KubeCon+CloudNativeCon is one of the biggest conferences in the world where users, developers, and companies who have or want to adopt the Cloud Native standard of running applications and use Kubernetes in their organizations or even students like me who are passionate about Cloud Native, gather and discuss new ideas, learn, and network with amazing folks from the community and have fun. Lots of excellent talks, games, events, meetups, and parties happen in a span of 5 days, which is quite mesmerizing for anyone who witnessed the event in-person or virtually.
In this blog, I'll be giving a brief walkthrough of my overall experience.
I'll share my experience with day-wise orders starting from day 0 to day 4 because things will look organized that way.🤩
Also, I would like to thank CNCF for the Dan Kohn Scholarship Fund which gave me the opportunity as a student to attend this great event for free.
DAY-0 (16/05/2022)
Data on Kubernetes Day 2022 Europe
This was my very first event scheduled on the KubeCon page and I got introduced to a great and very welcoming community Dok community, The event was really fun engaging, and beginner-friendly. I spent the whole day enjoying the talk, awesome hip hop, and the extraordinary presentation skill of bart 🔥.
Also got to see the Data on Kubernetes Landscape for the very first time. A tool for users to navigate products, solutions, and consultancies for running stateful workloads on Kubernetes
you can find the recording for the event here and you can join the community here Dok Community
DAY-1 (17/05/2022)
KnativeCon Europe
It was a colocated event by Knative, It started with an introduction of Knative and had some awesome beginner-friendly talks, I scheduled talks early and that saved my time and then I was much more focused only on talks that I was interested in, Here I got to know about Knative from Installation to operation, also got to learn from different Developer experiences who are using and designing for Knative + Serverless and Event-Driven architecture patterns.
I also joined the Slack channels of some sponsors under the CNCF channel and at first, I felt nervous among such great personalities present. I volunteered, and I introduced myself there, and I was really mesmerized by the response I got, and the folks over there were so very supportive. I met amazing people there, chatted with folks, and got valuable suggestions and advice, and for that, I am really thankful to the community.🙏
you can find the playlist for the event here
DAY-2 (18/05/2022)
From here onward the real fun of the event started or say the main event starts, Amazing keynotes sessions, 1:1 mentoring, and networking zoom sessions, virtual hours, Sponsor's solution and showcase, and many more!
KEYNOTE 1
- The Keynote started with a very warm welcome and opening remarks by Priyanka Sharma, Executive Director, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, She shared her journey to CNCF and about the progress, CNCF has made so far with a total of 7000 in-person and 10000 virtual attendees this week at KubeCon,156K code contribution to cloud-native I as a beginner started to feel more confident by listening to her talk I could relate 100% to her as I was also feeling out of place and my knees were also shaking before. She inspired us to have the correct mindset while collaborating with the community members.
"Respectful collaboration is the path to long term success"
- Next was a very enticing session about how Mercedes-Benz tech innovations were using Kubernetes for 7 Years 👀 the talk was presented by Jens Erat, Peter Mueller, and Sabine Wolz., This session was really overwhelming to hear the journey starting from Kubernetes 0.9 to an on-premises self-service cloud platform with close to 1000 clusters on Cluster API, they also described how a strong belief in open source with lots of resilience made the project a success.
- Next was about Incremental Deep Learning For Satellite with KubeEdge and Midnapore and how KubeEdge managed to bring the cloud-native to space. Also, the talk helped get us some ideas on how to combine KubeEdge Sedna, the cloud-native edge machine learning suite, with TinyMCE which is a high-level API toolkit for Mind Spore deep learning framework, to enable incremental learning at the satellite to accomplish tasks like remote sensing and earth observing. This was also a very enticing session as I have always been interested in space and astronomy stuff.
SOLUTION SHOWCASE
Here, I visited some of the Sponsor's virtual booths and met some new folks and talked to experts, and watched some live project Demo, and I was amazed to see that they were also offering job opportunities, I applied to some for an Internship role and got some positive responses. I also got to network with folks from the industry and learned so many new things there.
Sponsors Booth I visited
COLOCATED EVENTS
Intro to Kubernetes, GitOps, and Observability Hands-On Tutorial - Joaquin Rodriguez, Microsoft & Tiffany Wang, Weaveworks, This was a great session for newcomers and I enjoyed every portion of the talk, much of the key concepts were covered by practical and hands-on demo, as during the session attendees were offered a way to experience the commands in real-time on a web browser and that was awesome.
No Docker, No YAML, and a Polyglot Developer Experience on Top of Kubernetes - Thomas Vitale, Systematic &Mauricio Salatino, VMware, I personally loved this session, Here I got to know about how we can build a Containers-as-a-Service sort of platforms like Azure Container Apps and Google cloud run in a cloud provider-agnostic way on top of Kubernetes using only open-source projects. I was interested in this sessions because these platforms allow us to run our applications without the need to have knowledge about containers or Kubernetes, as they take the source code and remotely build and deploy our software while hiding away the complexity of Docker and Kubernetes. Thomas and Mauricio showed us the idea that how exactly the tools like Knative, CloudEvents, Buildpacks, func CLI, and popular languages like Java, Go, and Python can be glued together to provide an optimized polyglot developer experience.
And this is how my day-2, full of excitement and thrill, concludes
DAY-3 (19/05/2022)
KEYNOTE 2
- Securing Shopify's Software Supply Chain - Shane Lawrence, Staff Infrastructure Security Engineer, Shopify, In this talk, the lessons learned by Shopify after the security of solar wind and codecov being compromised, and how Shopify has been using opensource technologies for protecting millions of businesses also discussed how traditional defensive techniques can be applied in the cloud, and how voucher and grafeas implementations can give us control over the software that runs in the clusters, and how the SLSA framework can guide us toward establishing trust in our software.
THE API IS PEOPLE! - Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source, Cisco, In this talk Stephen discussed the interconnectedness of people in the community and how there are always countless opportunities in the open-source world for learning, contributing, and collaborating
Supporting the Community – So Open Source Projects Can Grow and Thrive - Le Tran, Member of Technical Staff, Kasten by Veeam, In this session Le Tran discussed the importance of community members and valuable contribution to the success of an open-source project, also she shared some insights on the journey to build an open-source community, including the benefits and challenges that come with creating a contributing culture in an organization, and how Kasten by Veeam, is working to build an open-source community whose members contribute often, and in meaningful ways to the open-source cloud-native projects.
SOLUTION SHOWCASE
- went the same as the previous day got to meet new people and enjoyed talking to them.
COLOCATED EVENTS
- Sharing Knowledge: Writing Good Docs for Quick Approval - Jared Bhatti, Waymo, This talk was about How can we improve our ability to write good documentation that gets approved quickly. As good documentation has a profound impact on the visibility, quality, and inclusivity of open source projects. Documentation creates a shared understanding of work, helps onboard new developers, and improves the overall quality and reliability of the project. Also, Jared shared his experience leading Kubernetes SIG Docs from 2016 to 2020 and explained the topic in a very nice story-based presentation that walks developers through best practices for creating inclusive, accessible, high-quality documentation in pull requests designed for a quick approval. This demonstration includes how to structure documentation using content templates, write with clarity and technical accuracy, and avoid common pitfalls that trap PRs in prolonged reviews.
- The Soul of a New Command: Adding ‘Events’ to kubectl - Bryan Boreham, Grafana Labs, This talk was more of like about Cloud Events and how can we make use of Cloud Native methodology to better use the Event system and how new alpha feature in Kubernetes 1.23 release, as the ‘kubectl alpha events’ command resolves some issues that could not be fixed within the generic ‘kubectl get’ command earlier.
- Virtual AMA Happy Hour with Priyanka Sharma
I am really glad I got to talk to Priyanka Sharma over Zoom call during the AMA happy hour session, She is very humble and down to earth, and got some valuable suggestions and advice. With that being said, this felt like a total success of spending time at the event for me.
DAY-4 (20/05/2022)
This was the last day and this was the time for the final KubeCon keynote and the day, I was a bit sad that it was ending but the past few days had been nothing but awesome.
KEYNOTE 3
- Nurturing The Whole Project - Josh Berkus, Community Architect, Red Hat & Catherine Paganini, Head of Marketing & Community, Buoyant, This session was about taking care of the open-source project in every different aspect other than code and documentation, and thus we need to deliberately create a welcoming community, publicize the project, manage contributor's expectations, motivate them to take on more responsibility, develop project policies and processes, and more, For all these things we have the CNCF and TAG Contributor Strategy.
- Supporting the Community – So Open Source Projects Can Grow and Thrive - Le Tran, Member of Technical Staff, Kasten by Veeam
- How Developers Help Scale Kubernetes Security - Connor Gorman, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat
- End User Awards Apple is the winner of the End-user awards this time 🎊🎉
SOLUTION SHOWCASE
- went the same as the previous day got to meet new people and enjoyed talking to them.
COLOCATED EVENTS
Peer Group Mentoring + Career Networking This was the best mentoring session so far all thanks to #kubecon for organizing such interactive sessions as well, This time too I met some great folks and enjoyed talking to them, and special thanks to Jai campbell for the valuable advice about learning in public and tips to start contribution to large open-source projects, I feel much more confident now.
What Anime Taught Me About K8s Development & Tech Careers - Annie Talvasto, Camunda, I am crazy when it comes to anime, I love anime and so this was the most awaited session in my scheduled and to be very honest this was a very beautiful session like hoe Annie connects Kubernetes dots with Anime like Naruto and One-piece. This session has some great helpful beginner tips to get started on your cloud-native journey. The session also covers what the heroes of East blue and Planet 4032-877 can teach us about career development in the tech world. Importance of perseverance, inclusion & diversity as well as always having a snack at hand 😁
- From Student to SRE That Loves CNCF in No Time - Jacob Valdemar Andreasen, Lunar, This session was something I can connect to easily as I am also a student, and seeing how Jacob found his way to open-source and the CNCF world, gave me the spark to work harder and help folks around me as much as possible. The session starts with a brief journey of Jacob's, How a year ago Jacob knew nothing about Kubernetes, Linkerd, or any other fancy CNCF projects. Jacob had been studying Software Technology for two years where he learned to write code and use software design patterns. In his fifth semester, Jacob decided to try something new and joined Lunar as a Site Reliability Engineer for a five-month full-time internship where he contributed to CNCF projects and learned to develop and maintain a GitOps-based Kubernetes platform. By constantly questioning his knowledge and pushing his boundaries Jacob steadily learned how to navigate the CNCF environment. Now, 1 year and 6 months later, Jacob is a Certified Kubernetes Administrator and continues to work at Lunar where he plays with Kubernetes, Flux, Fluent Bit, Prometheus, Backstage, Linkerd, and many other exciting CNCF projects. Jacob’s journey will be very helpful to explore the opportunities and obstacles one faces as a student wanting to start their journey toward working as a platform engineer.
- Navigating the CNCF Landscape, the Right Way - Divya Mohan, SUSE; Savitha Raghunathan, Red Hat; Kunal Kushwaha & Saiyam Pathak, Civo, This was the last talk I did attend and it was great and really exceeded my expectations the entire landscape of CNCF(you can check landscape here) was discussed very simply and briefly. The CNCF ecosystem is growing every day and at an initial glance, the landscape can seem intimidating to newcomers, especially students, and the main purpose behind the session was to navigate through the entire development and operations lifecycle, covering the various projects involved right from the creation of the application to the deployment & monitoring. also In addition to this great talk, Divya guided us on the various ways one could do contribute to CNCF projects and also introduced us to some opportunities for newcomers, Saiyam Introduced us to various means one could use to effectively learn the cloud-native technologies, and Kunal motivated us to get started with the contributions he also talked about the imposter syndrome that newcomers usually face and how to overcome this feeling, Savita told about some common CNCF terminologies that people starting out should be familiar with.
You can find the recordings of the sessions on CNCF's youtube channel ❤
With this, my virtual experience at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon-22'EU came to an end. I got to know a lot about Cloud-Native Technologies and joined great communities and also met some new people online who were both fun to talk to and share ideas. Special thanks to Saiyam Pathak,Kunal Kushwaha,Kubesimplify and Community Classroom. I would highly encourage everyone to experience this festival, Thank you 🙏