Highlights from KubeCon and Coder v1.24

Jonathan Yu

 on October 21st, 2021

Last week we hit the road for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Los Angeles for our first hybrid in-person and virtual conference. As a remote and globally-distributed team, it was fitting to use a variety of approaches to interact with users, partners, and open source project maintainers. As organizations mature in their adoption of cloud native technologies, security, observability, and developer velocity continue to be top of mind for developers and decision makers. We had far too many fantastic conversations to summarize in a single post, but here were some of our highlights.

Supply chain security

Software supply chain attacks continue to rise in both number and severity, with Sonatype’s State of the Supply Chain report describing a mind-boggling 650% year-over-year increase in the number of incidents in 2021. The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity in May demonstrates that security continues to be a key risk for organizations, and while container technologies make it more difficult for attackers to maintain a foothold, the greater number and variety of applications in cloud native systems means that sophisticated tooling will be crucial. Luckily, the Linux Foundation, along with founding members Red Hat and Google, announced the open source sigstore project to make it easy for users to ensure provenance and integrity of third-party dependencies.

In addition, organizations including Snyk, Aqua Security, and Anchore remain at the forefront of container security and offer a variety of tools for publishing a full Software Bill of Materials. We’re also excited about Chainguard, the recently-launched company founded by several industry luminaries, since they share our passion for supply chain security and zero-trust approaches to security.

Zero-touch observability tools

For cloud native applications, observability tools are essential for operating them effectively, and yet, developer teams often cannot afford to devote significant resources to implementing instrumentation. Leading firms including Sysdig, Pixie Labs (acq. New Relic), Honeycomb, Isovalent, and Rookout are using advanced techniques such as eBPF or transparent reverse proxies to provide deep instrumentation of applications with minimal modifications to source code, providing the benefits of observability while significantly reducing their cost. These tools and platforms run the gamut from performance, security, networking, and debugging application logic.

Container-native development experience

Just as security and observability tools help us build better software, modern tools enable us to develop better software, faster. With Coder, your developer workspace runs in containers and you already have access to fast hardware that feels local. Sophisticated build tools including kompose, Tilt, and Garden simplify development as well as testing of complex microservices applications in the cloud. These tools are a great complement to your developer workspace, since your project source code and containers can live together in the same infrastructure.

Moreover, Loft’s virtual cluster project enables developers to each have their own “personal” cluster, while keeping costs under control, since workloads actually run on a shared cluster with isolation at the Kubernetes control plane layer. These projects enable you to build complex applications in your existing Kubernetes infrastructure, supporting automatic re-builds and hot-reloading of modified code. Better yet, Tilt and Garden also provide instrumentation and observability features, simplifying debugging for complex applications.

Other highlights

As with our very own code-server project, open source software continues to drive innovation in the cloud native ecosystem. We met with Cosmonic, creators of the open source wasmCloud project, which enables developers to build applications in any language running anywhere, from data centers to the edge, powered by WebAssembly. We also met our friends and business partners over at Nestybox, the creators of sysbox, which is the open source container runtime that powers Coder’s container-based virtual machines, for the first time in person, after a great many discussions over Zoom and Slack.

We also took a break from juggling containers to try our hands at juggling:

New in Coder v1.24

We also released a new version of Coder last week. Here’s what’s new:

AWS ECR support

Customers can now host their Coder images using AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR). See our documentation on adding private ECR Registries.

Updates to Changelog

Now you can view the changelog for up to 3 releases prior within the Coder dashboard.

Service banner customization

Coder’s service banner now supports custom colors. Admins can customize colors using a hex-code color picker to indicate various levels of severity for in-dashboard messages.

For a full list of changes, see the 1.24 changelog.