Canonical at KubeCon EU 2020: our first virtual KubeCon experience

Another great KubeCon has recently come to an end – which is nothing less than what we expected. After all, that’s why Canonical and Ubuntu have been consistently present at KubeCon & CloudNativeCon EU, to connect with the community.

This year, we showcased Canonical’s conformant, interoperable, multi-cloud Kubernetes through our two Kubernetes distributions – Charmed Kubernetes and MicroK8s. We’re excited to now open our presentations up to the public, by giving you access to the recordings of the live Kubernetes demos that our technical team exhibited at KubeCon EU 2020! Just scroll down for the full picture. 

As for the event in general: while no two KubeCon events have ever been the same, this year’s setup was even more unique, as the community moved to the virtual space to discuss all things Kubernetes. We took every single bit of it in, and here are the takeaways we can narrow our experience down to: 

1. Virtual KubeCon is still KubeCon

For better or for worse, the format of this year’s KubeCon is what anyone’s comment on the event would be about. There was a lot of curiosity around what CNCF and The Linux Foundation would come up with to allow the community to engage in meaningful conversations around Kubernetes, as well as form connections among its members. Our verdict? They did a great job. With over 18,682 registrants, 7,800 companies, and 230 talks and tutorials, there was hardly a lack of engagement on the content side (which, for the record, remains available on-demand for those who want to purchase a post-KubeCon ticket). 

2. You can take the community out of KubeCon, but you can’t take KubeCon out of the community 

As far as community buzz goes, this event was solid proof that not even a global catastrophe can keep us apart! Some of the community engagement bits we loved the most:

• Forming hubs around (excitingly designed) virtual booths to chat about K8s 
• The tons of live Q&As concluding all speaker sessions, keynotes, tutorials, and sponsors’ individual demos.
• Sharing pictures of our pets, playing Drag Queen Bingo together, and customizing our portraits with Kubernetes-related icons and designs (nerds just wanna have fun).  

3. Cloud is the name of the game (and a couple of other trends…)

It was hard to miss the fact that the CNCF community has grown… a lot! Unsurprising, considering the difficulties businesses have experienced this past year due to COVID, and their natural efforts to adapt to change by embracing the cloud more than ever before. We saw a strong interest and focus on cloud-related projects, including user-contributions, sessions, and 1-2-1 discussions. Once again, the event organisers did a great job making topics and discussions relevant, by adopting an end-user-focused angle to most panels, presentations of case studies, and private chats. 

4. KubeCon is (still) about the tech

As much as we’ve enjoyed the gaming, chatting, and exploring what virtual expos look like, it was clear that all of us joining KubeCon EU again this year were still very much there to hear what’s new around Kubernetes. We can attest to this ourselves too, judging by the multitude of Kubeheads signing up for our demos, and grabbing the opportunity to ask our technical team for insights on their Kubernetes use cases. We were thrilled to see how relevant our presentations were his year in particular, as we showed our peers what’s new on Charmed Kubernetes and MicroK8s, and how our two Kubernetes distributions empower them to truly leverage Kubernetes in any scenario – from cloud to edge. Get a taste for yourselves via the demo recordings below! 

Canonical multi-cloud Kubernetes demos at KubeCon 

1. Hybrid cloud Kubernetes: connecting the dots with Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes

Canonical has recently teamed up with Microsoft, to enable Kubernetes users to manage multiple K8s clusters from a single platform – Azure Arc. Even if you’re not a Microsoft user, you can attach any on-prem or public cloud Kubernetes cluster to Arc, and manage them from a centralised point. In this demo, watch how to administrate multiple and different K8s clusters with Canonical’s distributions of Kubernetes and Arc.

2. Charmed Kubeflow as Kubernetes workload

Canonical’s distribution of Kubeflow – Charmed Kubeflow – supports the most popular tools for  AI/ML – like JupiteHub and Tensorflow – in a standardised workload running on Kubernetes. In this demo, we demonstrate how simple and fast it is to run Charmed Kubeflow on top of any Kubernetes distribution – including Charmed Kubernetes and MicroK8s. 

3. MicroK8s HA: zero-ops Kubernetes is now more resilient

MicroK8s is Canonical’s lightweight Kubernetes, that installs a cluster on any machine in under 60 seconds. Initially, MicroK8s was a single K8s cluster project, however as users grew to love this easy-to-deploy distribution, Canonical now enables them to create multi-node, highly-available K8s clusters for higher scalability and resiliency. Watch this video to witness yourself how easily you can deploy K8s, cluster it, add a load balancer and run a sample workload on top of it, using just a few commands in MicroK8s.

4. MicroK8s with Multus add-on 

 Multus provides multiple networking interfaces per container project. Allowing users to establish complex networking for their containers, it’s often met with particular popularity within the telco industry. Watch this demo to learn about Canonical’s implementation of Multus on MicroK8s – the lightweight Kubernetes distribution that can be installed anywhere in under a minute. 

5. Charmed OSM: Telco VNF management and orchestration

Open source MANO (OSM) is an orchestration tool that telcos require to run their network functions. Canonical has used charm technology in its distribution of OSM, and enables telcos to run it on top of Kubernetes while providing support and lifecycle automation. Discover how.