My thoughts from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2023

by Mahamed Ali, Senior DevOps Engineer at Cisco ThousandEyes

SIG Testing: Intro and Updates — Mahamed Ali, Cisco

I’m a Senior DevOps Engineer at ThousandEyes and an Open-source maintainer for Kubernetes and Knative. I joined ThousandEyes 4 months ago and I work with our Engineering Effectiveness team. Engineering Effectiveness empowers our engineers to be more effective and happier by providing the tools, processes, infrastructure, and support they need to design, implement, test, and operationalize their code quickly and with high quality. I recently attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 and had a great time there. I’ll discuss some of the OSS projects that I work on as well as my experience at the conference.

Knative

Knative is an open-source community project that adds components to Kubernetes for deploying, running, and managing serverless applications. It also supports serverless event-driven workloads. I’m currently a Lead for the Productivity Working Group at Knative, which owns the testing, infra, and CI/CD for the project. One exciting piece of work I delivered is the adoption of the Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) framework. Supply chain security is an important security concern because we need to be confident that the program that is running on our systems is the actual program the developers published and an adversary hasn’t tampered with the program before it ran on our systems.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system. It is made up of many components and subprojects. The Kubernetes community organizes itself by Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that focus on different projects and codebases. I’m currently working on projects owned by Testing, Release, and K8s Infrastructure. Right now, I’m working on a project to replace the program that we have for launching end-to-end (E2E) test clusters for testing Kubernetes. I’m also working on various infrastructure improvement projects to help the project with the increasing demands.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2023

I attended Kubecon + CloudNativeCon this year, which was held in Chicago, IL. I had a great time and I met many members of the OSS community that I work with and other leaders of the community. I also gave a talk on behalf of SIG Testing about some of the exciting work we have been doing this year.

KubeCon is a long conference with many exciting things happening concurrently. Some of the more memorable activities were ClashLoopBackOff (where two engineers deployed Kubeflow in 30 minutes), a D&D-themed talk, and a talk about Why Service is the “Worst” API in Kubernetes.

Personally, this is my priority of activities at the conference:

1. Kubernetes Contributor Summit — This is a day 0 event and a must-attend for Kubernetes contributors. Nearly everyone at Kubecon who works on the Kubernetes project attends this event.
2. SIG Meet and Greet (Meet the Kubernetes Contributor Community).
3. SIG Talks. For me, that is K8s Infra, Testing, Release, and WG-LTS
4. Other interesting talks
5. Project Pavilion
6. Booths/Sponsor events
7. Cloud Native Rejekts. This is a b-side conference 2 days before KubeCon where interesting rejected talks are presented.

Cisco was a platinum sponsor of the conference, and I met colleagues from the Open Source Program Office (OSPO). They are participants and maintainers of various CNCF projects.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and hopefully I’ll see you at a future KubeCon & CloudNativeCon.

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