2024 Recap
December 30, 2024
With another year drawing to a close, I wanted to reflect on some of my favorite open source community highlights of 2024.
1. More fun with the kubernetes release team
I remember when I first joined the Kubernetes release team. Now I guess I’m an old timer and have been a part of every Kubernetes release since 1.27… (eek!)
This year, I had the opportunity to lead the Release Notes team for the 1.31 release, ensuring every enhancement and change was well-documented for the community (and making some krel improvements in the release notes tooling along the way…). I also took on the role of Release Lead Shadow for 1.32, gaining valuable insights into managing the intricate release process from start to finish.
The highlight of the year came with my nomination to be the Release Lead for Kubernetes 1.33. It’s an incredible honor, and I’m excited to take on this challenge in 2025. Being part of the release team has always been about more than just managing timelines—it’s about contributing to one of the largest open-source communities and ensuring every release moves Kubernetes forward. Here’s to an exciting year ahead! 🥂
2. CloudNativeSecurityCon 2024 Seattle
In June, I had the opportunity to present two talks at CloudNativeSecurityCon in Seattle—a city I visited for the first time!
The first session was a five-minute lightning talk I co-presented with Ariana on Istio’s Egress Gateway functionality. We delved into how the Egress Gateway enhances security by controlling outbound traffic and ensuring compliance with policies. If you missed it, you can check out the talk here: Speak Egress and Exit: A Look at Securing Traffic Out of the Mesh with Istio.
For the second session, Peter and I hosted a hands-on workshop titled “Hacking Istio: The Good, the Bad, and the Misconfigured.” This session was an interactive, story-driven deep dive into understanding and mitigating common security pitfalls in Istio setups. Participants had to “escape” the Jail pod in the misconfigured cluster and “rob” the Vault pods by crafting a cleverly manipulated JWT token. It was an engaging way to teach complex security concepts while giving attendees a chance to get hands-on experience.
Peter and I had a lot of fun creating western-themed promotional material for our workshop:
4. Kubecon NA 2024 in Salt Lake City
Before diving into the excitement of KubeCon, I took a couple of days to explore one of Utah’s breathtaking national parks—Arches! The landscape was absolutely stunning, from the winding Colorado River to the incredible natural rock formations. And yes, there were plenty of arches!
I kicked off my KubeCon week with the North America Contributor Summit! Since joining the Kubernetes SIG Release team in 1.27, the Contributor Summit has been a highlight for me. This year’s summit was no exception—it brought together Kubernetes contributors for a mix of insightful talks, unconference sessions, and SIG and working group meetings.
Being part of the SIG Release team meant getting to connect with so many talented contributors and dive deeper into Kubernetes community initiatives. The summit is always a great way to recharge, collaborate, and get inspired before the main event!
2024 was also the year I became a CNCF Ambassador. The CNCF Ambassadors program has members from all around the world, focused on the mission of “making cloud native ubiquitous” through community leadership and mentorship.
At Kubecon NA, all the CNCF ambassadors in attendance were invited to the Ambassador breakfast session. 🍳 It was a fun opportunity to meet with all the other ambassadors from the community and learn about the different projects they are a part of!
This was also the year of the “AI Gateways,” and I had the chance to showcase some of the exciting features I worked on for the Gloo AI Gateway. At the Solo booth, I gave a series of live demos on topics like “AI Gateway: Credential Management & Access Control” and “AI Gateway: Rate Limiting.”
Lawrence Gadban and I also ran a hands-on tutorial of how to use Argo Rollouts with the Gateway API provider of your choice. The tutorial walked through basic Kubernetes rollouts, switching to Argo Rollouts, native Istio traffic management with Argo Rollouts, and finally how using Argo Rollouts with Gateway API simplifies the “mess” that comes with needing to support multiple providers. It was great hearing that people enjoyed trying out the tutorial so much that they wanted it to keep running after our session was over!
So there you have it! 2024 was a great year for travel, community and learning! Can’t wait for what adventures lie in the year ahead!