg, Senior Vice President of Engineering, CoreWeave & Peter Salanki, Chief Technology Officer, CoreWeave
Training large-scale foundation models on Kubernetes brings a new set of challenges compared to traditional workloads. With tens of thousands of interconnected GPUs, even small hardware failures can lead to significant performance bottlenecks. This talk will dive into real-world lessons learned while building Kubernetes clusters at scale, including tackling hardware failures, optimizing GPU scheduling, and improving observability. We’ll also explore how CNCF projects and Kubernetes provide the best platform for managing the complex infrastructure required for generative AI, making it easier to monitor and maintain AI workloads with the right observability tools. Attendees will walk away with actionable insights into how to navigate these challenges and build robust, scalable systems for training foundation models.
Build Intelligent Applications with an Open, Flexible, and Data Driven AI Platform (sponsored)
Sudha Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Oracle Cloud Development Platform, Oracle
In today’s technology landscape defined by rapid advancements in AI and data technologies, both openness and flexibility are imperatives for driving innovation. Cloud-native technologies empower developers to build and run massively scalable AI services and applications on a flexible platform. With the platform, developers can leverage familiar open-source tools, data technologies, and AI models of their choice on the cloud native platform. Join Sudha Raghavan, SVP of the Oracle Cloud Development Platform, as she shares key insights, best practices, and the tangible benefits of using open source technologies to build AI platforms and cloud native applications at Oracle, deployed at scale across several cloud environments.
Paving the Way for AI Through Platform Engineering
Kasper Borg Nissen, Lead Platform Architect, Lunar
In today’s ever-evolving world, organizations struggle to integrate AI efficiently. Is AI a department, a team, or a tool for a select few? No, it should be woven into the fabric of the business. Drawing from the principles of platform engineering in cloud native ecosystems, we explore how organizations can reuse experiences and investments in cloud native and platform engineering to democratize AI, enabling every team to access its potential. Real-world examples, like Lunar, demonstrate how businesses can implement AI without needing complex infrastructure and harness the power of AI through simplified platforms and evolutionary architectures.
The Future of GenAI: Cloud Native Blueprints with OPEA (sponsored)
Ezequiel Lanza, AI Open Source Evangelist, Intel
Enterprises are eager to adopt generative AI to boost productivity. The Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA), a Linux Foundation project, offers a framework of composable microservices for creating advanced GenAI systems, including LLMs, data stores, and prompt engines. OPEA provides blueprints for popular workflows, such as ChatQnA, CodeGen, and RAG systems, all designed to simplify deployment of cloud native architectures. Featuring a user-friendly pipeline definition language for Kubernetes, this keynote will cover how to get started running GenAI applications on a K8s cluster utilizing a microservices architecture for component flexibility.
NVIDIA Case Study: The Many Facets of Building + Delivering AI in the Cloud Native Ecosystem
Chris Lamb, Vice President, Computing Software Platforms, NVIDIA Corporation
NVIDIA provides accelerated computing, networking infrastructure and platforms at the vanguard of today’s most rapidly evolving fields (artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous systems, virtual world simulation, etc) among operating cloud services, a global gaming network, and powering the development effort to creating the next wave – all of which are powered by the Cloud Native Ecosystem and enabled by CNCF community software in some form! This keynote provides a glimpse into how we use, derive from, and contribute to a wide variety of CNCF projects to build, deliver, and advance technologies’ most rapidly advancing fields. We’ll also offer our perspective of the state of the ecosystem, call attention to remaining challenges, and help inspire further community collaboration to power the AI revolution onward!
Engineering the Future of Generative AI Platforms on Kubernetes
Aparna Sinha, SVP, Head of AI Product, Capital One
The evolution of machine learning and AI has raised the stakes on how technology organizations extend their enterprise platforms to deploy generative AI applications at scale. In this keynote, Capital One’s SVP, Head of AI Product – and early contributor to Kubernetes at Google – Aparna Sinha, will share considerations and principles for leveraging Kubernetes and other open source technologies to create open enterprise platforms that power generative AI applications. Attendees will walk away with actionable insights and best practices on areas including:Extending existing machine learning platforms to create modern generative AI platforms; New platform layers that need to be built on top of Kubernetes when evolving machine learning platforms for generative AI; In-house vs. third party build and deployment components and decisions; Risk and governance implications and considerations; Articulating platform requirements to enable co-creation and contribution from user communities.
Thursday, November 14
Theme: Security
Above the Clouds: Mountainous Achievements with End Users
Taylor Dolezal, Head of Ecosystem, CNCF
Get ready, innovators! We’re embarking on an exciting journey through the CNCF ecosystem. We’ll discover valuable insights in the End User stream, explore new areas with our End User TAB progress, and examine the thriving hubs of our ever-changing ecosystem. This talk will remind you that in the vast expanse of cloud native technology, our strength lies not in isolated efforts, but in the community we build together.
A Developer’s Guide to Securing Your Software Supply Chain (sponsored)
Toddy Mladenov, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft
Container images, AI weights, WebAssembly modules, and software packages – what’s the link? They are all examples of some of the many artifacts found throughout a software supply chain. With so many different artifacts, the real question becomes, “Is your software supply chain as secure as your production environment?” In this keynote, we will navigate the journey of these artifacts from source to production, and showcase how to secure your software at each step of the supply chain using cloud native open-source tooling. With the help of key CNCF projects like in-toto, Notary Project, Ratify, and Copa, you will learn how to ensure your software is secure, consistent, and reliably delivered to production.
Cloud Native’s Next Decade: Stable, Secure, and…Ready for Disruption?
Nikhita Raghunath, Principal Engineer, Broadcom
In the cloud native world, we’ve come a long way – after a decade of driving Kubernetes adoption, it feels like we’ve hit a milestone. With the pace of new Kubernetes features slowing down, some might think that we’ve reached a “steady state”. But have we really? While the ecosystem feels more stable and secure than ever, the next decade holds challenges that demand our attention, especially in the realm of security. Sure, we all know security is vital, and there’s been a lot of fantastic work across the board, from OSS initiatives to innovative startups. But the threat landscape is shifting fast. As we peer into the future, it’s not just about refining what we already know. It’s about tackling new challenges that are emerging on the horizon, like securing AI systems. Some may say it’s too early — that AI security is just hype. But think again. AI introduces complexities we haven’t seen before, offering both new vulnerabilities and fresh opportunities for defense. Are we ready to face the coming wave of security threats that could reshape the digital landscape? This keynote will dive into what’s next in cloud native security, while showing why this “boring” phase is just the calm before a new storm of innovation and challenges that will shape the next decade.
Application Development’s Great Cloud Native Disruption (sponsored)
Colin Walters, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat & Preethi Thomas, Senior Manager, Engineering, Red Hat
Artificial Intelligence is exposing technological and operational gaps in our industry faster than ever. Newer workloads are forcing application developers to innovate in ways that open source is uniquely positioned to help guide. This talk will discuss the current state of open source technologies and how application developers can collectively harness and contribute to transparent, open innovation and guide the next generation of cloud native development.
Open Source Security Is Not A Spectator Sport
Justin Cappos, Professor, NYU & Santiago Torres Arias, Assistant Professor, Purdue University
The CNCF has been a trailblazer in resilient open source software security by enabling innovation, coordination and community building. We will highlight some of the efforts and resources provided by TAG Security including security assessments for CNCF projects, one of the first supply chain security recommendations, A Reference Architecture to Securing the Software Supply Chain, and the Cloud Native Security Whitepaper. We’ve done this all by fostering an open and welcoming community of security professionals. Come and join our community and help us improve cloud-native security for all!
Friday, November 15
Theme: Community and Celebrating KuberTENes
Honoring the Past to Forge Ahead
Bob Wise, CEO, Heroku
Twelve-Factor was published by Heroku founder Adam Wiggins over a decade ago and served as a guiding principle for many software engineers and tech founders of SaaS companies. In that time, cloud-native and Kubernetes has fundamentally transformed technology. As we look to the next decade of technology innovation and the millions of apps we’ll build and run – how durable are these Twelve-Factors? In this talk Bob Wise, CEO of Heroku will reflect on the journey of the Twelve-Factors, Heroku’s journey as a platform designed around these twelve-factors and what that means for the future, and announce the open sourcing of twelve-factor as a community project to participate in the ongoing refreshing and revisiting of the Twelve-Factors to guide us through the next decades.
Kubernetes in the Second Decade: Balancing Innovation with Stability (sponsored)
Jago Macleod, Engineering Director, Kubernetes & GKE, Google
Kubernetes has come a long way since Google introduced the project to the world a decade ago. We are so proud of what Kubernetes has become. But like the rest of the technology landscape, the explosive growth of Batch, ML, and GenAI workloads alongside existing, often business-critical, workloads creates new challenges for end users running on Kubernetes. In previous technology cycles, the most likely outcome would be the rise of a new platform. However, due to the declarative API, the modular and extensible nature of the platform, and the strength of the ecosystem, Kubernetes can evolve in ways that were more difficult for previous platforms. Google is significantly re-focusing and increasing our already industry-leading investment in Kubernetes to refactor, extend, and even re-invent significant aspects of Kubernetes to meet the needs of the next decade. This is the fundamental challenge: innovation to address new opportunities <em>without disruption to the installed base.
Five Cloud Native Technology Areas to Watch For
Lin Sun, Head of Open Source, solo.io & Karena Angell, Chief Architect, Red Hat
As part of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), we’ve been busy reviewing projects that are coming into the CNCF, promoting projects from various stages (sandbox, incubation and graduation) and identifying areas of greater collaboration. Along with the reviews, we are innovating the technical review processes, and collecting end user feedback. We would like to take you through five key cloud native technology areas to watch for in the next few years, reflecting what we see in the cloud native ecosystem.
Rethinking Kubernetes Connectivity (sponsored)
Idit Levine, Founder and CEO, Solo.io
Cloud traffic management is broken. Any time you put a request on the network you need to secure, control, and observe its behavior. Today, ingress traffic is treated differently than east west traffic. Outgoing requests to services like GenAI, LLMs and SaaS are treated differently. The technology used to solve these challenges is outdated, inconsistent, overlapping, and does not fit our platform engineering principles of automation. New innovations in the cloud-networking space allow us to re-imagine the solutions to these problems. In this keynote, we’ll discuss the future of API connectivity and cloud networking that goes beyond Kubernetes.
Kubernetes Family Feud: A Decade of Architecture and Evolution
Rags Srinivas and Tim Hockin
Kubernetes is 10 years old! While its growth has been remarkable, it has also accrued technical debt, familiar to long-standing members, and there are still many issues that remain as top concerns. In this fun Family Feud-style format, team leads and a moderator will engage experienced community members in discussing these architectural and design issues. By polling the community ahead of time, we aim to surface the most pressing, or at least bothersome, concerns. Two teams, each headed by a captain on stage, will compete in the typical Family Feud style. After attending this session, participants will gain awareness of early design and architectural decisions and compromises, understanding which have been fixed and how to work around others. Along the way, attendees might enjoy a hearty laugh or two, appreciating the collective wisdom of the community members polled.
We know you’re as excited as we are to hear what these experts have to share in Salt Lake City. Register today and start planning your days at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024.