My experience at KubeCon EU, and why it is totally worth it to go there
Last week, KubeCon (A CNCF-sponsored conference) was hosted in the Spanish city of Valencia for three days. I was one among the more than 7000 engineers who attended the conference, and I consider it a unique time totally worth experiencing. So, in this blog, I will try to share my impressions and my reasoning on why attending these conferences is good to grow professionally.
The most evident reason is to get to spend time around people who speak the IT language on a daily basis. After the last couple of years, the imposed restrains because of the world pandemic situation prevented every type of gathering such as meetups or conferences. And honestly, after having to attend several “Microsoft Teams” meetings per day, most of the IT people don’t want to join yet another “Zoom” call for a knowledge sharing session. So, this year, Kubecon was a good chance to get back a live platform to learn and share IT experiences.
This is also the second time that I attend Kubecon. The first one was meant to be in Amsterdam but due to Covid restrictions, it was hosted virtually. From these two experiences I have seen that there is always a core topic where the demand leads to: From Service Mesh and eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter), through Serverless workloads to GitOps. This time, I could see that Security was the main subject of discussion and a lot of companies showed their products and how they work on top of Open-Source solutions to get companies to enforce security from the beginning. Tools like Kyverno, Falco from Sysdig, and Trivy from Aquasec were targeted by engineers which did long lines to take a spot in the sessions rooms (Of at least 300 spots each)
Kubecon has two (three if you also attend the keynotes) focus points: The technical talks and the showrooms where, as mentioned before, companies show their solutions on several rounds of demos per day. In exchange for your email, they give you what they call “Swag”. Most of the times the swag you collect is shirts or socks. But on selected stands, you get books, learning material, and even hardware to do some labs. In my case, I got books related to container security and about eBPF and a piece of hardware from HPE which resembles a Raspberry PI computer (Which I’m excited to start using). So, the opportunities to grow professionally are also there on the table for you to take.
There are no doubts about the terrible consequences of climate change and the role that IT plays in mitigating them and even recovering the conditions that we have lost so far. For me it was important to discover that out there, several companies are working on several fronts to develop technologies that will in the future help the bigger polluters to host and expose workloads in a sustainable way. Getting to know the perspectives of cloud and hardware providers would not have been possible or at least more difficult to get if not for them being present at Kubecon. I got the idea that sustainability will be at the core of each version of the conference from now on, and that made me particularly happy.
After this, I can list the benefits of attending Kubecon as follows:
1. Get to share experiences with engineers from around the world
2. Learning which will be the relevant topics for the next couple of years
3. Get more perspective on career paths and learning opportunities
4. Refresh your mind with new ideas to implement/propose back at work
5. Getting insights on how to collaborate and being part of an Open Source community
The only counter point of attending Kubecon is that sometimes, several good talks happen at the same time slot, and other timeslots do not align with your desired talks path. If you are alone, often you get some “FOMO or Fear of missing out”. You can always watch the recording a couple of weeks after the session was done, but time (And more IT time) flies, and once you are focused on learning something, it is hard to divert from it. So, my impression is that the more people you go with, the richer the debate will be.
And after mentioning the IT debate. I have to say that this one is more enjoyable if the city which hosts the event, has such an amazing vibe like Valencia. I got to spot a lot of “clusters” of people with some KubeCon-related shirts happily debating on the beach of the “Malva-Rosa”. This, while I was sitting in the boulevard next to it with a Ukrainian ex-colleague and his Costarican and Egyptian colleagues (What a universal language IT is, the same as English…). Having this quality of time while also learning and indirectly “working” rises the engineer's engagement levels with their employer and makes them love the IT world even more if possible.
My conclusion is that, attending Kubecon can be a rewarding experience, full of insight, learning, and socialization. On the other hand, try to not attend alone if possible. Get to enjoy the time and come back full of ideas to implement, demo, and spread across the organization you work for.
