Serverless + Kubernetes: Two highly relevant topics | Two world-class speakers

We'll start 2019 by featuring two topics that are highly relevant and extremely popular with technologists around the world - serverless computing and Kubernetes.

Serverless:

Speaker: Mark Hinkle, Co-founder, Triggermesh
Mark has a long history in emerging technologies and open source. Before co-founding TriggerMesh he was the Executive Director of the Node.js Foundation with membership including Microsoft, IBM, Google, Intel, PayPal, and other industry leaders.

Previously he was the VP of Marketing at The Linux Foundation. Mark joined the Linux Foundation from Citrix were he was the Head of the Citrix Open Source Business Office with participation in numerous trade organizations including the Xen Project, Apache CloudStack, Open Daylight, and the Open Stack Foundation. Mark joined Citrix as a result of the acquisition of Cloud.com where he was Vice President of Community. Previously he held the position Vice President of Zenoss, an open source enterprise management company and Director of Technical Support for MindSpring/Earthlink.

Talk: Serverless is FaaS-tastic
Serverless can be misleading as a descriptor. Serverless infrastructure actually runs on servers. However, the “server-less” reference comes from the fact that serverless abstracts the complexity of running servers away from the software developer which enables them to develop software without having to worry about the scaling, redundancy and overall infrastructure design. This is called Function-as-a-Service or Faas for short.

For the purposes of this talk, we’ll discuss serverless technologies where someone else is providing serverless infrastructure. Popular serverless platforms include Amazon Web Services Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Microsoft Azure Functions.

The presentation will also discuss the software that can be used to deliver Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) that enables serverless, including serverless frameworks like Knative, Kubeless, OpenFaaS, and Oracle’s fn.

Finally, we’ll cover what a cloud-native application might look like including the use cases and design patterns that serverless is geared towards providing.

Kubernetes Functionality:

Speaker: Dr. Brad Topol, Distinguished Engineer @ IBM
Brad is a Kubernetes contributor, serves as a member of the Kubernetes Conformance Workgroup, and is a Kubernetes Documentation Maintainer. He is a former member of the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors an OpenStack core contributor and was the project lead for the OpenStack Interoperability Challenge effort.

Title:
An Introduction to Kubernetes Functionality and an Update on the Kubernetes Conformance Certification Program

Abstract:
Kubernetes continues to experience explosive growth as it becomes the de facto platform of choice for the creation of cloud native computing applications. Key to the value proposition of this open source infrastructure is that Kubernetes environments be interoperable across different vendors’ environments. This ensures that Kubernetes applications are portable and customers feel confident that vendor lock-in is not occurring. The Kubernetes development community recently formed a Kubernetes Certification Program and Kubernetes Conformance Workgroup to define requirements and test suites that are suitable for certifying Kubernetes environments as meeting conformance/interoperability requirements. In this talk I will begin with an introduction to Kubernetes that covers its functionality and capabilities. I will then I provide an overview of the Kubernetes Certification Program and the Kubernetes Conformance workgroup and give updates from our most recent meeting held at KubeCon. I will also discuss how the Kubernetes open source code test suite is annotated to identify and describe conformance tests and also explain how to get involved and contribute to this critical initiative.