Microsoft Open Source Blog 
We’re in Austin this week for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, where all the CNCF projects will gather under one roof. Conference co-chairs, Microsoft’s Michelle Noorali and Google’s Kelsey Hightower, have put together a compelling program of emerging trends in microservices architectures and orchestration, container operations, distributed logging for containers, serverless, and more.
Drop by the Azure booth to learn more about our open source projects with the Kubernetes community or check out the below list of Microsoft and Azure keynotes and sessions throughout the week, with topics ranging from the Open Container Initiative (OCI) to using Kubernetes for humanitarian relief efforts.
Not at KubeCon? You can still live stream all the keynotes here and follow us @OpenAtMicrosoft to get the latest updates.
KEYNOTES:
CNCF Project Updates – Michelle Noorali, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft Azure
Wednesday, December 6 at 9:20am, Exhibit Hall 3, Level 1
Michelle is a software engineer on the Azure Container Service team at Microsoft and a core maintainer on the Kubernetes Helm project. She co-leads SIG-Apps which is the Kubernetes special interest group for running and managing applications and workloads on Kubernetes.
Watch in person or live stream it here.
Kubernetes: This Job is Too Hard: Building New Tools, Patterns and Paradigms to Democratize Distributed System Development – Brendan Burns, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft
Wednesday, December 6 at 5:30pm, Exhibit Hall 3, Level 1
Brendan Burns is a software engineer for Microsoft Azure and co-founder of the Kubernetes project. Before Kubernetes he worked on search infrastructure at Google and was a professor at Union College in NY.
Watch in person or live stream it here.
SESSIONS: Wednesday, December 6
Panel: Kubernetes, Cloud Native and the Public Cloud [B] – Moderated by Dan Kohn, Cloud Native Computing Foundation
11:10am, Ballroom A, Level 1
The six largest public cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Oracle — are all now major backers of CNCF and Kubernetes. This is a chance to hear their perspective on investments they are making into Kubernetes and other CNCF technologies.
Container Runtime and Image Format Standards – What it Means to be “OCI-Certified” [I] – Jeff Borek, IBM & Stephen Walli, Microsoft
11:10am, Ballroom B, Level 1
With the proliferation and rapid growth of container-based solutions over the past few years— including container-based solutions from almost all major IT vendors, cloud providers, and emerging start-ups—the industry needed a standard on which to support container image formats and runtimes while also ensuring interoperability and neutrality. The Open Container Initiative (OCI) was launched with the goal of developing common, minimal, open standards and specifications around container technology without the fear of lock-in. This session will also include a demo of the OCI Image validator being run against container images from container image registries from multiple vendors.
Microservices, Service Mesh, and CI/CD Pipelines: Making It All Work Together [I] – Brian Redmond, Microsoft
2:45pm, Ballroom A, Level 1
Microservices come with many advantages for massively scaling applications. With that comes many challenges around service communication and application updates. It is pretty simple to do blue/green deployment and canary releases with a basic web site. But what about thousands of microservices? How can we have blue/green deployments at the service level while still allowing for efficient communication? This is one of the areas where service mesh technology is a huge benefit in Kubernetes. The overall goal of this demo-heavy session is to show the value of these technologies working together to ease the delivery of cloud native applications.
SESSIONS: Thursday, December 7
The Elements of Kubernetes – Foundational Concepts for Apps Running on Kubernetes [I] – Aaron Schlesinger, Microsoft Azure
2:45pm, Meeting Room 19AB, Level 4
“The Elements of Style” is one of the most important and foundational guidelines on how to write well. It has effectively summarized, in a list of seminal guidelines, how to harness the power of the English language to write high quality prose of almost any kind. In this talk, Aaron will bring many opinions together and lay out an “Elements of Kubernetes” guide for app developers and operators alike, relating each “element” to stories and details he’s seen in the community that reveal what makes a good Kubernetes and cloud native app.
Accelerating Humanitarian Relief with Kubernetes [I] – Erik Schlegel & Christoph Schittko, Microsoft
4:35pm, Meeting Room 9C, Level 3
How can UN humanitarian aid field experts use social media to gain insight, understand trends and track key humanitarian issues? Through a collaboration with Microsoft and UN OCHA, Project Fortis was created to accelerate the surveillance around humanitarian disasters and health epidemics around the world. This talk discusses the architecture of a high-available native spark pipeline running across multiple Kubernetes clusters to support Fortis customers.
SESSIONS: Friday, December 8
Setting Sail with Istio [B] – Lachlan Evenson, Microsoft
2pm, Meeting Room 9AB, Level 3
Even with Kubernetes, doing microservices can be hard. In this session we will dive into Istio, A platform that builds on Kubernetes primitives and simplifies building and securing microservices. This session is a soup to nuts walkthrough of the Istio architecture along with diving into deploying a microservice onto Istio from a user perspective. For those interested in learning more about Istio, this session is a great introduction and will be very hands on.
Democratizing Machine Learning on Kubernetes [I] – Joy Qiao & Lachlan Evenson, Microsoft
2:45pm, Meeting Room 9C, Level 3
One of the largest challenges facing the machine learning community today is understanding how to build a platform to run common open source machine learning libraries such as Tensorflow. Both Joy and Lachie are both passionate about making machine learning accessible to the masses using Kubernetes. In this session they’ll share how to deploy a distributed Tensorflow training cluster complete with GPU scheduling on Kubernetes, best practices on using distributed Tensorflow on top of Kubernetes, and more. All work presented in this session will be accessible via a public GitHub repository.
Follow the team @OpenAtMicrosoft to stay connected during KubeCon. Looking forward to seeing you there!