Meet Cisco at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2021!

The apps we are building are becoming atomized: they are fracturing into microservices and ultra-specific APIs. I am excited that one of the most interesting and influential groups of developers working on these apps will be coming together to explore the paths forward in software next week at KubeCon + CloundNativeCon 2021. I’ll be there with the Cisco team and I want to give you a preview of what we’re looking forward to discussing…and announcing.

APIs, The Universe, and Everything

The ability to program a massive application by piecing together services from around the world gives us incredible flexibility and agility. But it also presents new problems, from API security to observability. I will be at KubeCon to discuss this challenge and to introduce APIClarity, a new open source program supported by Cisco. APIClarity provides observability across all API calls made from a cloud native application, matches them to their intended specification, and flags drifts, zombie (deprecated) and shadow (undocumented) APIs, among other things. APIClarity, available on Github, will be a useful tool to help you keep on top of the libraries of APIs you use, and to keep your applications more secure. I’m proud of the contributions we’ve made to the APIClarity open source community and happy to be working with our initial partners on it, API Metrics and 42Crunch. I look forward to demonstrating the project to you. Don’t miss my keynote at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon on October 13 starting at 10:05am PST. Register now for the conference (if you haven’t already)! At the conference, we’ll also be talking about SecureCN, Cisco’s comprehensive tool for container, Kubernetes, and API security. SecureCN includes APIClarity capabilities. My team will be demonstrating both APIClarity and SecureCN at the Secure demo station in Cisco’s booth at KubeCon. If you can’t make it in person, check out the free trial of SecureCN.

Don’t Miss Cisco’s Breakout Sessions

We’ll have more great technical sessions at the conference, too:

Edge Machine Learning for the Internet of Things

Our senior solutions architect Asheesh Goja will propose a novel approach to building Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) applications using Kubernetes. Using an illustrative reference architecture, the talk will explain emergent AIoT behaviors and architecture patterns. He’ll have a demo simulating an industrial IoT setting where sensors measure conditions in real-time and feed these data to an edge device. The device uses a TPU accelerator to apply logistical regression to predict future equipment breakdown. You will see how ML pipelines measure drift and re-train and re-deploy the model. Join us on October 14 at 11:55am PST.

Using Calico’s dataplanes

The Calico VPP dataplane, introduced at last year’s KubeCon, adds a new networking option for Calico on Linux alongside iptables and eBPF. This takes advantage of Calico’s pluggable dataplane support, which offers future-proofing and agility for the user in dataplane choices. Having VPP’s flexible and modular userspace networking stack in a Kubernetes environment enables all sorts of interesting things — such as allowing network-intensive pods to send and receive data at ludicrous speeds while conserving the CNI features we love, thanks to kernel bypass. In this talk, we will show you how we achieve that, the level of performance that we can reach, and how it compares to other approaches.Join Cisco software engineer Aloys Augustin and Tigera Developer Advocate Chris Tompkins, October 15 at 11:55am PST.

Building a fair and trustworthy ML pipeline

In this talk, Cisco product managers Meenakshi Kaushik and Neelima Mukiri will discuss adding trustworthiness and fairness to multi-cloud Kubeflow workflows. An overview of responsible and fair AI will lead to two demos: Using open source tools like MinDiff and Tensorflow for fair model learning; and including fairness as a parameter in HyperParameter using Kubeflow. Talk starts Friday, October 15, 4:30pm PST

Intro to the Cloud Native Function (CNF) Working Group

The CNF Working Group recommends best practices for networking applications that run on Kubernetes. In this session, we’ll introduce the Working Group, including how the team functions and what it produces. We’ll discuss example projects and describe how you can participation and contribute to the CNF Working Group. Join CNF WG co-chairs Ian Wells (Cisco), Jeffrey Saelens (Charter Communications), and Taylor Capenter (Vulk), October 15 at 5:35pm PST.

More to see and learn

We also have talks at events that are co-located with KubeCon and taking place before the physical KubeCon even kicks off: At GitOpsCon, see Gitopsify Cellular Architecture on October 12 at 9:30am to hear from Ayush Ghosh of Cisco and Sergey Sergeev of AppD (part of Cisco). They’ll explore how cellular architecture and Gitops together can help create an independently deployable, manageable, and observable solution for building and managing data-intensive microservices. Ayush Ghosh and Sergey Sergeev are also at ServiceMeshCon, giving a related talk called Test in Prod with Canary Everything on October 12 at 2:20pm. Come to this session to learn about using Service Mesh and Gitops to move from running multiple, expensive, non-prod and inconsistent environments to testing in production. They’ll discuss using Istio along with a custom Envoy filter to run account-based canary in production. Cisco will have much for you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, including deep dives into containerization tools in four zones in our in-person booth: Create, Connect, Secure, and Observe. See our Cisco at KubeCon page for a full lineup of what we’ll be showcasing. I look forward to seeing you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, either in person or online. Until then, check out more of the Open Source projects that Cisco is involved in. Learn more about Cisco at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2021