ControlPlane at KubeCon EU London ‘25 - Recap
KubeCon EU never disappoints, and this year’s was no exception. ExCel London played host to a busy conference, with the showroom floor stretching over both the north and south sides. Being hosted in ExCel London also meant something else: London is ControlPlane’s home and HQ, and so we were present in force.
Here’s a conference recap for those who couldn’t make it.
🚩 Capture the Flag 🚩
As an official partner of the Linux Foundation, we’ve been running Capture the Flag (CTF) events at KubeCon for many years. We were as excited as always to host this year’s CTF, which put attendees onto a real Kubernetes cluster and challenged them to break out of scenarios to find the flag. This year was a bumper year, with our resident expert, Kevin Ward, hosting over 120 players! If you’re coming to KubeCon India, you’ll find us hosting a CTF there too.
🎤 CNCF Keynotes 🎤
As you may expect, AI was everywhere, not just on the vendor stands but also in a number of the talks and even in the keynotes. However, this being KubeCon, it was undoubtedly more content driven than hype led. The keynote “Into the Black Box: Observability in the Age of LLMs”, presented by Christine Yen, CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb.io, addressed the challenges of implementing observability in systems utilising large language models (LLMs), emphasising the need for robust monitoring in AI-driven applications.
We also had practical usage of AI in the form of “AI Enabled Observability Explainers – We Actually Did Something With AI!” where Vijay Samuel from eBay showcased practical applications of AI in enhancing observability, demonstrating real-world implementations that improve system monitoring and performance.
Taking a break from AI, we heard from Thomas Øther Rasmussen and Paul Farver from The LEGO Group, who shared strategies for managing multiple Kubernetes deployments effectively, focusing on maintaining consistency and quality across implementations. When the videos are released, we’ll update the links, but to find it, the title is “The Bricks That Make Us – How The LEGO Group Avoids 50 Mediocre Kubernetes Implementations.”
Our very own John Kjell gave a riveting insight into identity-based trust in “Identity-based Trust - Till Death Do We Part?” alongside the excellent Kairo De Araujo. Taking the audience from the basics of public/private keypairs through to the using Sigstore and projects like in-toto and The Update Framework (TUF).
Security segues nicely into compliance which is a very necessary part of all our roles so it was only right that it took centre stage with “Cutting Through the Fog: Clarifying CRA Compliance in Cloud Native” presented by Eddie Knight and Michael Lieberman. In this session, they addressed the complexities of the upcoming EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and its implications for the cloud native community. They emphasised the importance of understanding and preparing for the CRA to ensure compliance and maintain security standards.
The CRA is reasonably far reaching and, as with all upcoming legislation, the specifics are still being worked out. Eddie and Michael did a great job explaining some of the nuances of the phrase “product with digital elements.” It is somewhat ironic that this may deter organisations from hiring professionals to contribute to open source! Thankfully at ControlPlane we’re playing a leading role in helping projects prepare for and weather this incoming legislation. Reach out if you’d like to learn how we’re helping CNCF projects and how that can help your organisation.
🌍 Community 🌍
Technology is the what, but the why of KubeCon has always been about the community. At its core are the maintainers and contributors across over 180 CNCF projects who received heartfelt thanks. Along with that, thanks were some new initiatives that helped support them. A new training and certification achievement in the form of golden Kubestronaut and the launch of GitJobs.dev, a new job board to help connect open source contributors with relevant roles in the ecosystem.
This KubeCon also marked the one-year anniversary of us taking on some of the core Flux CD maintainers as members of staff and the launch of our Enterprise for Flux CD, which meant that we were present in force at day zero events such as the Project Silva day, as well as the Cloud Native Telco day before the actual start of KubeCon.
We’re incredibly proud of our small contribution to this great project, which goes from strength to strength. With KubeCon following hot on the heels of the Flux team announcing the General Availability (GA) of Flux v2.5, the Flux project booth was a busy place. People are excited to learn about
Common Expression Language (CEL) Integration: - Enables custom health check expressions without modifying Flux
Enhanced Authentication: - Added support for GitHub and GitLab authentication, with plans to extend to other Git sources
Custom Event Metadata: - Allows for more detailed and informative notifications.
As well as many other fixes and features
The release of v0.14 of the Flux Operator brings some of the most requested features, including GitHub Pull Request or GitLab Merge Request ephemeral environments for testing and validation.
At KubeCon itself, there were some insightful talks across different areas of the conference referencing Flux CD, including
Project Lightning Talk: - Tamao Nakahara presented “Flux - What is it & What’s New with Image Automation?” offering insights into recent advancements
Cloud Native Telco Day: - Guillaume Nevicato and Cedric Yhuel discussed “A Telco Game Changer: Sylva Embraces GitOps,” emphasising Flux’s role in telecommunications
Linkerd Day: - James Johnstone and Haydn Stokes delivered a lightning talk on “Upgrading Linkerd With Flux,” showcasing integration strategies
OpenFeature Summit: - Aditya Soni and Anshika Tiwari explored “Flag- Aditya Soni and tastic and Fearless: Feature Flags Meet Kubernetes for Deployments That Sing,” highlighting Flux’s versatility.
Main conference:
Flux Ecosystem Evolution - Stefan Prodan & Sanskar Jaiswal, presented the latest features in the Flux Operator, Headlamp and the Flux plugin, Flagger, and the Gateway API in progressive delivery enhancements. A major highlight of this KubeCon has been the many contributions from prominent members of the cloud native community who graciously participated in the Flux Documentary, currently being produced by ControlPlane in collaboration with our friends at Kube.fm. We had the pleasure of conducting in-person interviews with a number of distinguished figures, including Shaun O’Meara and William Rizzo from Mirantis, Philippe Ensarguet from Orange, Chris Aniszczyk from the CNCF, and Tamao Nakahara, formerly of Weaveworks. Additionally, we had a rare opportunity to bring together several core maintainers and contributors of Flux at the CNCF booth, capturing a historic group photo. This moment perfectly encapsulates the spirit of open source: a diverse, global team of individual contributors collaboratively developing a foundational technology for the modern cloud native and GitOps/DevOps ecosystem.
From left to right: Tamao Nakahara, Matheus Pimenta, Sanskar Jaiswal, Leigh Capili, Stefan Prodan, Michael Bridgen, Hidde Beydals.
ControlPlane’s CEO, Andy Martin, presented alongside Michael Lieberman from Kusari on “Mind the Gap: Bridging Supply Chain Policy With Git-less GitOps and GUAC”, where they demonstrated a live supply chain attack showing off the security features of Flux CD and OpenSSF Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition together in a wide-scale production scenario, which incidentally ties in well with our recent publication of the D2 Reference Architecture.
💭 Closing Thoughts 💭
KubeCon is always a special conference, not just because of the technology or community mentioned above but also because of its surrounding events where like-minded people can come together and socialise. I know that Francesco Beltramini’s DJ set went down a treat at House of Kube, and I hope that our sponsoring of Kuberoke again this year was just as special for the listeners!
If you’d like to learn more about all the goings on at KubeCon, or if you’d like to know more about how we, as foremost cloud native experts, can help your organisation consume and use next-generation technology safely and efficiently, please contact us here.