[Kaslin Fields]: Hello and welcome to the Kubernetes podcast from Google. I'm your host, Kaslin Fields.

[Mofi Rahman]: And I'm Mofi Rahman.

[Kaslin Fields]: This week's interview was recorded live at Google Cloud Next and features Alain Rigney and Camila Martins talking about recent developments in Kubernetes and cloud native technologies, including exploring highlights from KubeCon EU and the value of community events.

[Kaslin Fields]: But first, let's get to the news.

[Mofi Rahman]: AWS introduced specialized Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for Amazon ECS, EKS, Finch and AWS Serverless, providing real-time contextual responses and service-specific guidance to guide AI assisted application development.

[Kaslin Fields]: Summer is the season of KubeCon events in Asia! KubeCon China took place June 10th to 11th, KubeCon Japan was on June 16th & 17th, and KubeCon India is coming up August 6th and 7th. Be on the lookout for cool announcements coming out around these events.

[Mofi Rahman]: A reminder for CNCF open source project maintainers, the upcoming maintainer summit co-located at KubeCon North America has an open CFP which closes July 20th. And the maintainer craft CFP for KubeCon North America closes on July 7th. These opportunities are only available to CNCF project maintainers, but if you are one, make sure you take advantage of these opportunities to share the awesome work you are doing with users and fellow maintainers.

[Kaslin Fields]: A new open-source project, llm-d, aims to create a "well-lit path" for serving large language models (LLMs) on Kubernetes. It combines vLLM with the Kubernetes Inference Gateway to enable smart, state-aware routing that dramatically improves latency for multi-turn conversations by leveraging KV-caching.

[Mofi Rahman]: Speaking of gateway API inference extension, a blog on gateway API inference extension was published. Inference extension aims to make serving LLMs on Kubernetes easier with much needed features like model identity aware routing and request criticality.

[Kaslin Fields]: And that's the news.

[Kaslin Fields]: Hello everyone. We're coming to you live from Google Cloud Next where I'm very excited to be recording Kubernetes podcast episodes for video as well as audio. So if you're listening to this on audio, there is also a video that will probably be posted on our YouTube channel. And today, I'm excited to be talking with Camila and could you pronounce your name for me? I didn't get to ask you before.

[Alain Regnier]: Alain.

[Kaslin Fields]: Alain.

[Kaslin Fields]: Alain.

[Kaslin Fields]: Would you like to introduce yourselves?

[Alain Regnier]: Yes. Um, hello, I'm Alain Rigney. I'm a CTO of a small startup based in Paris called Kubo Labs, and we develop tools to help identify and solve issues on your Kubernetes cluster very quickly.

[Kaslin Fields]: Excellent.

[Camila Martins]: Yeah, um, my name is Camila Martins. I'm from Brazil. I'm a GDE, uh, from Google Cloud and also Modern Architecture . and I organize um some DevOps Days events, uh, like CNCF KCD events meetups, uh the KCD Rio de Janeiro actually, and the DevOps days through Brazil and, so, yeah, I'm so involved with the community and I'm also I'm a senior um at Starblock too. Yeah.

[Kaslin Fields]: Thank you both so much for being on today. I'm excited to talk about some of the things that you all have been doing recently. Let's start off with KubeCon EU. I know that you were there. How did it go?

[Alain Regnier]: Yes, I just uh switched from a to a to next.

[Kaslin Fields]: Right over. It was the week before, so.

[Alain Regnier]: Exactly. No, it was great. Um, a lot of uh interesting things to to to find out. Uh, one of the big news for me, uh, was the uh Neoforce project. I don't know if you've heard about it. They mentioned it during the the keynote. Uh, it's an effort to build some sort of sovereign cloud in Europe. And this is a very major topic in Europe right now . and I've been involved on the French side of things with what's called second cloud there. And um, this new project that we had not heard about before, it's actually backed by the Linux Foundation. And as you can imagine, this is a this is a big thing.

[Alain Regnier]: Um, a lot of interesting things. So, you know, I was in Salt Lake City before that, I was in Paris before that. I've been going to KubeCon many times over the last few years. Um, one of the thing that was very interesting to me also was the presence of OpenTelemetry everywhere . like like everywhere. Um, this is really uh very interesting and and good I think for the industry. Platform engineering was a big thing also. There are still some solution that seems a bit complex to implement within companies, but uh we we're getting there. So, something also that was very interesting for me in London, especially compared to the to the other edition was that I attended several very technical talks. That's not always the case. Maybe I missed them on the program . but this time, uh a couple actually a couple of session I I went out of the session thinking, wow, I definitely need to watch it again. Um because it was very interesting, very technical, the kind that I like and I did not get everything. So um well that's that's pretty much it . otherwise just a regular KubeCon Europe and very similar to what took place in Paris last year or in Amsterdam to to years ago.

[Kaslin Fields]: Yeah, the KubeCon schedule is so large. It's hard to judge which talks will be exactly what you want them to be and so that's something common that I hear. So a couple of themes from KubeCon it sounds like observability, especially OpenTelemetry, platform engineering, which I've seen here as well. We had a platform engineering meetup which was really, really crowded here on the Next show floor. Excellent.

[Alain Regnier]: What what what nice thing also. That's a personal thing but um there was more observability than AI, I would say as a

[Kaslin Fields]: Oh, I did hear that it was lower. Yes, yes.

[Alain Regnier]: Uh and that was uh definitely plus. Of course, we still need AI and we want AI in too, but I think it was much more related to what we actually do with our customers. So

[Kaslin Fields]: a better balance. Yes. with the new upcoming AI stuff which a lot of folks aren't really doing yet and the stuff that everyone is actually doing.

[Alain Regnier]: doing, exactly.

[Kaslin Fields]: Yep. Understandable. And KubeCon is of course a huge event for the cloud native community and is used as an example for a lot of different events. And Camila, would you like to talk about that?

[Camila Martins]: Yeah, and CNCF and we have other events around the world and uh well we have a lot of different communities. So for example, we have the Docker community that Docker is right here too . and uh we have the Docker community. I'm also a Docker Captain . and we try to help people to understand uh containers because it's curious but we have a lot of people that want to go inside, go deeper in the world of developer, and the Vops, DevSecOps, but they do not understand nowadays on how to build, how to create images . and I think the most important thing is to understand the basics and we go to the containers. And we have other communities there. We have Elastic that it's also here. We have the CNCF community, so we have um we have right now in the last month, we had KCD event in Rio de Janeiro, and that community days for people.

[Kaslin Fields]: exactly.

[Camila Martins]: And we had a bunch of people uh almost for a community that just started this year and we had only like three months to organize. We had um 300 people and everyone was so involved and uh in a place that he only supports like 100 and a half uh 150 people. Yeah, and so we we saw people uh standing up and watching the the talks but it was so amazing because we have a company in Latin America that wants to help, wants to share and I think in the Vops, in communities like cloud native, the most important thing it's how we can help, support, make people migrate to other careers. And I saw a lot of people changing their lives. So on these events like Google Cloud Next, um, KubeCon that I was in Amsterdam two years ago and also in Salt Lake last year, they are so important to create connection, networking, and also to understand that it's not about only your journey, but we have a bunch of people that it's only in the same journey. So you have a lot of people that can help you. So that's why I believe in the communities and that's why I support them. So, um we have all of these communities, also, um, the HashiCorp community that's also here. Wow. Yeah, all these all this this companies, they are not just um in the booths, but they are trying to help these people to go or go deeper and go go first. So, yeah, this it's it's a hard work. I think, I think people that go to the s, I don't know if everybody understands how hard it is to do all of this, but yeah, and that's why I I celebrate this and and I say to everybody that I I know that work and volunteer for. Thanks, thanks for your work. Thanks for being volunteer because it's really a hard work to do events like this. Even if it's 100, 60 people, 50 people, a meet up for 20 people, it's it's really hard work. Yeah, because we have other things to do. We are doing this because we believe on this, yeah.

[Kaslin Fields]: Absolutely. and you run community days Brazil and you do events throughout Latin America . that was a lot of events.

[Camila Martins]: Yeah, I'm an organizer from KCD Rio de Janeiro with other incredible um people, but I'm also organizing the DevOps days, Rio de Janeiro and supporting other DevOps days that they are through Brazil and I'm a speaker in a lot of uh Latin America events, not only uh from KCD, CNCF, but also from Google, for example, we we had right now, uh we just ended the season of the IWD, International Women's Day uh from Google and we had in Rio and I'm going in the end of this it's it's ending the the this season. So in the end of this this month, I'm going to Bogota to talk to amazing women . and we are going to start we are starting right now also the build with AI. So yeah, Google it's also celebrating. We have a lot of things, DevRel things and stuff to do, yeah.

[Kaslin Fields]: Let's dive deeper into the content that happens at these kinds of events. What do folks want to learn? Alain, you were at KubeCon EU, you talked a little bit about some of the talks that you saw that were really technical. I'd love to hear more about those and I'd also love to hear about a talk that I hear you gave about the 10 best practices for Kubernetes. Could you give us a little sneak peek at that? What are some of your top best practices? And we'll come back to your favorite talk.

[Alain Regnier]: Sure, sure, yeah. So actually it was a lightning talk um regarding GKE and and best practices. What can I say? For example, um when you get started, you need to be very careful with your pool, uh the way you create them because they cost they can cost you a lot more than they actually need to. Um for example, um you can um select specifically a zone or a region where it's going to be cheaper for you. So you have to evaluate the ratio between the latency for your users and the price um you're going to pay. Um something else you can do is you can purchase um committed usage so that basically you say, I'm going to be using for one year, for two years, you're going to get a discount . nice way to to save uh on the cost. Um you can also use uh preemptible uh VM is now being called spot VMs on um on GKE where basically the VM can be kicked um at some point. Um but it will be much cheaper for your for your usage. So if your workload can handle it, uh it's very nice and nice way to to to save money. Another aspect that you can uh also um investigate um is the all the advanced networking features you get um on on GKE and very often people don't don't know them uh or don't know them well enough. For example, private clusters where you're going to get only private IP for uh your nodes, no security risk of uh someone accessing the node from the outside. Um the authorized networks where you specify which IP address can access the API. Um what else ? um also the Dataplane V2, uh which is a very nice feature where basically it's based on on eBPF uh and you have um advanced features. One that I particularly like is uh when you create network policies on your cluster, something is being prevented. Well, nice, the the the network policy is working, but you don't know exactly who was making a request and so on. All that you can get the logs um with Dataplane V2. Um that's um that's pretty nice. So again, knowing in advance all those uh network features. Uh another one also, which is very nice is the IP alias um mode on uh on um GCP which turns into what's I think it's called native VPC native cluster now on on GKE, uh where basically one node will get its IP address, but also a full subnet of IP addresses that will be attached to the node, and those IP addresses will be used for the pods directly. So, from a routing point of view, from an overhead point of view, this is actually much more efficient. Well, that's the kind of thing that I think you should uh know when you when you're using GKE. And um, maybe a third one, which is very rarely used and I'm very surprised by that. It's the uh GKE dashboards. The whole thing has been completely revamped. It's very powerful. You can do filtering, you can do a lot of things. And every time I ask people, I have only have a few hands that that raise or, oh, I didn't know I could I could go there. Usually we get the cluster and they work with the cluster. Now one advice is to really spend half an hour with the GKE dashboard and then you will always get back to them.

[Kaslin Fields]: Yeah, kind of boiling it down to three points that really apply anywhere is node management. Yes. Figuring out what machines are in your cluster and keeping it to the machines that you need and the sizes that you need. Yeah. Fascinating area of of cost optimization that I love to talk about. I might ask another question about that. And then networking. Always good to understand how your networks work, especially if you're working in the cloud, if you're working um between different regions, there can be costs associated with that. If you have to transfer data outside of the cloud, there's always costs to think about. Definitely something that you want to look into and make sure that you understand as you're getting into um wherever you're running your Kubernetes clusters. Um and so we've got opt node management, um Networking Networking and observability. Yes. Dashboards, ways that you can visualize what's going on in your cluster so that you can control those costs. You can't control the costs if you don't know what you're spending on. You miss it.

[Alain Regnier]: And and don't just set up observability and forget about it. Spend the required amount of time to learn how to use them and go back regularly to your dashboard so that you don't lose the touch because we also see often people that have not been to their observability tools for a while, and they just don't know how to to use them anymore, and so they stop using it completely.

[Kaslin Fields]: Yep. And then at some point you're like, huh, what didn't we have something that told me what was happening? What was happening in this cluster? Where did that go? I've seen that happen before. All right, Camila, let's talk a little bit about some of the content that you've seen in events lately. What are some of the big trends that you're seeing around Kubernetes and cloud native? What do you think people want to learn about?

[Camila Martins]: a lot about observability . uh like Alain said before, things like OpenTelemetry. I'm watching a lot of this things on in Salt Lake I saw a bunch of talks about it and a lot of trends with AI. So yeah, absolutely AI it's a thing. So how we can use AI in monitoring, so how we can um, um apply it to understand when it's a peak in monitoring and understand if this peak it's normal and it's going to be normalized or it's a thing that it's out of on the monitoring or maybe um also in documentation, um AI to help to create documentation because we know that it's not everybody or for example, me that we do not like to write documentation as well, but we know that it's so important. So we have Gen AI to well create this documentation not only to us to understand what we did before, what we are doing, but to also documentate our architecture and to our team, to other teams in a cross uh work and between other in in our company . and um also um I'm watching some companies that are trying to put AI as as as as a thing to, hey, we use AI too. So come on. It's a really thing. And um I saw a report that it's really interesting um from Docker um that because it's it's also a thing that we are talking a lot about like AI and what it's going to happen to us with AI and the Docker did a report that it's so interesting um that AI Gen AI it's helping us with our work, like for example, to build CLI comments or commands or for um to create documentation or for create test because in our infrastructure uh environments, we know that there's not every place that we create tests for our infrastructure behavior and we know that it's a thing that we need. And also um to create code and what kind of code we are creating. So all these models that also we are seeing right now with Gen AI and 2.5 and others, I think this this models that are being best uh improved, uh we can create code that we can go further with our infrastructure as code. So we can create best Terraform, docker and implementate in our cloud. So, I know that sometimes when we get and and also to troubleshooting because sometimes when we get when we get a thing that's going wrong, we just got there and we just search in Google and and yeah, and now Google is better because we have so and so yeah and and right now we have and it was a problem because sometimes that error that we had, nobody had before. So it was like, okay, so what we can do? And Gemini it's improving us to, okay, what kind of things we can do because we are mixing uh the models with the documentation that this platform that we are trying to troubleshoot uh has . so yeah, it it's improving us to to to go best with our applications and to maintain our infrastructure. So, I think the all the companies in a way they're trying to put AI but to improve what they have in a way about observability or to create infrastructure or to maintain this infrastructure and uh well, but the things that I see the most, like Alan said, it's more about observability and and how to work with this observability . and and like I said, a lot of OpenTelemetry and I think that I really love that it's eBPF. I'm I love eBPF. I just met Liz Rice. Liz Rice, if you are hearing this, I love you. So So and also about this advanced networks, network policies, how to deal with different protocols and how to um work inside the Kubernetes with high performance, uh cluster mesh, service mesh, improve the service mesh because we are talking about service mesh for a long time, but how to improve the service mesh. So um this job with eBPF they are going uh really deep dive with that too and it's amazing . not only is but other companies too . it's it's so it's so nice. so.

[Kaslin Fields]: And just to get back on what you said, um I think it's important also to realize that the results we get from AI tools have considerably uh improved over the last couple of years.

[Kaslin Fields]: Yeah, especially in the last like couple months.

[Camila Martins]: You're right. You're right. Amazing.

[Kaslin Fields]: and we're getting to a point where it's actually becoming really useful. Yeah.

[Kaslin Fields]: I kind of love the combination of what you were saying of observability and AI. I think there's something really important to point out there. Um you were mentioning documentation which I love the call out for. AI can be such a great tool to get you past that blank page. If you need to write some documentation and you're like, oh, I don't even know where to begin or if you're writing a blog post or whatever you may be documenting, AI can be really useful for just getting you started. And with AI and the ability to generate these things, I think the volume of everything we're seeing is going to increase dramatically and being able to understand what we have when we're operating in that kind of scale and when there's that kind of scale of things to consume, observability becomes even more important again. Even though we're talking about observability of systems, I think uh kind of it all works together. AI is going to kind of explode the amount of stuff that we're looking at in all kinds of different areas. So.

[Camila Martins]: Yeah, I think AI doesn't need to be the the whole thing, but a way to use target. So for example, I don't know how to start this architecture, this documentation, but how can I start it? So it it can be useful to create ideas to you. So it it's really useful for it. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Kaslin Fields]: I like to remind folks that content that exists is better than content that doesn't. Yeah. Absolutely. AI is so helpful for that, but you do always have to check it. It can make things up. So, you don't want to just AI generate all of your stuff, you want to at least check that it's right, but it can get you far fast.

[Alain Regnier]: And you don't want to execute on production what the AI gave you before reading it. So you need to make sure.

[Kaslin Fields]: You need to make sure.

[Kaslin Fields]: There's definitely no security problems in this code. So, coming back to Alain, let's talk about some of those talks that you've seen recently. What are some of the coolest things that you've learned in talks? And we'll be quick with this one.

[Alain Regnier]: Yeah. Well, there there was one that was a subject I was not very familiar with which was the CSI, the uh the the storage uh interface. Um I attended a talk that was talking about how to extend the the the CSI API. But they gave a very nice overview and a deep dive of how it works and and and and why. Um this was particularly interesting for me because again, this is a subject I didn't not really dig before. And um

[Kaslin Fields]: And was that at KubeCon?

[Alain Regnier]: Oh, that was at KubeCon.

[Kaslin Fields]: The container security interface.

[Alain Regnier]: Uh no yeah the the the no container storage interface.

[Kaslin Fields]: Storage interface. I have all the CSs.

[Alain Regnier]: and um and I was surprised because the I went through the talk just to learn a few things and and it was much more insightful than I than I expected . so

[Kaslin Fields]: And that kind of I see a tie into the AI things that you talked about. It's just what's top of mind, isn't it? The prevalence of stateful applications on Kubernetes is just skyrocketing. Another reason that you need to observe it more closely and also that storage is becoming really important.

[Alain Regnier]: Yes. I don't know if they made that tie in the talk, but So nothing that talk, but that's an interesting point. I also got to see on the developer lounge um area, a talk about, I forgot the exactly the name of the project, but it basically it's Postgres, um running directly on the cluster, not even as a stateful set. But uh with um redundancy with a failover um directly and uh the demo they made was very impressive. So I definitely need to dig in that again.

[Kaslin Fields]: Well, we're talking about storage and stateful. I'll take the opportunity to go off on a slight tangent, tell everyone something that I think folks should know. If you've ever looked into Agones is a open source project for running game servers on Kubernetes. When I started looking into it with Mark Mandel, who is one of the folks who like really the the person who kind of created it. What I noticed is that it's just a really good tool and system for running stateful workloads on Kubernetes. So, if you haven't checked that out for your stateful workloads, even though they're not game servers, you might check out the kind of structures and processes that Agones put in place. It could be useful for all kinds of stateful workloads. So the CSI talk, any others come to mind?

[Alain Regnier]: What else? Um well, there were several on on uh on AI at different level, um including here at Next, um AI for developers, because we do development as as I mentioned . and um, you know, starting from asking chat GBT a few year a couple of years ago, you know, how would I do that and just finding which framework, which API and getting some pretty good results. Um now we see uh new um new mechanism or new new application like like or or or and so on . and integration in in your IntelliJ um you know, IDE of uh something like a Gemini, those are very powerful tools. And the demo that I've seen uh were very interesting. That's something also that um

[Kaslin Fields]: Yeah.

[Alain Regnier]: I definitely want to, for me, going through a conference like that, it's a good opportunity to learn about new things, and then you want to dig into them as soon as you're back. And the key, uh the key aspect of all that is, are you going to be able to dig into them over the last couple of weeks after the show or months later?

[Kaslin Fields]: Yeah. And I like, it's always good to think about the perspective that you're looking at AI tools from because it's like, there are so many AI tools for the developer workflow that I think folks are really interested in how they can make their own work as developers much faster. And then there's of course all the AI tools that you build into applications for your users. So there's a couple of different perspectives to consider there. So we're talking about like developer tools that are integrating AI.

[Kaslin Fields]: Excellent. And Camila, you've had some time to think about your top talks and topics recently. What are some things, some of the best talks that you've seen recently?

[Camila Martins]: I saw um some talks are really interesting . for example, I saw on how AI helped at McDonald's in in first. Oh yeah, I love user stories . in with data governance. It was really nice how to deal with because I was talking uh about it um before, it's hard to deal with events and it's hard to deal with a huge restaurant worldwide and they are using AI with that. And it's so interesting to see how AI it's helping with different contexts. So I saw that for McDonald's and I saw that for Target too, to deal in the context of McDonald's with the with uh the food and target uh with electronics and uh I saw also a thing that it's more uh academical, um that it's a Gco, a Jeko. I I I think this is the name uh that it was for uh images, um models to images . um so how they are dealing uh with understand if it's a thing that we are already have, but they are um make improving it how uh how to understand if it's a dog or not, different dogs and but they are making it in an academical way. So it was really uh nice. Uh we had GDE content too, so it was really amazing. And uh for me the keynotes that we had was it was so nice. The video too and also the AI agents um because I'm more in Google Cloud stuff, but I because we have a bunch of AI things, so we need to learn this thing. So AI agents for me, it was a thing. So and in in the first day of the keynote, one thing that really impressed me was in the moment of I don't remember, um but and an e-commerce that you can talk with the chat and uh and and collect everything and make discounts and go to the checkout and make the whole process just talking with the the website. It was a thing. So yeah.

[Kaslin Fields]: Absolutely. The way we interact with computers are changing.

[Camila Martins]: and and and yeah, absolutely. And uh how they are now understanding us. We before it was like a thing, we talk and sometimes they do not understood before. And now we talk and they understand and like, oh, amazing. I'm talking like it's really a it's really a person. Yeah, it was crazy. And so we had a lot of new ideas and uh features and developer and uh the general keynote, it was a thing, but the AI agents and this this news about the video to that it's a thing that I'm I'm following since the last year in the Google IO. It's a thing that really impressed me. Yeah, for sure. And how they are helping uh other companies, um banks and uh cloud, some multi cluster and multi uh and multi cloud content. It's really a thing, for sure. Something just Gemini does.

[Kaslin Fields]: Yeah.

[Kaslin Fields]: I love keynotes at any event, KubeCon, Next, whatever conference you may be going to because they always try to, you know, have the biggest themes really well represented there. Um and so you get a lot out of going to one session even though it's a very long session. Um I also love that you mentioned the developer keynote because I was actually backstage during the developer keynote helping to run some of the backups. Wow. Fun fact, one of the two failures in the developer keynote was real. Wow. So uh go check that out. See if you can tell which one was the real failure. It was so smooth, it's hard to tell. So, thank you so much both of you for being on today. And I'm so glad that we got to talk together in Google Cloud Next and make a video.

[Alain Regnier]: Thank you so much.

[Camila Martins]: Thank you.

[Alain Regnier]: Thank you.

[Kaslin Fields]: That brings us to the end of another episode. If you enjoyed the show, please help us spread the word and tell a friend. If you have any feedback for us, you can find us on social media at Kubernetes Pod or reach us by email at Kubernetespodcast@google.com. You can also check out the website at Kubernetespodcast.com where you'll find transcripts, show notes and links to subscribe. Please consider rating us in your podcast player so we can help more people find and enjoy the show. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.