Arctiq Blog Post: KubeHuddling in Toronto: A Tale of Techies and Tidbits
Last week the Arctiq Team and I took part in the first-ever Toronto KubeHuddle event. We spent a solid two days diving deep into everything Kubernetes, security, and developer experience. Honestly, it was a fantastic reminder of why I love this job. Hanging out with people just as passionate as we are about DevOps and catching up with familiar faces is always time well spent.
In this world, where change is not just constant, but also blazing fast, I can’t stress enough how important these meetups are. It’s a chance for all of us to get together, swap ideas, and learn from each other. And trust me, every time we do this, it just reinforces our ‘better together’ philosophy. So, let’s dive in and hear what my teammates have to say about their time at KubeHuddle…
Japneet Sahni — DevOps Consultant
“After attending KubeCon (Europe) way back in 2019, KubeHuddle was the first major Kubernetes community conference I attended post-pandemic. And I must say, that it was one heck of an experience. Developers, Platform Engineers, DevOps, SRE, Cloud Enthusiasts, all coming together and learning and collaborating on various CNCF technologies.
Carrying some passion for service mesh since a long time now, for me the highlight of this event was a talk from Christine Kim and Rob Salmond on “comparing security polices across providers”. Their focus was on exploring recent changes in popular cloud native networking solutions (Cilium, Linkerd2, Istio), comparing their implementations, and highlighting the trade offs. They also stressed on the fact how Istio is continuously working on people’s feedback, and understood that there are lot many clients who still struggle to adopt service mesh. Istio (which was recently accepted to CNCF), has introduced a sidecar-less model (Istio Ambient mesh) that pushes some of their policy enforcement out of the pod and back onto the node. For me, thats the kind of innovation we were looking for so that we as consultants can help our customers to adopt service mesh easily.
Another thing which I liked about this event was that how they very smartly divided their talks in “Beginner” and “Intermediate” levels. Overall, it was an amazing event and I would like to thank Arctiq for giving us this opportunity to be part of this event.”
James Doherty — DevOps Consultant
“This was my first Kubernetes related community conference. KubeHuddle was a friendly, open, and welcoming environment with speakers and attendees for all levels of interest and expertise. I checked out Julia Furst’s presentation on “Is Kubernetes Too Complicated?” where they walked through a simple analogy of Kubernetes that helped them understand things and talked about their own journey into the technology. They highlighted that when working with Kubernetes there are always new plateaus of knowledge to aspire too, and that constant learning is part of the process. Diana Pharm gave a humorous presentation “How to Talk to Women”, where she shared some of the outrageous behaviour that she and her colleagues have experienced in their careers and gave advice on how to not just be a part of the problem but how to be a supportive ally.
I also caught an interesting presentation from Engine Diri titled “No YAML!” that gave a demo on using your favourite programming language to write YAML for you, letting you leverage common programming features such as type safety, loops, import, etc and best practices such as DRY and KISS.”
Adi — DevOps Consultant
“I was keenly focussed on Sysdig and security in particular during KubeHuddle. Curtis Collicutt, Solution Engineer at Sysdig delivered a presentation emphasizing the significance of protecting the runtime environment using Sysdig. The focus of the presentation was on the runtime of applications and the crucial role Sysdig’s runtime engine plays in safeguarding applications as well as infrastructure.”
Curtis highlighted the importance of runtime security and how Sysdig offers effective solutions using Falco policy engine. He emphasized that runtime security goes beyond the traditional security measures implemented during the development phase. By monitoring the runtime environment, Sysdig enables organizations to detect and respond to threats and vulnerabilities in real-time.
During the keynote address, Curtis also shed light on the persistence of vulnerabilities within codebases. He revealed that, on average, vulnerabilities persist in code for approximately four years before they are addressed and fixed. This staggering timeframe underscores the need for SDLC security and protection of runtime environments to mitigate potential risks and ensure the security of applications and systems.
In conclusion, Sysdig’s presentation at the Kubehuddle Conference highlighted the significance of protecting the runtime environment and how Sysdig’s solutions can effectively enhance SDLC as well as runtime security, emphasizing the need for continuous monitoring and proactive security guardrails.”
So, there you have it — our time at the first Toronto KubeHuddle, as experienced by the ArctiqTeam. I think it’s fair to say that these two days reaffirmed the importance of community and collaboration in DevOps.
Honestly, there’s nothing quite like the buzz of learning something new, meeting like-minded people, and being part of such a dynamic event. And if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that getting together like this, sharing our knowledge, and having those lightbulb moments, is what really propels us forward in this ever-evolving industry.
I hope reading about our experiences has sparked your interest and maybe even inspired you to attend similar events. Remember, there’s always something new to learn, and in this business, we’re definitely ‘better together.’ See you at the next event!
Originally published at https://arctiq.ca.
