5 min read

July 2026

Photo of a presentation screen at KubeCon Japan showing the following text: "Welcome! γ‚ˆγ†γ“γ"
Konnichiwa from KubeCon Japan!

πŸ‘‹ Intro

Welcome to the July edition of CloudNative.Now - a monthly newsletter that covers all that has been happening in the cloud native world in the past month!

(There's quite a bit of personal update this issue, feel free to skip straight to the links. πŸ˜‰)

I'm sending this months edition from lovely Yokohama in Japan where I'm currently attending KubeCon Japan πŸ‡―πŸ‡΅. It's been so good to be able to see some of the Asian cloud native community! πŸ’™

It's been quite an adventure getting here πŸ˜… When I arrived at the airport in London I received a notification to tell my that my initial flight to Copenhagen had been cancelled and I was being rescheduled onto a flight to Paris instead... now with a 9 hour layover. πŸ˜’ I was stressed to say the least. But, we ended up making the most of it and spent a few hours in Paris and managed to go see the Eiffel Tower for the first time.

A photo of the Eiffel tower taken from near the base lookup up. There are trees either side of it framing it in the center.

After KubeCon wraps up today I'll be heading over to Tokyo for the next week for a very much needed holiday and to celebrate my birthday. πŸŽ‰ This is my first time in Japan so looking forward to doing ALL THE THINGS!!!

Earlier this month I also had a long weekend camping at EMF Camp and had THE BEST TIME! This was my second time attending and it was just as good as the first time. So much weird and wonderful things going on and managed to hang out with some very lovely old friends. If you get a chance to attend in 2028 I highly recommend it!

As always, you’re invited to subscribe to the email newsletter or add the RSS feed to your favourite feed reader to make sure you don’t miss anything! And please help to spread the word and recommend this to your friends and network if you find the content useful! πŸ’™

If you have any feedback or have any links you’d like to suggest please reach out on Bluesky or Mastodon! πŸ’¬

πŸ“° News & Articles

πŸ§‘β€πŸ« Tutorials, Videos & Podcasts

  • kiac: Kubernetes on Apple Containers with VM-Isolated Nodes - Saiyam Pathak
    kiac runs local Kubernetes on macOS where every node is its own lightweight VM via apple/container: kubeadm or k3s flavors, Cilium on a custom kernel, built-in LoadBalancer, Grafana, Gateway API, and clusters that survive reboots.
  • Building a Custom Metrics Exporter for Kubernetes - Victor David Effiok
    Kubernetes ships with built-in awareness of CPU and memory, but most real-world scaling decisions depend on signals that live entirely outside that narrow window: how many messages are waiting in a queue, how long the last batch job took, how many active WebSocket connections a pod is holding. When the built-in metrics are not enough, a metrics exporter bridges that gap.<br>This post walks through writing one from scratch, packaging it as a container, and wiring it into a cluster so that Prometheus β€” and ultimately the HorizontalPodAutoscaler β€” can consume it.
  • πŸ“Ί Kubernetes Custom Resources Explained (CRDs, Controllers, & Operators) - Whitney Lee
    CRDs, custom resources, controllers, operators - these terms get used interchangeably, but they mean different things.
  • πŸ“Ί KubeCon+CloudNativeCon India Recordings - CNCF
    This playlist features all the sessions and keynotes from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026.
  • πŸŽ™οΈ Progressive Delivery, with Heidi Waterhouse - Software Defined Talk
    Whitney and CotΓ© talk with Heidi Waterhouse, co-author of the book Progressive Delivery.
  • πŸ“Ί Athenz: Giving Services an Identity - Whitney Lee
    Humans have had identity solutions for yearsβ€”passwords, two-factor auth, SSO. But what about services?
  • πŸ“Ί Cloud Native Days Romania Recordings - Cloud Native Days Romania
    This YouTube playlist features sessions from Cloud Native Days Romania 2026. If you're interested, the recording of my talk is here. πŸ˜‰
  • πŸŽ™οΈ Hardened Runtimes, the CEO Job, and Raising as an All-Woman Founding Team, with Emily Long - Software Defined Talk
    Whitney and CotΓ© talk with Emily Long, CEO and co-founder of Edera, about building a hardened container runtime that secures infrastructure foundations instead of chasing detect-and-respond alerts. Emily describes why "zero days as the new hotness" makes structural security worth the effort, and how Edera lets teams swap in a new runtime without re-platforming. The conversation also covers her jump from COO to CEO, what actually changes when you're the one absorbing every decision, and what it's like raising a deep-tech Series A as an all-woman founding team.
  • Kubernetes Dashboard to Headlamp: A Step-by-Step Guide - Vincent T.
    A step-by-step guide on transitioning from the standard Kubernetes Dashboard to Headlamp for improved cluster observability.

🧰 Tools

  • Announcing etcd v3.7.0 - SIG-Etcd
    etcd has announced the release of version 3.7.0, which introduces major features such as RangeStream and various performance improvements.
  • Cardamon - dominikhei
    Cardamon is a cleanup tool for Prometheus that collects unused metrics from Grafana and Prometheus and generates drop statements for them.

🎀 Events and CFPs

Events

CFPs

πŸ’¬ Social Post of the Month

Bluesky post from Chris Short with the following text: "The Kubernetes Docs team does such a wonderful job. K8s documentation is exquisite and the group of people doing the work are absolutely awesome. Thank you for all you do, SIG Docs! #Kubernetes"
Huge love for the SIG Docs folks! πŸ’™
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That's all for this month!
Thank you for reading! πŸ’™

If you enjoyed this post, please spread the word and share with your friends.

~ Marcus πŸ‘‹