After returning home today from day 1 of Open Infrastructure Days UK 2019, I have to admit - I was pleasantly impressed. I've been to a few small conferences over the years, many of which consisted of presentations based on sales fluff and/or ended up being not very technical. However, today they managed to get it right, in short, there was no BS, no sales fluff and the guys knew there shi*.
Here are a few takeaways from some of my favourite talks of the day...
Kubernetes-native Infrastructure
Managed Baremetal with Kubernetes Operators and OpenStack Ironic
Steve Hardy, Red Hat
The guys at Ubuntu have released a project called Metalkube that leverages OpenStack Ironic to deploy bare metal Kubernetes servers (nodes). The cool thing here is that it allows you to roll out new physical servers using the K8 management tools (i.e kubectl).
For more info check out: https://github.com/metalkube/metalkube-docs
SONiC
Enabling Fast Evolution in the Network
Matty Kadosh, Mellanox Technologies
SONiC (born from Microsoft Azure) is a NOS for white box switches. Though there are a million different NOS's out there, SONiC has some cool features which made it stand out. For example containerization and K8 management support. But the real interesting feature is around SONiC+, this allows applications to be modularized as additional containers and added to the NOS. These apps can then use the SAI (software abstraction interface) and the Redis DB infra of SONiC - niiiice. Here is the same presentation but given at OCP - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dal5aGwlnas.
For more info check out: https://azure.github.io/sonic/
Istio
Running Resilient Workloads with Istio
Matt Turner, Istio
This talk basically provided a rundown of the Istio K8 service mesh i.e sidecar proxies that are added to the pods within your cluster. This, in turn, gives you massive control of the traffic in terms of testing, metrics, rollouts, etc. This is the new hotness in the world of container networking.
Matts site is https://mt165.co.uk, there are some really good talks on there. A bit of googling found this, should you want to learn more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB611FtjHcQ.
For more info check out: https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is-istio/