KubeCon 2024: Innovations and Milestones Shape Future of Cloud-Native Tech

There's a lot going on in the cloud-native landscape as 2024 draws to a close.

Last week, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosted its annual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America event in Salt Lake City, with speakers sharing insights about the latest advancements and innovations in cloud-native technologies.

The conference, which has emerged as the premier gathering for cloud-native technologies, marked a pivotal moment in the industry's history. Kubernetes, now turning 10, has established itself as the second-largest open-source project globally, surpassed only by the 33-year-old Linux kernel.

While Kubernetes was the founding project of the CNCF, today it is far from the only one. The CNCF has an ever-growing list of projects that were highlighted at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024.

Among the key CNCF highlights:

Microsoft Hyperlight Advances Virtualization

One of the most significant technical announcements was Microsoft's submission of Hyperlight to the CNCF Sandbox, an entry point for early-stage projects. Rita Zhang, principal engineer for Microsoft Azure, presented this groundbreaking Rust library that addresses a critical challenge in cloud-native computing: the speed/security trade-off in virtualization.

Related:Comparing Container Orchestration Tools: Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos

"Virtual machines have long been the cornerstone of cloud-native infrastructure, widely trusted to securely separate host and guest environments," Zhang explained. "But for event-driven scenarios like serverless, traditional VMs are simply too slow to spin up."

She explained that Hyperlight uses Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) or Hyper-V to run untrusted code in a micro virtual machine without loading a full operating system. The technology is also fast — Zhang demonstrated sequential calls from VM to host that averaged just 900 microseconds per request, which is less than 1 millisecond. The project's submission to the CNCF marks a significant step forward in cloud-native infrastructure innovation.

Flatcar Grows Cloud-Native Operating System Landscape

Another new project coming to the CNCF is the Flatcar container Linux effort.

Designed specifically for container workloads, Flatcar has established itself as a critical infrastructure component, now supported across virtually every major cloud and on-premises platform.

Related:How to Simplify Kubernetes Management

"For the community this means that for the first time we can deploy a complete production environment including the operating system using all CNCF technologies," announced Andy Randall, principal PM manager at Microsoft Azure. "Flatcar is a natural fit with CNCF because it's designed specifically for containers and embraces cloud-native principles like immutability and declarative config."

The project is evolving to meet modern deployment challenges through an innovative approach to customization.

"You remember the Burger King 'have it your way' campaign? Well, that's the approach that we're taking with Flatcar," Randall said. "With system extensions, you can build your own choice of layers on top of the base OS image to simplify cluster API worker image creation or enable deployment of new workload types such as WebAssembly."

CNCF Graduated Projects Showcase Major Updates at KubeCon

While new projects are always exciting, there's a lot of activity around the CNCF's established projects too.

Keynote presentations highlighted significant updates to CNCF graduated projects — stable projects being used successfully in production environments — emphasizing maturity and innovation across the cloud-native ecosystem.

In a major development for service mesh technology, Istio announced its ambient mode has reached general availability (GA).

"Six months ago we promoted Istio's ambient mode to production-ready status, and today we're excited to announce that Ambient is officially GA," said Keith Mattix, senior software engineering lead at Microsoft focused on Istio and other networking projects.

Security and registry management saw notable improvements, with Harbor releasing Version 2.11, featuring new SBOM (software bill of materials) capabilities. Harbor is a self-hosted cloud-native registry.

The certification management space welcomed a new graduate, as cert-manager joined the top tier of CNCF projects. The project offers expanded ecosystem support and multiple sub-projects for enhanced certificate management in Kubernetes environments.

Also, networking and observability tool Cilium reported significant advances in container networking performance.

"Container networking is just as fast as host networking," noted the Cilium project's Bill Mulligan, highlighting the project's multicast support and Gateway API 1.1 implementation.

Linkerd, self-described as "the world's lightest, fastest, and most secure service mesh," announced Version 2.17 with new rate limiting features. Project creator William Morgan emphasized a focus on memory safety with "a data plane implementation written in Rust to avoid those pesky memory safety vulnerabilities."

The Argo project is showing strong community momentum thanks to significant updates across its portfolio. The team announced improved UI features, enhanced OpenTelemetry integration, and new Progressive Sync capabilities for ArgoCD.

Fluent Bit unveiled Version 3.2, bringing improved efficiency to telemetry collection. Creator Eduardo Silva said the new version is "10% more efficient, which means lower energy consumption," adding that the project has achieved "more than 15 billion deployments."

CNCF Expands Cloud-Native Certification

Addressing the growing diversity of cloud-native technologies, the CNCF announced a major expansion of its certification program during the event.

"Historically, we had a large focus on Kubernetes because that was our first project. That's kind of where a lot of the initial resources went," Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF, said. "But as CNCF has grown to over 200 projects, we have other very, very large communities out there such as Prometheus, Envoy, OpenTelemetry, and so on."

The foundation unveiled three new certifications:

Additionally, a new platform engineering certification program is under development, aimed at clarifying industry standards.

"We're working with the community together because, you know, I find platform engineering a bit of a nebulous topic depending on which company or person you talk to," Aniszczyk said. "So what do we do best in CNCF? We congregate people together and work on things and improve things."