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Living on the Edge! A KubeCon Europe '24 Recap

Jeremy Saenz
Mar 28, 2024
Living on the Edge! A KubeCon Europe '24 Recap

Last week, we had the wonderful opportunity to attend KubeCon Europe, meeting NATS users and Synadia customers from all sorts of industries and disciplines. Here are some things the team took away from the flurry of activities at the event:

NATS at the Edge is getting a lot of attention

Many folks leaned into our fun, frantic, espresso fueled presentation about using NATS to drive AI at the Edge. This talk got everyone perked up to engage in our interactive demo that utilizes NATS for micro-services, inference, metrics collection and more. Many audience members even claimed it was the best talk they saw for the whole of KubeCon EU! Interested? Watch the replay below:

Production use of NATS in every corner of tech

One thing in particular that stood out this KubeCon was the sheer amount of engineers and companies that are utilizing NATS in production. From Edge, streaming, and micro-services, to machine learning and factory automation — NATS is being leveraged in so many facets in and beyond the cloud, and it's so exciting for us to meet users we haven't yet heard of.

In addition to new friends we made in-between sessions and at the booth, our friends at XBTO and MachineMetrics also spoke about how they leveraged NATS to power their Multi-region and Edge communication. You can watch their respective talks below:

Organizations are looking beyond standard cloud tooling for Edge Deployments

Synadia has invested twelve months of development time into creating a two-node K3s solution in partnership with SUSE. This commercial offering protects against the loss of a single node, but ordinarily is available as a two-node Kubernetes resource pool with inbuilt floating-IP address capabilities. The goal is simple deployment and operations, without requiring the investment, power and space of a three node system. The interest in this technology was significant and there was a live demo on the SUSE stand of our work to date. General availability is targeting the second half of the year and please reach out to us or our partners over at SUSE for more information.

SUSE also hosted Synadia for two podcast recordings, one for a general overview of NATS and the second being all on the topic of the two-node K3s solution. Both were a joy to do and thank you to SUSE for adding that extra magic to an overwhelming week!

On the Akamai stand, Synadia had the privilege and honor of presenting twice; one as part of a panel led by Nigel Poulton (of Kubernetes fame) and the other as  short talk on keeping things simple across development, architecture and operations, which highlighted the use of NATS for ephemeral communication across application components and data durability for Key-Value, Object-Storage and Streams. The fundamental point delivered being the powerful infrastructure of Akamai coupled with the simplicity of NATS provides developer speed, architectural simplicity and operational ease.

Seeing the cloud native space engage in a productive conversation around the Edge and where tooling like Kubernetes may (or may not) be the best fit was super encouraging, and we're looking forward to working with both of these teams to help build the future of the Edge for everyone! Thank you for hosting us and making us feel welcome!

That's a wrap!

Another KubeCon down in the books for us. The team has so many fun ideas for how we can share NATS more easily with folks on the show floor at KubeCon NA this fall, so stay tuned for more news there.

…and if you are looking to attend KubeCon NA in the fall, don't hesitate to reach out and schedule a meetup with the team. We'd love to hear how you are using NATS and how we can help!