Kubernetes Meetup Sri Lanka - Inaugural Edition
The most awaited Inaugural Kubernetes Meetup of Sri Lanka was held on 20th September 2018 at the Dialog Iconic Auditorium, Colombo. Although there were couple of meet-ups on the DevOps culture, this was the first meet-up which focused on container orchestration. The event was organized by Platformer and sponsored by Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Google Cloud and IdeaMart.
Meetup started sharp at 6PM after half an hour registration where the invitees were given swags sent by Cloud Native Foundation.
The introduction was done by the Co Founder of Platformer, Kanchana Wickremasinghe, and briefly explained how Platformer works on GCP and containers and how Kubernetes is helping the world.
First guest speaker of the event was Sreenivas Makam, a Partner Engineer at Google Cloud. He talked about the DevOps culture, Microservices architecture, why containers are essential and how Kubernetes helps the containers.
Kanchana Wickremasinghe then elaborated on how Kubernetes could help the businesses and how to get the most of it on Azure using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Platformer is a Google Cloud Partner and their infrastructure runs on GCP. GCP has the native support for Kubernetes with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The next guest speaker of the event talked mainly on GKE.
Nilesh Jayanandana, a Senior Software Engineer at Platformer explained how GKE is helping the Platformer PAAS and how flexible it is to work with GKE. A demo was done by him, showing how an App can be provisioned with only just a couple of steps using GKE.
The key event of the meetup was the speech done by one of the Kubernetes Co founders Brendan Burns, now a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, was one of the lead engineers on Kubernetes which revolutionized how the infrastructure works. His speech mainly focused on the history of containers, how cloud deployments happened at the inception of containers and how containers have changed and eased the cloud deployments with the help of orchestration using Kubernetes. Also he talked about the future of Kubernetes with Metaparticle, a standard library for cloud native applications on Kubernetes.
The final presentation was done by Ruwan Ranganath Senarathne, a DevOps enthusiast and a Senior Software Engineer at WSO2.Telco. His talk was centered on the Amazon EKS, Elastic container service for Kubernetes on AWS. EKS is a new service introduced by AWS and according to Ruwan, it is still not production friendly.
The event ended with a QnA session where the participants won Google T shirts, swags and ‘Kubernetes: Up and Running’ books written by Brendan Burns, Joe Beda, and Kelsey Hightower.
The meetup was a huge success and a great pathway towards the future DevOps meetups which will be organized by the Platformer. Kubernetes is still new to the Sri Lankan industry. Having meetups like this is something the community needs. Although there were a limited number of seats to this meetup, It was tremendous to see how eager the participants were to join it.
Platformer will be organizing a series of meetups in the future and take the meetups outside Colombo as well. Platformer will keep sharing the latest trends in the container world.
