KubeCon India 2024 Recap

KubeCon has always been a significant event in the cloud-native ecosystem. After a long journey, India finally had its first KubeCon in Delhi on the 11th and 12th of December. After a long wait, KubeCon was finally organized in India, giving the Indian community an amazing opportunity to attend a KubeCon and network with some of the amazing folks within the industry. India is among the top five countries with the most active contributors, and this number is rapidly growing. 

KubeCon India was a remarkable experience, and there were a lot of key takeaways that team Devtron had from the event. Let’s dive into all of the new announcements and learnings from KubeCon India.

Keynote Highlights

The event started with the iconic KubeCon keynotes. The Day 1 keynotes focused on sharing the amazing scaling power of Kubernetes and highlighted the entire Kubernetes journey from its origin, to where it is today, and what is to come. The Day 2 Keynotes focused more on the role of AI in the Kubernetes ecosystem, and the two technologies will continue to integrate. Let’s take a quick recap of the themes that were being discussed.

• Service Mesh Adoption at Scale: Purushotham Malipedda and I V Prasad Reddy from Flipkart, one of India’s largest E-commerce websites, took to the stage to explain their journey of adopting a service mesh. They were facing challenges with scaling their workloads and implementing disaster recovery mechanisms. They onboarded Istio and migrated around 6,000 services, giving them the ability to leverage the mesh’s features such as service graphs and securing east-west traffic.
• The Cloud Native Story: Nikhita Raghunath from VMware in her keynote walked through the entire journey of Kubernetes and cloud-native, and how it has evolved over the years. From the creation of the first containers to Kubernetes and where it has evolved from there. We’ve moved over to a standardized container runtime i.e. CRI, and even have the WASM runtime. Kubernetes has matured into a stable technology that folks are beginning to adopt. Nikita shared that the next few years of Kubernetes are going to be all-around optimization, from cost to performance, as well as improving the multi-cloud strategy.
• The Unison of Cloud Native and AI: During the Keynotes of Day 2, AI was all the hype. Aparna Subramanian and Sumedh Degaonkar from Shopify talked about how they searched and found Kubernetes to be the perfect orchestration tool for deploying their AI and ML workloads. Arun Gupta from Intel walked through CNCF’s AI Working Group and talked about the entire cloud native AI landscape and how it’s evolving. Finally, Janakiram talked about how they orchestrated AI agents in Kubernetes using the built-in Kubernetes properties such as CustomResourceDefinitions, StatefulSets, and HorizontalPodAutoscalers.

Recommended Sessions to Watch

KubeCon India had a plethora of talks on AI, WASM, Operational optimization, and much more. While there was a ton of information to learn from the talks, a few stood out. We recommend rewatching some of the following talks once they are out. 

• How a Small Step turned into a Giant Leap to Cloud Native Adoption for an Enterprise: Ashwin Gupta and Shubham Bansal, from Fidelity share their entire journey on how they adopted the cloud and cloud-native technologies. Initially, they started using open-source technologies and now, they have an entire stack of OSS tools from Kubernetes, Argo, Elastic, Helm, Cilium, and many more. This talk highlights all of the challenges that global financially regulated organizations can face when adopting Open Source technologies and the learnings Fidelity had along the way,
• Optimizing 5G Networks: Deploying AI/ML Workloads with AIMLFW of O-RAN SC: Subash Kumar Singh from Samsung explored the AI/ML Framework (AIMLFW) within O-RAN SC (O-RAN Software Community) community. It was designed for dynamic and efficient 5G network management. This talk covered some of the core challenges in AI/ML workflows for distributed 5G networks, and how to overcome them.
• Ensuring Seamless Service Continuity in 5G: Enhancing Kubernetes Disaster Recovery in Telecom: Ganesh Chandrasekaran and Saurabh Swaraj from Samsung’s R&D department highlighted the importance of having proper service availability in the telecom industry and the importance of making local and geographic redundancy for disaster recovery. This session explores a Kubernetes native solution to bridge the gap between existing tools such as Velero, Portworx, and Stash and offer seamless redundancy for telecom workload. This talk walks through some CNCF projects including Nephio for intent-based automation and Prometheus for real-time Monitoring in the Telco space.
• Is GitOps a Broken Experience? Where’s the Ops in GitOps?: Rajalakshmi Kamath V from VMWare delved into the limitations of GitOps in large-scale Kubernetes environments. The talk focused on GitOps’ inability to provide real-time visibility into the actual state of the system or immediate operational control during outages. Drawing from Walmart’s experience managing over 200,000 workloads and 10,000 daily deployments across thousands of clusters, the session highlighted the need for complementary operational tools. These tools enhance observability and runtime state insights, bridging critical gaps in GitOps workflows and ensuring greater resilience and efficiency in managing Kubernetes workloads.
• Scaling Private LLM Model Services with Kserve and Modelcar OCI: A Real-World Implementation: Mayuresh Krishna from Initializ highlighted how Kubernetes, Kserve, and Modelcar OCI storage simplify the deployment and scaling of private LLM services. The talk addressed the challenges of complexity and cost and demonstrated how Kserve enables efficient, scalable model serving with optimized GPU utilization and how Modelcar OCI artifacts streamline artifact delivery by reducing duplicate storage, enhancing download speeds, and minimizing governance overhead.
• GenAI Recipes for Cloud Native Deployment: Arun Gupta and Kaushal Desai introduced OPEA, the Open Platform for Enterprise AI, that provides a framework of composable microservices for deploying GenAI applications. It showcased the process for deploying systems like ChatQnA, CodeGen, and RAG on Kubernetes across various Cloud Providers. The session showed the use of diverse data stores, including open-source vector databases and managed services, and highlighted scale testing with over 50,000 documents.
• Faster Deployments at PepsiCo with Self-SErvice Continuous Delivery using the App of Apps Pattern: Chaitanya and Prasanti Kadiyala from PepsiCo transitioned to the GitOps methodology using ArgoCD for streamlining the deployment workflows. They leveraged ArgoCD's App of Apps pattern, to define a bootstrapper Application, enabling the automation of application deployment which allowed them to achieve self-service Continuous Delivery, empowering teams to independently manage their deployments while maintaining centralized control and visibility. This talk highlights the various challenges while adopting GitOps including managing dependencies, configuring environments and ensuring consistency across deployments.

Devtron at KubeCon India

The Devtron team had attended KubeCon India, with high spirits and a secret plan in the works. During the main conference, we had some amazing conversations with folks who have been involved in the tech and cloud-native landscape for decades. Some of the memorable conversations we had have been around Platform Engineering, Kubernetes Challenges, WASM, Observability, and how the cloud-native landscape has evolved over the past couple of years.

Close to the end of the first day of the event, Devtron’s secret plan had begun execution. We organized a memorable networking party with our friends at Middleware. It was an evening full of insightful industry conversations, where founders, engineering managers, and Kubernetes experts from various companies came together over dinner to exchange ideas and foster new connections. Later we threw a DJ night and it was the most happening party in the town ever! 

Here are some pictures to help attendees relive the excitement, and for folks who couldn’t make it, we hope to see you at the next KubeCon.

Conversations with Industry Veterans

In the two exciting days of KubeCon, we were also able to interview some people who are working on some groundbreaking technologies and who have been involved in the landscape for years to ask them their thoughts on where the industry is headed as a whole.

Please check out our YouTube channel to hear our conversations and gain insights into the direction of Kubernetes and cloud-native.

See you all at our next event!