This week's firehose of cloud native news

Every Wednesday, Nick Chase and Eric Gregory from Mirantis go over the week’s cloud native and industry news on the Radio Cloud Native podcast.

This week, Nick and Eric discussed:

• Kubernetes news including the Kueue job queueing controller, a registry redirect, and Istio's move to the CNCF

• Private 5G, holographic calls, and telco tensions

• And many other stories on the podcast, including Cloudflare's workerd, the end of Google Stadia, the latest web tech survey from the HTTP Archive, and much more

You can watch the entire episode below or download the podcast from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to tune into the next show live, follow Mirantis on LinkedIn to receive our announcement of the next broadcast.

Eric: Yesterday, the official Kubernetes blog published a post introducing a new tool called Kueue, an open source job queueing controller and set of APIs. In alpha at the moment, Kueue is meant to manage resource allocation to batch jobs in multi-tenant environments where allocating your limited compute resources in a deliberate way is important. So if Job A and Job B are both running in the same environment but you want to make sure that Job A is prioritized for a certain flavor of compute resource, Kueue will help you with that.

The project maintainers go to pains to note that this isn’t muscling in on the territory of components like the scheduler or autoscaler or job-controller — in fact part of the rationale for the project was that some existing job queueing solutions replaced those components, which Kueue wanted to avoid. So instead this is serving as a higher-level way to conceptualize queueing that utilizes and integrates with existing Kubernetes APIs.    

You can check out the blog at kubernetes.io/blog and the project at kubernetes-sigs/kueue on GitHub.

And another quick tidbit: Kubernetes is shifting to a new registry URL for the project’s official container images, moving from k8s.gcr.io to registry.k8s.io. The backstory here is that the original Google Cloud hosted registry has been handling a lot of demand from AWS-hosted clusters, so the project maintainers “are trying to put together a plan to host copies of images and binaries nearer to where they are used rather than incur cross-cloud costs.” The new CNCF-hosted registry URL will redirect requests based on where they’re coming from—so requests from AWS get served images hosted on AWS, requests from Google Cloud get served by the images on Google Cloud, and so on. 

These images are mostly used under the hood, so it shouldn’t impact your day-to-day usage. The original k8s.gcr.io address has started to redirect a portion of traffic to registry.k8s.io as of October 3rd. Kubernetes maintainers are asking users to report any issues they notice related to the change.

Back in April we discussed Google’s donation of the Istio service mesh to the CNCF, and now the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee has voted to accept Istio as an incubating project. The Istio trademark will complete its move from Google’s Open Usage Commons to the CNCF. This has been a long journey that came after some inter-company tussling, so it’s nice to see it resolved, and with Istio squarely in the CNCF fold, it’ll be interesting to watch how it drives movement in things like Wasm integration and eBPF.

Nick: One of the most exciting things about this job is that we get to watch things that were previously seen only in the realm of science fiction become reality, and today we have another one fo those stories.  According to Edge Industry Review, "The European telecom firms Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone, and the deep tech firm Matsuko, have pioneered a test to make holographic conversations as simple as conventional phone communications."

The technology takes advantage of the speed of 5G and the low latency of edge computing to create a system in which you would basically use your phone camera to create a 2D video feed that gets uploaded to the cloud and converted to a 3D video feed that's delivered to the other side fo the conversation via VR or AR glasses.

No word on when this solution will be available to the masses, but they're not the only ones trying to make this work. For example Cisco last year introduced Webex Hologram, which is available to early adopters. 

The group has already done a pilot, and Daniel Hernández, VP of devices & consumer IoT of Telefónica, says, “We are confident that in the near future, we will be able to offer our customers a new way of communicating, using this new holographic technology to deliver a more immersive “virtually there” experience.”

And all of this brings up questions about the future of how the Internet is built. We're still at the beginning of the 5G rollout; this week, there was news about Nestle and Ericsson deploying the first private 5G network in Latin America, as well as a citywide private 5G network to cover the entire city of Las Vegas, not just for surveillance cameras and other IoT devices, but also to help with Clark County remote schooling and even to provide access to both residents and visitors to the city.

But at the same time, the same way that I can't resist a story about the Metaverse, today's Telcos are obsessing over it and for good reason: they feel like they shouldn't have to pay to upgrade the Internet to make it possible to fulfill the promise of the Metaverse, whatever that is.

Because make no mistake, in order for the Metaverse to work, we are going to have to move unimaginable amounts of data very fast and with very little latency.  And that means investment from Telcos, who are still bleeding pretty badly from their 5G investments.  

According to Light Reading, Verizon's debts have ballooned from $93.1 billion in 2013 to nearly $151 billion last year, with just a 11% bump in sales.  Meanwhile, companies like Meta, aka Facebook, that will profit from the Metaverse are seeing their revenue explode.

So we wind up in a bit of a touchy position.  Because right now, carriers have to treat all traffic the same. And that's called Net Neutrality. They can't charge you more for metaverse data, any more than they could charge you more for streaming Netflix, which is what they were complaining about the last time this came up.  They can charge you if you go over a certain amount, but let's face it, in this world of unlimited data, people aren't going to stand for that.

Laurent Leboucher, the group chief technology officer of France's Orange, told Light Reading, "If we start to deploy many sites, it will have a cost and we need to find a way to monetize that. It cannot just be the operators bearing the cost for free for metaverse providers."

Check out the podcast for more of this week's stories.