My first KubeCon, a recap
On the 1st week of May I visited Copenhagen to attend the KubeCon & CloudNativeCon event. My impressions of the event were much akin to that of a kid in Disneyland (or maybe I should say Legoland). I have been following the CNCF since it's inception in 2015, and the growth of KubeCon from just a handful of attendees back then to over 5000 in Copenhagen is testament to the explosive adoption of its projects, particularly Kubernetes. Credits to the CNCF for the excellent organization despite the scale.
There were a few themes and announcements in this edition, like operators, efforts on serverless, service mesh, SPIFFE, etc. The highlight for me however was the “hallway track”, where I bumped into quiet a number of peers and end users from all kinds of business. Plus having one-on-one chats with the who’s who of the industry like Joe Beda and Kelsey Hightower was icing on the cake. Because I arrived in Copenhagen a day prior I could also attend a couple of workshops and the Red Hat commons gathering.
In true open source spirit, the CNCF makes video recordings from the event available online, and this time it got everything (over 300 sessions) uploaded within 2 days of the event. That is worth months of binge watching. Therefore, to make things somewhat simpler here is a cherry-picked list of 5 of the most notable keynote talks which capture a good essence of the event.
CNCF 2020 Vision by Alexis Richardson, Founder & CEO, Weaveworks
If there is one talk that you can watch to get up to speed to what the CNCF is all about, it is this one. I have seen Alexis’ talks previously too, and the clarity with which he lays out the vision is pretty amazing.
Serverless, Not So FaaS - Kelsey Hightower, Kubernetes Community Member, Google
CNCF is assuming a key role in bringing about standardization of serverless technology. In his keynote, industry celebrity Kelsey Hightower explains how this is happening and introduces the cloud-events project.
Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones - Simon Wardley, Researcher, Leading Edge Forum
This is a talk about strategy, situational awareness, maps, patterns and serverless. This has to be one of the best talks I have ever heard at any event, and had the audience in splits.
Anatomy of a Production Kubernetes Outage - Oliver Beattie, Head of Engineering, Monzo Bank
Talking about your failure in front of 5000 people takes guts. In this talk Oliver does just that as he dives deep into a production outage. Very valuable lessons learnt from this talk.
Software's Community - Dave Zolotusky, Software Engineer, Spotify
Spotify has made great technical accomplishments, but here Dave talks all about the people aspect, and how he leveraged the community to get help accomplish things.
So those were my top 5 general talk picks from the KubeCon. Apart from these, I totally loved some of the deep dive sessions on kubeadm, istio, SPIFFE, etc. You can find those and more at the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj6h78yzYM2N8GdbjmhVU65KYm_68qBmo
PS: A version of this blog was published on the Devoteam website.