This year’s North America edition of the KubeCon took place in Chicago. What a beautiful city and great location for the KubeCon.

From 5th to 9th November, people all over the world came together to talk and discuss the future and direction of the Cloud Native ecosystem with various CNCF projects and Kubernetes.

The Harbor team with Yan Wang, Vadim Bauer and Orlin Vasilev
were also present at KubeCon with a maintainers track, a booth, and a community meeting.

Due to those various duties, we were unable to attend many sessions; however, we attended a few keynote sessions and, more importantly, had many great discussions Harbor users at our booth. This gave us a good idea of what our users and the community has to say about Harbor.

Here are some unsorted notable notes we have been discussing with people.

• Using Harbor to store other types of artifacts. We have been brainstorming about that idea with the maintainers. One idea would be to introduce a pluggable proxy interface where different extensions for Harbor could be created. It would be similar to https://github.com/container-registry/helm-charts-oci-proxy. On one side, the user-facing interface would comply with that of the particular artifact spec (eg. NPN, Maven, PyPy) and would translate them to OCI artifacts with the right manifests and immutability policies.
• How to set up a true multi-regional Harbor container registry.
• Distributing container images to the EDGE location.
• More fine-grained permission control for users, similar to the upcoming robot accounts.

Harbor at KubeCon Chicago

Of course, there have been a few talks about Container Registries and Harbor in particular.

My Kickoff as a speaker at the KubeCon 2023 started with a lightning talk about Dynamically Proxying Helm Charts as OCI Artifacts.

The second talk together with Wang Yang and me was about Harbor new features and the Harbor superpowers for different user groups like Ops, CISOs, and developers appreciate the most.

In details, I was talking about:

1. How Harbor works well for small Teams and Enterprises at the same time!
2. How Harbor makes CISOs happy!
3. Because all organizational images are in one place with Replication and Proxying.
4. Because CISOs get an overview of all the image vulnerabilities in one place.
5. Because audit trails help to reconstruct who did what.
6. Why Harbor is OPs people’s darling!
7. Automation & IaC – RESTful API, Terraform, Pulumi
8. Operational control mechanisms – GC, Quota, Polices

The Second part of the talk was about the new features of Harbor, that will be introduced in version 2.10

• Robot Accounts with more customizable and fine-grained permission sets.
• Software Bill of Material (SBOM) for Harbor will provide a list with that enumerates the components, dependencies, and their versions within a container image, serving the purpose of enhancing transparency, traceability, and security in software supply chains.

Notable Mentions of Harbor and Registry Related Topics

Below are some interesting talks that are related to Harbor or deal with Container Artifact management.

Tutorial: Cloud Native Essentials: A 101 Tutorial to Start Your Cloud Native Journey - Rey Lejano, SUSE & Eamon Bauman, Red Hat

This 90-minute tutorial is an introduction to various CNCF graduated projects, simplifying the often challenging process of self-learning about cloud native projects. The tutorial covers the installation, setup, and usage of key tools such as containerd, Kubernetes, Harbor for container registry, Helm for application deployment, Prometheus for monitoring, Fluentd for logging, and Open Policy Agent/Gatekeeper for admission control.

Mastering LLM Delivery in Private Clouds: A Journey to Seamless Deployments with Kubernetes and OCI - Autumn Moulder & Marwan Ahmed, Cohere

This talk explores simplifying Large Language Model (LLM) deployments using Kubernetes and OCI artifacts. It addresses data governance and security challenges, emphasizes Kubernetes for a portable inference stack, and highlights OCI’s efficiency gains by reducing storage, enhancing download speed, and minimizing governance overhead. Learn how to leverage Kubernetes and OCI in your MLOps journey.

Flux 2.0 and Beyond: Amplifying GitOps with OCI and Cosign - Kingdon Barrett & Sanskar Jaiswal

In this session, Sanskar and Kingdon will discuss deploying Helm applications securely across different environments using Flux and the Open Container Initiative (OCI). They will showcase a production scenario with a promotion pipeline utilizing GitHub Actions, approvals, keyless signatures with Cosign, and ambient credentials based on environments. The session emphasizes the benefits of using OCI registries for Helm charts over HTTP registries. The conclusion will touch on the future direction of Flux and how OCI is influencing the future of CI/CD.

Closing Words

KubeCon North America in Chicago once again proved to be a vibrant hub for the cloud-native ecosystem. Harbor’s presence and the many positive reactions and congratulations are proof that the project is meeting the needs of users.

Vadim Bauer
Harbor Team