My KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe Experience 2019
Hi, My name is Ines and I’m one of the lucky people who were sent an invite of diversity sponsorship to the kubecon event in Europe.
First of all, I want to thank CNCF for this great and life changing opportunity for me.
I was very happy to receive the email and I was very excited to meet the kind of people who loves staying in front of computers that motivates me a lot and to know more technical aspects about kubernetes, mainly the core project. However, little did I know, that this event, it was more than that, it gave me all of the motivation and also all of the technical information and knowledge that I wanted to have.
My First KubeCon day was AWS container day which was a perfect choice for me since I work with aws and I wanted to dig more deeper into aws & cloud native projects.
Through this day, I learnt a lot about what’s new in AWS with relation to K8S or simply other cloud native tools.
One of the best discoveries for me was the APP mesh which is based on envoy proxy, as well as some advanced services for observability such as cloudwatch container insights.
In addition to that, I’ve learnt about the huge benefit of doing machine learning development workflow on kubernetes, as well as the advantages of kubeflow.
And mostly, the famous eksctl CLI that helps you provision your cluster in an easy way.
And here are my favorite pictures for the first day.
The end of the first day was very successfull and It made me feel like I belonged that with these smart and motivating people and I also got the chance to have a tour in the beautiful barcelona city (Thanks CNCF for the great choice).
The second day was in a different place which is the main event place at the Fira Gran Via, which was a HUGE building, it was also very organized and you would find the planning of the day in each corner.
The day started with a perfect keynote where we learnt about almost all of the CNCF projects with details from people who work daily on these projects and I got to listen to one of the best speakers such as Dan Kohn, Bryan Liles and especially Cheryl Hung which was a women that inspired me a lot and seeing all of these women who participated as speakers making me want to work hard and be there on stage on day.
And last but not least, the famous presentation of Lucas and Nikhita that marked a starting point in my life which is contribution.
I always just thought it’s just some smart people coding in a shared github account on a project that I would probably not understand a thing of. but it’s more than that, it’s not even about coding, it’s the family that it creates, a family that is composed of people who encourages you, help you and inspire you to show your best. It’s about sharing and improving.
And here is the famous picture that presented the CNCF projects.
After the keynote, there were so many sessions that I wouldnt want to miss and there was a huge place for sponsor showcase which was the perfect place for you if you had a question in mind or request of a demo or a sticker and a tshirt. I got to meet so many people and I got to see a lot of demos and know about new CNCF projects that I didnt hear about before.
And It was also such a pleasure meeting talented people such as Joe Beda, Ali Saad, Arun Gupta, Janet Kuo and all of the speakers that taught us so many things in a short period of time.
I also participated in the Networking and Mentoring session in the next day which was the most best part of the whole event for me, I was lucky to share a table with 3 of the greatest people i met in the event, Nikhita, Hippie Hacker and carolynvs. They introduced me to the world of contribution, the steps to follow, they taught me where to start and I even made my first PR that day.
These kind of people and all of the community’s love to Open Source is what makes it fun and interesting to be a part of. And I hope everyone like me who was at a certain point scared or doubtful, knows that it’s really a safe place to be around.
At the end, The event was a SUCCESS for me and I enjoyed the 5th anniversary party of Kubernetes and the big Poble Espanyol party with free food and drinks.
Overall, Kubecon was a dream experience for me. Before this conference, I wouldn’t have been able to talk about Kubernetes or other Cloud Native Projects with confidence. But after this event, I now gained a lot of knowledge and met so many people that offered me help. The whole experience offered me great opportunities to improve my personal as well as professional developent. I’m excited to share this experience with my friends and I’m inspired to start being an active member of the community
With this, I look forward to KubeCon Europe 2020. Thank you KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Europe 2019 and Thank you CNCF for the amazing opportunity.
Here is a quick summary about what u’ve probably missed in this event, and let’s start with OpenTelemetry that is the next major version of the openTracing and openCensus projects, CNAB that allows one to package up multiple formats and their toolchains into a single artifact, different kuberentes operators, how bazel helps with streamlining kubernetes application CI/CD, containerd, crio-o, Autoscaling multi-cluster observability using prometheus, thanos and linkerd, building docker on kubernetes using buildkit and the great cloud native storage orchestrator Rook.
In addition to Jaeger deployement, its agents and its scaling, Enhancing security made by Envoy SDS, The new fluentbit after fluentd for extending your logging pipeline with Go, the amazing Grafana Loki for logs and its integration with existing observability tools, multiple types of load balancing such as gRPC load balancing and its benefits with service mesh and kubevirt VMs that provides networking functions to kubernetes objects.
And lastly, the super star Helm, Prometheus and custom metrics of k8s, Calico and SPIRE and their integration with envoy, the new trending GitOps strategies and the serverless future of cloud computing.
I’ll write a detailed technical article later on, stay tuned.
