KubeCon NA 2024 Takeaways: GitOps, Platform Eng & Scaling CI/CD

KubeCon North America 2024 wrapped up in Salt Lake City and as is always the case in the world of a growing start up, the takeaways from the event are never-ending. 

The Testkube team was there - on the show floor, at the keynotes & talks, and at ArgoCon on Day 0. We learned a lot on the latest trends in the cloud native space and w'ere excited to share them with you! Here are some takeaways from the event that aren’t only about AI. ;) 

Why Testkube attended KubeCon NA

KubeCon is infamous for showcasing innovation, community, and some of the most pressing challenges and advancements in the cloud-native ecosystem. With over 9,000 attendees and a 50% first-timer turnout at the recent KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City, the event was buzzing with energy, discussions, and insights.

The Testkube Team has attended previous KubeCon events so we were excited to see how folks from the user community would react to new features and advancements in our tool (including a new architecture and dashboard since KubeCon Paris!). We were also looking forward to discussions about the challenges people face when scaling testing using modern CI/CD pipelines, buzz about GitOps and TestOps as it seems we have more and more practitioners in our own OSS Community, thoughts from Platform leaders as they juggle the aforementioned challenges, and above all welcoming the community at large to our 2nd ever KubeJam event which was organized and sponsored by Testkube, EDB, and KubeFM.

But more on that later.

ArgoCon Day 0: GitOps and the Argo Documentary

Our CTO Ole Lensmar and Product Manager Bruno Lopes began the week at co-located events including ArgoCon where the GitOps track was a standout and many talks focused on practical implementations and cultural shifts enabled by tools like ArgoCD. 

A particularly anticipated highlight was the launch of "The Argo Journey: A GitOps Story", a documentary showcasing how GitOps has transformed software delivery across industries. The film highlighted real-world adoption stories, from small startups to global enterprises.

During this event, we were excited to hear many GitOps experts reiterate that testing integration with GitOps workflows is non-negotiable. As noted by many folks throughout the week, GitOps without automated testing is like deploying blind—it’s only a matter of time before you stumble.

Platform Engineering Day 0: Platform Engineering Evolves with More Focus on the “How” Rather Than the “What” & New Certifications

Platform Engineering Day was the other much anticipated co-located event where the TAG-AppDelivery community took center stage. Atulpriya Sharma, a leader in the TAG-AppDelivery and a longtime member of our Testkube OSS Community, attended the event and provided us with some great insights saying that there was discussion around the importance of incorporating testing frameworks and tooling into platforms to ensure seamless and reliable developer workflows and better the overall developer experience. 

Also a big takeaway was the announcement of CNCF-backed certifications for tools like Backstage. These certifications aim to standardize best practices in building internal developer platforms (IDPs). We hope to hear more discussion around the importance of incorporating testing frameworks directly within these platforms and best practices in the space in the upcoming months.

Scaling CI/CD Pipelines and the Testing Challenge

Over the past couple of years, we hear more and more often that scaling CI/CD pipelines while maintaining reliable testing practices is inherently challenging due to the increased complexity of modern development environments. During KubeCon, discussions at our booth and during parallel community initiatives continued to circle this topic.

As pipelines scale to support microservices architectures, distributed teams, and multi-cloud deployments, they often involve numerous testing stages, such as unit, integration, performance, and security testing, all of which must be orchestrated seamlessly. You can learn more about this in the talk we gave at KCD London just prior to KubeCo NA.

Here’s what we learned from talking to so many end users in during the event:

• Running concurrent tests for multiple microservices or features can overwhelm infrastructure, lead to delays, test flakiness, or even complete pipeline failures
• Teams are looking for ways to address this by optimizing resource usage and enabling dynamic scaling of test environments based on workload needs
• Ensuring observability and debugging at scale is difficult
• Defining tests and testing needs can be a challenge and involves folks from almost all teams to do it well
• Identifying the root cause of a failed test is increasingly complex as the number of services and dependencies grow
• The real bottleneck isn’t speed—it’s visibility into what to test, what breaks, and why

Many told us that they also struggle with fragmentation in how testing is integrated, resulting in inconsistent test coverage or duplicated efforts which makes balancing automation with human oversight another hurdle they have to jump over. 

These challenges underscore why effective testing is the cornerstone of scaling CI/CD pipelines, ensuring they not only deliver fast but also deliver reliably.

CNCF’s Action Against Open Source Bullying

One of the more serious topics was CNCF’s commitment to addressing issues of toxic behavior in open source communities. In his keynote, CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk detailed steps to protect contributors from harassment, including enhanced moderation policies, clearer codes of conduct, and confidential reporting mechanisms. These actions were widely applauded, with attendees sharing their own stories on social media, showing the real impact of these changes.

Community and KubeJam

The community is the heart of KubeCon and the heart of Testkube. Our Testkube Team is always looking for ways to be involved in the cloud native community at large. From organizing, supporting, and speaking at Kubernetes Community Day events, to maintaining CNCF tools and growing awareness around them, to speaking on panels and growing awareness about CNCF Graduated projects, our team looks for every opportunity to give back.

This year, we took additional steps to celebrate the community at large by teaming up with EDB and KubeFM to host the 2nd KubeJam at KubeCon event.

The hackathon-style jam session encouraged collaboration among attendees who shared their praise for the momentous event across social media.

We were thrilled to welcome so many of you to our community jam session and want to thank all who participated for making it a huge success! We are already planning for London so please reach out if you’d like to help make it happen.

So Long, Salt Lake City. Hello London! 

KubeCon 2024 proved that the cloud-native ecosystem continues to innovate, evolve, and address its toughest challenges with an unwavering focus on collaboration and inclusivity. We’re excited to see you all in London in March 2025...!