What I learned from speaking at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 is a wrap and we are all back to work after these intense moments. Before planning next year’s conference in Amsterdam, let’s take a look back and see the 5 key points to remember from Barcelona.
This edition was very special for me, as it was the first time I was presenting a talk to the cloud native community. I also had the opportunity to join the Kubernetes Contributor Summit Europe 2019 which was co-located with KubeCon and meet my GitHub friends from all over the world.
1. Kubernetes has become huge
With more than 7'700 attendees, this conference was just shy of the all time record set by KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018, for the biggest opensource event ever (sold out with 8'000 attendees).
This is a testimony to how far the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has grown since its creation in 2014 by Google and the Linux Foundation to encourage the development and collaboration on Kubernetes and other cloud native solutions. CNCF projects are grouped into various categories; Sandbox, Incubator and Graduated. There are now 38 CNCF projects; 6 Graduated, 16 Incubator and 16 Sandbox.
195 new members joined CNCF in 2018 for an increase of 130 percent year-over-year. The Foundation’s more than 400 members now include every major public cloud provider and a growing number of organizations across Europe and Asia.
2. Everybody is talking about Kubernetes
Every day started off with a free pancakes breakfast, courtesy of a big sponsor and coffee! This was extremely useful as most of the interesting breakfast places in Barcelona are closed until 8:00-8:30…
Then, we all moved to the big stage to listen to about 90 minutes of keynotes by representatives of the CNCF and high-level sponsors. Most of the talks, excluding the sponsored ones, were interesting and I would like to send special kudos to CERN for their incredible performance in proving the existence of the Higgs boson live!
Then the time between 11:00 and 17:20 was split into tracks, to end with some more keynotes, ensuring all attendees gather not far from the sponsor booth where the 300+ companies would welcome us with drinks and food.
There were 16 parallel tracks over 3 days, resulting into more than 345 talks available in this playlist.
3. I did it too
The largest single event on the day before the conference is the lightning talks. While the lightning talks are part of the official schedule, they are held the evening before the conference starts and they are all done on one stage all in a row. The lightning talks are a collection of 5 minute talks which can cover a huge range of subjects.
Back in January, when the deadline for the call for proposals was set to expire, I was working on a pull request (PR) to improve the current probing mechanism for pods and it was so frustrating to have little reviews on it that I decided to propose a talk to raise the community awareness on this issue…
Three months later, I was lucky enough to be selected among 1'300+ other proposals for the lightning talks session. I knew the conference and the 5' format, having been to KubeCon Berlin in 2017 and this was not going to be my first public talk on Kubernetes. I was quite confident I could do it.
So I made my slides, prepared my text and practiced with my colleagues. 3 weeks before the conference, we had to upload our presentation to the portal and this is when I saw it… 386 people had subscribed to my talk! Few days later, the number grew to 500. Needless to say this was already 25 times more than a busy meetup and I was starting to feel a bit anxious.
The last few days before the conference, this trend accelerated and finished with 1099 people subscribed. This is how I ended up speaking about the intimate details of container health in front of roughly 50 times more people than I usually face during regular meetup presentations!
In the end, the 5 minutes flew really fast and were received by a round of applause. It was a great experience and I will definitely try to submit more proposals in the coming years to spice up my conference attendances…
4. Everyone can contribute
The day before the conference was also the Contributor Summit, where Kubernetes contributors can meet face to face, discuss and hopefully improve the whole process for new and existing contributors.
A key point that came up over and over again was that Kubernetes needs contributions of all kinds, not just code! For example, release management is a challenge in its own which requires a unique skill set. The Kubernetes Documentation writing community is a welcoming group where you can learn about Kubernetes and then share your knowledge through the documentation, without ever needing to write a line of code. Artistic skills such as video, visual art creation and writing can also be useful for functions like marketing through blog posts, articles and other media. So whatever your background may be, the Kubernetes community would be excited to welcome you!
One of the best ways to get started is to join the Kubernetes Slack. With the emphasis on community and inclusion, even newbies are encouraged to ask questions here. Within the Kubernetes Slack, you can find individual channels for each SIG within the Kubernetes Community. For a complete list of Kubernetes SIGs, you can check out the GitHub Page here.
5. Swissquote is a great place for Kubernetes lovers
Moving to Kubernetes has been identified as a key area for Swissquote’s future and sustainability. We have already several teams embracing Kubernetes for development, builds, tests, integration environments and of course production workloads and the goal is to accelerate that transition.
Unlike many companies which rely on external parties or consultants, or use packaged/proprietary versions of Kubernetes, we build our own knowledge in-house and use upstream builds to avoid any dependency on third parties and vendor lock-in.
After coming back from KubeCon, we are encouraging our employees to get involved in Kubernetes and related projects. The goal would be to send a real Swissquote delegation to the contributor summit and present few talks about our technologies. We are really looking forward to giving back to the community and participating in this great opensource adventure!
Thank you for your time!
