KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 Barcelona Recap
It is the first time that I have attended to the KubeCon conference which is located in Barcelona. In this article, I’m not going to share any technical stuff. I just want to share my insights at KubeCon. Even the conference happened in 20 - 23 May 2019, I just found opportunity to write it down now and it is always better than never.
First Insights
I fly from Turkey to Barcelona and I am pretty surprised when I land to El Prat Airport. There is a big Kubernetes billboard at the exit of Terminal 1. Not only the KubeCon participants but also the tourists feel the spirit of the Kubernetes conference.
There are also other cloud product commercials while walking to baggage claim. I was aware that KubeCon is popular however I didn’t expect that much.
KubeCon is Technology Centric or Enterprise Centric?
I divide the international conferences into two categories.
- Technology Centric
- Enterprise Centric
Technology-centric conferences are organized by non-paid volunteers and they focus on technologies instead of commercial products. After a while they can be sponsored by enterprise companies however they don’t change their mindset. You can investigate the advantages and disadvantages of using a particular solution. They don’t redirect you to only premium licenses. I can give Devoxx as an example for this category.
Enterprise centric conferences don’t have to be organized by enterprise companies however they are totally aimed to commercial products. I don’t want to give a name but when you attend this kind of conferences, every company eagerly defend their own solution and try to sell their products. I can guarantee that you will see more people from marketing/sales department rather than technical department in these conferences.
I can say that KubeCon is one of the technology-centric conferences. I know that it has several corporate sponsors but most of the companies behave like a Kubernetes partner instead of selling their own product. In other words, the companies dedicate to Kubernetes technology and every company is trying to improve the Kubernetes industry as well.
The Conference Hall
The conference hall is quite far away from the downtown but you can use bus, metro for the transportation. By the way, Uber is a great opportunity in Barcelona.
As you can see in the picture, the conference building is giant. It is divided by two sections. One section is for keynote & sponsor showcase and the other section is used for technical sessions. The distance between two sections is pretty long. It takes 10 minutes to walk from one section to another. I need to check the time frequently in order to catch up my schedule.
Attendance
How many attendees do you expect for a technology conference? I estimate at most 2000 people before KubeCon. I still can’t imagine that there are 7700+ people attending to KubeCon Barcelona 2019 and even more surprising 10.000+ participants are expecting in KubeCon San Diego 2019. These numbers are unbelievable for a niche technology in our industry. The following keynote recording will give insight about the crowd.
Technical Session or Company Booth?
There are two common approaches for attendees. The first one is to join technical sessions hosted in a room and visit the companies booths during break-time. Another approach is to consume your time at the companies booth as much as possible and talk to employees.
Generally, I prefer to visit the company’s booths and meet with as many people as possible. These kinds of conferences are great chance to discuss your problems face-to-face with technology gurus. As is known, the technical sessions are recorded and they will be shared through YouTube just after the conferences. But, you are not able to find these technology evangelists together and they are not available to answer your questions any other time.
You have already chance for meeting your influencers. If you would like to meet Joe Beda just visit VMWare Corner or if you would like to meet Fatih Arslan you need to visit DigitalOcean booth.
Kubernetes as a Service
There is a big competition on managed kubernetes services. Every tech company offers its own managed Kubernetes solution including but not limited to Azure, AWS, Google, IBM Cloud, Redhat, Oracle, VMWare, DigitalOcean, Pivotal, Rancher, Ubuntu, Mesosphere, Suse, Ubuntu, Linode. Even Docker proposes the Docker Kubernetes Engine for their enterprise edition. I can say that the most of the community comes into an agreement that Kubernetes is the defacto solution for container orchestration and I’m totally convinced that Kubernetes makes a huge impact to the cloud environment.
Return on Investment
My main ambition in this conference is to find the answers of my questions related to running Kubernetes + Istio on bare-metal servers. I would like to learn any experience or fail-stories about production-ready on-premise Kubernetes clusters. As you guess, I have bunch of questions about different topics including but not limited to storage, networking, stateful applications.
For instance, one of my purpose is to select a proper storage volume type for my on-premise Kubernetes Cluster. I have a chance to talk to the contributors of Ceph, OpenEBS, StorageOS, Portworx. Fortunately, every conversation improves my kubernetes vision. You barely find this opportunity if you don’t attend to international conferences.
Just a kindly reminder, preparing your questions and taking discussion notes is a vital habit because you forget the some of the questions. Even you remember the questions, you probably forget the answers :)
Final Thoughts
Tech companies will continue to invest in Kubernetes for sure. Joining the Kubernetes community and learning its ecosystem will be a great investment for developers’ career in the near future. If you are still reading this blog post, you shouldn’t miss the Kubernetes train and you should make your hands dirty with Kubernetes :)
