“Service mesh is going to go through this wonderful phase of growth,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO/COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). As companies adopt Kubernetes, break apart their monoliths and start to modernize, they begin to look for solutions to traffic management and they need to observe their systems at another level. That’s where service mesh comes in, and this is the kind of fundamental thing that CNCF wants to grow and support.
CNCF is not a kingmaker, but a neutral host, said Aniszczyk. Its main role is education and support. It offers certification exams and a free EdX course for Kubernetes and will offer certification exams on Envoy later this year.
Aniszczyk thinks service mesh is at a moment in its history when it’s about to take off. “In general,” he said, “we’re in a period of the industry that a lot of companies are basically revisiting their whole architecture.”
In an interview with Tetrate at Service Mesh Day 2019, Aniszczyk compared the feel and size of the event to the inaugural KubeCon in 2015. Some 10,000 people are expected at the next KubeCon North America, to be held in San Diego this November.
“It’s all about getting the right people in the room toward working for a common goal.”
CNCF’s hosted projects include Kubernetes, Envoy, Prometheus, and many other open source and cloud native technologies.
Tetrate will participate in KubeCon EU next week in Barcelona May 20-23, at KubeCon Shanghai June 24-26, and KubeCon San Diego Nov. 18-21, 2019.
Transcript
I was originally going to do the closing remarks but I have to fly home a little bit earlier than expected. So I’m just going to do kind of a quick, you know, CNCF “Why Service Mesh” and kind of make a little brief announcement for later in the year. So, you know, the last few years, my life has been a little bit crazy since joining CNCF and helping start the thing, you know, I kind of feel that service mesh is going to go through this wonderful, you know, phase of growth. You know, I don’t want to call it like service, service mesh wars, but there’s just going to be a lot of growth competition and growing the ecosystem. So, um, you know, in the context of CNCF, you know, a lot of people are still somewhat new to the organization.
You know, we, we are the kind of a neutral non for profit that was built to build a home for Kubernetes and the concept of cloud native computing. We are one of the largest open source, foundations out there. We are very unique in way that we have basically all the kind of global cloud providers as members and we have a variety of, of projects that essentially enhance the cloud native space. Envoy. You know, kind of being relevant to here and we kind of have a bunch of other kind of a service mesh empowering projects. Um, we also have a cloud native definition, like I mentioned earlier. I think the service mesh crowd may want to get together and crank something out. The only thing I’m not happy with that is it’s just too long. I can never remember the damn thing, but it was approved.
I’m good. I’m not going to fight that battle. So service mesh, you know, you know, a service mesh encompasses more than just cloud native, but you know, it comes up all the time in discussions when, you know, I talk with people in our community, our projects, our members. You know, a lot of times when companies adopt Kubernetes and get there, you know, all of a sudden, you know, they’re like, you know, I got a buddy who runs infrastructure at Under Armour who’s like “Crap, we need a solution for traffic management,” for example. “Like, you know, what’s out there, what’s on the cloud native landscape?” It’s like, oh, there’s the Istio. Okay Istio may solve that problem, you know, for me. And so essentially what happens is, you know, as companies modernize, potentially become more cloud native, break things in microservices, they look for solutions around traffic management, you know, mutual TLS and so on.
And that’s essentially how they kind of discover these technologies and projects. And so, you know, we see this kind of a, as a very fundamental thing that CNCF wants to grow and support. So one thing that we’re doing in kind of collaboration with the Service Mesh Day community is a, we’re going to be announcing that we are going to host a co-located Service Mesh Day event at Kubecon North America. How many people plan to be a Cubecon at least or have been. Yes, quite a bit. All right. That’s good. All right we’ll see you there. So, um, you know, we’re going to have a lot more space. It will be November 18th. We’d love to see a, a lot of folks, that are here, Kind of there we expect over 10,000 people at that event, which is a little bit crazy for a small little foundation, but, um, there’s a lot of interest in this space and I think it’s good to always kind of provide a, a neutral place for members and users and vendors to kind of get together.
So, we’d love to kind of have you involved in the organization at any level. Like, you know, we kind of have a saying that, um, you know, contribution really is kind of the currency of open source and if you’re going to bet your business on these technologies come support the organizations that kind of help make all these companies work together in a fair, safe way. It could definitely be a little bit political sometimes, but, um, we do our best to kind of make sure that rules are in place and people could actually collaborate and grow together. So, um, that was it and you know, hopefully we’ll see you on November 18th. Um, I’m going to go run to the airport right now and hopefully catch my flight home. Otherwise my wife will kill me cause we have a wedding tomorrow. So. All right. Thank you all.
