KubeCon First Timer? Me too!
For those who don’t know much about effx, we are a small startup composed of tech enthusiasts who just launched in October (which is probably why you haven’t heard much about us yet. Don’t worry, I’m here to shed some light!) and we are heading to KubeCon 2019 in San Diego!
You might be asking yourself, what exactly is “effx” and why are we going to KubeCon?
We are building a platform to help engineering teams better manage, understand and easily operate their service-oriented architecture. We do this by helping engineering teams keep track of what’s across their full fleet of microservices, discover what has changed within each microservice, and ensure that ownership and microservice metadata is up-to-date and regularly verified.
As the growth and usage of container orchestration tools becomes more and more relevant to the tech industry, our goal is to bring an elegant experience to those engineering workflows. The founder of effx, Joey Parsons who is a former infrastructure leader at Airbnb saw these problems first-hand and knew this was a pain point that needed to be solved. Read more in his recent article on Service Ownership in a Microservices World.
With Kubernetes going into its 5th official year, moving from infancy to being adopted by most companies with a modern infrastructure, there is no better time to help make the use of Kubernetes even more seamless.
And what better way to introduce effx to the tech community than showcase our product at the biggest Kubernetes event of the year! An event where companies who use microservices from all over the world, varying from large cloud providers like Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud all the way to small startups our size. As a seven person startup with a modern tech stack and a small Kubernetes footprint — we would be crazy if we missed this event.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with KubeCon, it’s the largest gathering for Kubernetes topics hosted by the Linux Foundation. According to the Linux Foundation, “2018 marked a tipping point for open source, which drove more than $65 billion in mergers, acquisitions, and IPOs (which Kubernetes played a large part in).” KubeCon has grown in attendance since 2015, starting with 500 people to over 8,000 people in 2018 and has continued to grow in 2019.
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So why is someone who comes from a business background — who doesn’t have a CS degree or come from a software engineering background — excited for KubeCon?
My first job after college was a recruiting position where I specialized in recruiting software engineers — more specifically DevOps and Security. This was a major learning curve for me because I came from a business background with no experience in the tech industry in general. Talking and connecting with DevOps engineers on a daily basis taught me a lot about the industry, I have gained so much knowledge in areas that I never knew much about (i.e. CI/CD, containers, microservices, kubernetes, serverless architecture, etc.)
I used these fundamentals as a base to help me plunge into the land of startups where I got the opportunity to join a company whose product is helping alleviate a lot of the pains that I would hear engineers talk about on a daily basis.
Back to the “why” — KubeCon is a great opportunity to talk with people about our product and learn even more about this ever-growing and ever-changing industry. If there’s anything I’ve learned thus far in my life and career, it’s that knowledge is key. The more you know, the better off you are both in your personal and professional life and I’m personally excited to use this event as building blocks for my future, and the future of effx.
Are you going to KubeCon? Come meet us there! You can find us in the Startup Sponsor section where we will be giving demos and would love to answer any lingering questions you might have.
