KubeCon North America 2024 was a milestone for many reasons—my first time in Salt Lake City, my first time representing Isovalent at KubeCon, and Isovalent’s first KubeCon experience as part of Cisco.
As we transition under Cisco’s umbrella (pun intended), this event was a perfect opportunity to connect with our existing and prospective customers, partners, and the broader community. Six months into our journey with Cisco, one thing is clear: our commitment to open-source contributions and customer-focused innovation hasn’t wavered.
With 34 activities over the KubeCon week, including sessions, booth talks, book signings, and a Hive Mind Mingle hosted at the Salt Lake Brewing Company’s Squatters Pub, it was an busy but very fulfilling week for Isovalent.
Here are our Isovalent highlights:
- Cilium voted #1 as most useful and most mature Multi-Cluster Application Management tool in CNCF end-user survey
- Cilium Maintainer Joe Stringer named CNCF Top Committer of 2024
- Cloud Native Rejekts, Cilium and eBPF Day and KubeCon sponsor
- 18 talks by Isonauts covering Cilium, Tetragon, eBPF and more!
- 5 book signings!
Let’s dive into some of the most interesting areas from the week:
Cloud Native Rejekts – The Opening Act Before KubeCon
Even before the amazing event of KubeCon begins, there is an event called Cloud Native Rejekts.
Rejekts is a b-sides like conference that makes it possible to resubmit a talk that was rejected by KubeCon and affiliated day zero events (more on co-located day below).
As it happens, this event is an incredible opportunity to engage with peers in a more intimate environment and really connect with folks prior to the madhouse of KubeCon!
Isovalent is a proud sponsor of both Cloud Native Rejekts event and KubeCon, with several Isonauts on site at the former including Liz Rice, Carla Gaggini, James Strong and Nick Young.
Duffie co-presented the first session of the event “Malicious Compliance Automated: When You Have 4000 Vulnerabilities and only 24 Hours Before Release” with Kyle Quest. This session looked at the challenges of container security and limitations of existing vulnerability scanners, showing examples of how you can reduce the attack surface using container image minification.
Cilium + eBPF Day Continues To Grow
Early figures from the KubeCon event’s team highlighted that Cilium + eBPF Day at KubeCon was the most attended colocated event this year. This is fantastic for two reasons: first, it shows that the interest in Cilium and eBPF has not wavered compared to previous events, and secondly, this year’s colocated day focused on splitting the content between Cilium and eBPF as evenly as possible.
For those of us who are not native to the US or Salt Lake City, we also had a small treat of snow in the morning. This gave us a chance to start experiencing one of the area’s most popular climates. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you didn’t pack for this weather), the snow didn’t stay around for long.
The first session of the day opened with Confluent’s Multi-Cloud Journey to Cilium. Confluent, a staunch lover of Cilium and an Isovalent customer, discussed the challenges of managing Kubernetes across different cloud providers and how Cilium provides a common networking layer between each platform. It’s always fantastic to hear and learn from these customer-based sessions, where you get a real sense of the real-world applications and challenges when using a particular technology.
Multi-Cloud use cases continue to grow as adoption for Kubernetes across different cloud providers grows, with Cilium providing a consistent networking and security layer regardless of where you run your workloads.
There were a number of excellent sessions covering both Cilium and eBPF in depth. One of the themes of the Cilium session this week was around performance and scale. eBay and Datadog covered, in their respective sessions, how to they leverage Cilium and Hubble for networking, security and observability at their hyper-scale.
Our colleague Ryan Drew shared spectacular performance improvements seen when using XDP and eBPF to boost IPsec performance (400% increase!). Interestingly, Anton and Daniel, also from Isovalent, presented how to boost WireGuard-based encryption in a session later on that week.
Here’s a 60-second recap of the Cilium + eBPF Day from our Bill Mulligan for the Cloud Native podcast. Bill was also the co-host for the Cilium + eBPF day event.
You can find all sessions for the Cilium and eBPF Day on the YouTube playlist below:
The Main Event
Our Isonauts took part in 14 sessions across KubeCon, without including the talks, demos and book signings at the booth. It shows how dedicated our team is when it comes to their community work and contributions. The topics were varied: multicast networking in Kubernetes with Cilium, security observability with eBPF, making Kubernetes CRDs changes safer, and understanding the role of the CNCF Code of Conduct Committee are some of the themes covered by our team.
Check out the recordings of each session below:
- Seeing Double? Implementing Multicast with eBPF and Cilium
- The Key Value of etcd Over Custom Resources: Scalability – Jef Spaleta, Isovalent at Cisco
- Securing the Future of Ingress-Nginx – James Strong, Isovalent & Marco Ebert, Giant Swarm
- Seccomp and eBPF; What’s the Difference? Why Do I Need to Know? – Natalia Reka Ivanko & Duffie Cooley
- Cilium, eBPF, WireGuard: Can We Tame the Network Encryption Performance Gap? – Daniel Borkmann & Anton Protopopov
- Understanding Kubernetes Networking in 30 Minutes – Ricardo Katz & James Strong
- Cilium: Connecting, Observing, and Securing Kubernetes and Beyond with eBPF – Ahmed Bebars, Joe Stevens, Bill Mulligan & Anna Kapuscinska
- Gateway API: What’s New, What’s Next? – Christine Kim, Nick Young, Mattia Lavacca & Guilherme Cassolato
- Pick My Project! Lessons Learned from Interviewing 20+ End Users for Cloud Native Case Studies – Shedrack Akintayo & Bill Mulligan
- Still Don’t Do What Charlie Don’t Does – Making CRD Changes Safer – Nick Young, Isovalent
- Tutorial: Stop Kubernetes’ Revolving Door: A Hands-on Tutorial to Secure a Kubernetes Cluster – Savitha Raghunathan, Rey Lejano & Mahé Tardy
At the Isovalent booth, we held a number of lightning talks, live demos of the Isovalent platform and book signings from Liz Rice, Natalia Reka Ivanko and Bill Mulligan.
The booth is a great opportunity to speak to engineers about their challenges, environments and discuss the outcomes that can be achieved by adopting the Isovalent Platform, powered by Cilium and Tetragon.
From my own personal view, it was clear that most attendees at KubeCon that came by the booth are focused around platform engineering roles, and, for the majority, have Kubernetes deployments running in one of the big three public cloud providers.
But there were also users who represented different roles and situations, such as one conversation I had where the attendee deployed closed systems running Kubernetes, with these platforms shipped to their end user, essentially kept offline. For this attendee, they needed a solution such as Cilium to provide advanced networking and security features, backed by enterprise support to ensure a low mean time to resolution for any issues that arose with these offline platforms.
Another hot topic at KubeCon was whether Kubernetes will be suitable to run virtual machines, via the KubeVirt project. Considering that I wrote a blog post on how to secure KubeVirt-based VM with Cilium, you can guess my opinion on the subject! Given KubeVirt’s 1.4 release announced during KubeCon and how many of you attended the KubeVirt chat with hosted with Liz and Thomas, we anticipate a surge in the number of VMs being created in Kubernetes in 2025.
The last thing that stood out for me the most was how Cilium is now the adopted standard when it comes to Kubernetes Networking. Many attendees I spoke to were already using Cilium in some capacity today, and wanted to know how to take their platforms to the next level. Knowing that Isovalent are the creators of Cilium, they came to the booth to look to us for advice and our expertise.
Talking of experts, let’s take a minute to celebrate one of our own:
So Much to Celebrate!
Joe Stringer, a 7-year veteran at Isovalent, was rewarded the CNCF award for Top Committer. Top Committer recognizes excellence in technical contributions to CNCF and its projects. The CNCF Top Committer has made key commits to projects and, more importantly, contributes in a way that benefits the project neutrally as a whole.
Joe was awarded the Top Committer award for his active involvement in the communities around Cilium as a maintainer, eBPF, and the Linux kernel (and for being a terrific and ever helpful Isonaut).
Our favourite eBPF projects were recognized several time over the course of the conference. First, Cilium was voted for as the most mature and most useful project for Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Application Management in the latest CNCF end-user survey (November 2024). Cilium alongside ArgoCD also achieved the highest “Adopt” maturity stage. Thank you to all the end-users out there who are constantly giving feedback to help us get do a bit better every day.
In the eBPF family, Cilium’s younger sibling Tetragon itself was recognized in this independent evaluation of Kubernetes security agents and came out top in this evaluation by Henrik Rexed, at Dynatrace.
Finally, our Hive Mind Mingle celebration was, as ever, a fantastic gathering of the cloud native community and an opportunity to thank all our customers and the wider community.
We’ll See You at the Next Conference
They say all good things come to an end, but with conferences such as AWS:ReInvent and Cisco Live we’ll be packing up, re-energising and getting ready to bring all the excitement from this year’s KubeCon in Salt Lake City to a location near you soon!
Expect to see more announcements from Isovalent at each of those and other future events. Reach out to our teams to chat about how the Isovalent Platform can help you overcome your current cloud native networking, observability and security challenges. For deep dive learning opportunities, get started with our hands-on-labs and be sure to pick up Credly badges, and matching stickers from our booths!
We look forward to seeing you in London for KubeCon Europe 2025, where we will be, once again, hosting the Hive Mind Mingle. If you would like exclusive VIP tickets for the event, consider applying for the Isovalent Advisory Circle.
Dean Lewis is a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Isovalent – the company behind the open-source cloud native solution Cilium.
Dean had a varied background working in the technology fields, from support to operations to architectural design and delivery at IT Solutions Providers based in the UK, before moving to VMware and focusing on cloud management and cloud native, which remains as his primary focus. You can find Dean in the past and present speaking at various Technology User Groups and Industry Conferences, as well as his personal blog.
