At KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2024, Alex Chircop, Chief Product Architect at Akamai, discussed Akamai’s increasing involvement in the Kubernetes ecosystem, including their Gold membership in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Platinum sponsorship of KubeCon.

Chircop also talked about the Akamai App Platform to simplify Kubernetes deployment, management and scalability.

Chircop explained the role of CNCF’s Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs) in advising the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and supporting project reviews, noting the rapid growth of CNCF projects, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainability.

Akamai’s commitment to open source includes providing over a million dollars in cloud services and credits to CNCF projects. Akamai also open sourced one of its tools, Flow-IPC, recently. Chircop highlighted the increasing maturity of Kubernetes adoption, reflected in the strong turnout for platform engineering sessions and the growing engagement with startups and project pavilions.

Guest: Alex Chircop (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai
Show: Let’s Talk

[read more]

Unedited Transcript (Note: the text is AI generated, it has not been edited or reviewed. It may contain errors, including incorrect names. It’s provided here under  Creative Commons license (CC by 4.0) to be used by bloggers, journalists and analysts for creating their own content.)

Questions discussed

• What kind of involvement does Akamai have with CNCF?
• What is the role of TAGs (Technical Advisory Groups)?
• How do TAGs and TOC (Technical Operating Committee) work together?
• Are there any patterns in the growth of the CNCF ecosystem?
• What kind of work is going on within Akamai to become more active in the open source sense?
• What kind of discussions and trends are you seeing at KubeCon?

Swapnil Bhartiya: This is Swapnil Bhartiya, and we are here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Salt Lake City, Utah. And today we have with us once again, Alex Chircop, Chief Product Architect at Akamai. Alex, it’s nice to have you on the show. It’s

Alex Chircop: always great to be here. Nice to be see you again.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Yeah, it’s my pleasure to host you again. And of course, you know we are talking, we’ll talk about CNCF’s TAG, which is Technical Advisor Group. And a lot of you know, your involvement with the when I say you Akamai is involvement with CNCF and all the open source projects. But before we go there, since we are here at KubeCon, and if I’m not wrong, Akamai is kind of new player in the, you know, KubeCon ecosystem, you know, we are seeing the booth, and the booth is also getting bigger and bigger every year. So talk a bit about Akamai from the lens of Kubernetes KubeCon.

Alex Chircop: So, so Akamai is, it’s a Gold member of the CNCF and a platinum sponsor for KubeCon. For us, it’s a really big it’s a really big opportunity to work with the community and talk about the Kubernetes services that that we offer, plus some of the new platform launches around our application platform, which is which is newly launched today and is available on the boot, and it’s making it easier for developers to consume Kubernetes without sort of all of the overhead of developing their own stacks.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What kind of involvement Akamai, you folks have with CNCF? Of course, you said membership, but I want to talk about the project label.

Alex Chircop: We’re working on a number of different projects and a number of different community entities. We’re very active in the tags, for example. So myself, I’m the co chair of the storage tag. My colleague Steven rust is co chair of the runtime tag, and the tags are very important into the running of the CNCF, in terms of the projects that are joining the CNCF, you’re

Swapnil Bhartiya: also involved with CNCF tag or technical advisory group, first of all, define what is the role of tags.

Alex Chircop: So there are eight tags in the CNCF. The tags offer our technical advisory groups, and they advise the TOC, which is the technology the technical operating committee, and who make the technical decisions on the direction for the CNCF and the projects that are joining the CNCF. So the tanks are there to scale the working of the TOC. We have over 200 projects in the CNCF today. They keep growing very, very fast. Since KubeCon in Paris, we’ve had 19 new projects. And of course, you know, in order to review projects and and and sort of shepherd them through the process, there is often need for specific, you know, subject matter expertise and and also work the tax would then also work with the community to help bring those projects into the CNCF. The other big thing that we do in the tags is work with the community and the end users to make it easier for the end users to consume the projects in the CNCF, so things like generating white papers or other working groups that allow the end users to figure out the ecosystem, or figure out, you know, some of the interesting use cases in the upcoming projects in the ecosystem.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also talk about, you know, they also have to see there, how do these two work? And do they work together in parallel or separately?

Alex Chircop: So, so the tag, the way I think about it is, the tags are kind of like an extension of the TOC. The TOC retains all of the decision making capabilities the TOC are elected through, through the various election processes for that are defined in the mission charter for the CNCF, and the tags are effectively an extension that allowed them to provide additional subject matter expertise. Because, you know, you can’t expect every member in the TOC to be an expert in everything. Plus also it’s a bandwidth thing, right? You know the we’re trying to standardize and formalize more the process for importing projects into CNCF and reviewing projects, and the tags help with that due diligence process as we, as we review projects, when

Swapnil Bhartiya: you look at CNCF ecosystem, land is growing. Are you seeing any patterns in this growth, and how is it growing?

Alex Chircop: So we’re definitely seeing a lot of growth in the ecosystem. There’s, there’s a massive amount of sandbox projects, for example, which which are projects which are joining the CNCF to help grow and establish themselves. Some of these might be experiments that don’t work out in the end. Some of these might be, you know, the next Kubernetes and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s very exciting to sort of foster that and see things grow. We’re also seeing, you know, like a huge influx in in some new areas. AI, where we’re seeing schedulers and controllers and other functions that allow, that allow AI workloads to be deployed properly on Kubernetes. You know, as as we discussed in Kubecon in Paris, if AI is the new application, then Kubernetes is the new web server and so. So I think, I think we’re seeing a lot of new, new developments there. We’re also seeing developments, for example, in sustainability and how we manage, how we manage the energy usage, for example, of Kubernetes clusters and and that helps manage costs, but it also helps with the with the ecosystem, with the with our sustainability in the ecosystem.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also talk about what kind of work is going on within Akamai to become a more active? I mean, of course, you are active here, but in the open source sense, where you are building a culture within Akamai. So the developers and they are also engaging and also contributing.

Alex Chircop: No, that’s correct. So, from Akamai’s point of view, you know, open source is a core foundation building block for everything we do, both in terms of, you know, operating systems, cloud, native networking, etc. The important thing here is, you know, to look at it both in terms of, you know, time, so the time that developers are contributing back to projects and being active in the ecosystem, but also, more importantly, in terms of the funding. So, for example, Akamai has provided more than a million dollars in credits to help CNCF projects do their testing or various other things that might be needed. So effectively giving cloud services from Akamai to help the projects work.

Swapnil Bhartiya: This is first day of Kubecon. I mean, almost end of the first day. So you have had enough interaction, enough traffic on your booth to get a pulse on where we are. Talk a bit about what kind of discussion you are seeing, what kind of audience you are seeing, what kind of trends that you are seeing are happening, and from horses mouth, yeah,

Alex Chircop: so, so that’s an interesting question. One, one of the interesting thing is we’re seeing a very huge project pavilion with a lot of people interacting in the project pavilion. So, so the interaction with the with the sort of the ground level projects is growing. Huge number of startups that are now sort of CNCF members and contributing innovative projects. But I also look at, sort of the first day, when you kind of see where people are going and what people are asking about, you know, I one of the things that really impressed me, for example, yesterday, was we had a platform engineering day and and it was, you know, a full house, standing room only for the whole day. And it kind of shows, sort of the, I kind of look at this as an indicator, a maturity indicator, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re past the stage where people are evaluating Kubernetes and evaluating cloud native. We’re now in the stage where we need, you know, the platforms to be, you know, as the saying goes, defining the platform as a product that effectively allows those internal developer teams to scale and accelerate their consumption of the cloud native ecosystem.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Alex, thank you so much for joining me today. Great insights for the community. And as usual, I look forward to talk to you again. Thank you.

Alex Chircop: Thank you again. Swap. It’s always fantastic to meet you at KubeCon, and I look forward to seeing

[/read]