KubeCon North America 2024 Retrospective

Reflections from attending my fifth KubeCon

Published in

Women in Technology

12 min readNov 24, 2024

A modern building with a cylindrical glass tower displaying a ‘KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022’ banner. The intersection in front shows street signs for ‘S TEMPLE’ and ‘200 W.’ Several signs and a large red circle with ‘YOU ARE HERE’ are visible on the ground. Flags are seen on the right side of the image. — KubeCon NA 2024 took place at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City

I told myself that I wouldn’t write a KubeCon recap this time around because KubeCon week was soooo busy and I didn’t have the mental energy to write a recap. But come ON…who am I kidding?

This year’s KubeCon North America took place in Salt Lake City, Utah (SLC), and I have to say that although things didn’t quite go according to plans, KubeCon did not disappoint. The following is a recap of my personal experience at KubeCon SLC.

Climbing in Salt Lake City

If you follow my work, you know that I climb wherever I travel. And OMG was I stoked about SLC from a climbing persepective, because:

SLC is surrounded by mountains, which implies there has got to be good climbing around. And by surrounded, I mean that every direction you look, you see big, huge, honking mountains. It’s just spectacular.
The International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) holds annual climbing competitions there
It’s home(ish) to one of my favourite climbing competitions, Psicocomp, which used to take place at Olympic Park in Utah, just outside of SLC. For reference, Psicocomp takes place on a 15m tall wall. Two climbers are pitted against each other, climbing the exact same route. The first one to get to the top wins. Caveat: there are no ropes, and if a climber falls, they plunge into an Olympic diving pool that is 5m deep. Also, once you get to the top, you jump into the pool. Fun to watch. Don’t think I’d ever try that. But I digress…

I had plans to climb in Salt Lake City. That is, until I sprained my ankle 1.5 weeks before I was supposed to fly out to SLC. How did I sprain my ankle, you ask? Epic bouldering fall. Of course. Climbing dreams dashed. 😭

A scenic view of snow-capped mountains under a cloudy sky. In the foreground, there is a parking lot with several streetlights and a sign that reads ‘8C.’ There are also some buildings and a fence visible. The image captures the contrast between the natural beauty of the mountains and the human-made structures in the foreground. — Photo taken at the Salt Lake City airport around sunrise. These are some serious mountains, y’all!

Pre-KubeCon: Cloud Native Rejekts

KubeCon week kicked off with Cloud Native Rejekts on November 10th and 11th. Rejekts is a conference that takes place a few days before KubeCon, and its tagline is “Recycle your KubeCon talk here”. And they are serious. Got your talk rejected by KubeCon? No problem! Just submit your talk to Rejekts. In fact, it’s welcomed and encouraged. Hence, the name.

A conference badge for ‘Cloud_Native Rejekts [NA’24]’, displaying the name ‘Adriana Villela’. The badge features logos of Cisco and Microsoft Azure as champion sponsors and is held by a hand with purple nail polish.

Which is exactly what my super duper conference co-speaking buddy, Reese Lee, and I did. And we got a talk accepted! Our talk was about the OpenTelemetry Operator, and tips and tricks for troubleshooting the Operator. You can check out a blog post version of our talk here, and the video of our talk here.

I’ve been making it a habit to dress up for my conference talks ever since my KubeHuddle glam experience, and even though I couldn’t wear my go-to fancy conference stilettos 😭, I did manage to pull together a cute conference outfit, paired with my awesome ankle brace. 🤘

A collage of three separate photos. The first shows a person holding a beige high-heeled shoe with rhinestones. The second depicts a person giving a presentation in front of a large screen with a slide titled ‘Troubleshooting Tips’ featuring two cats and text about deployment order. The third shows a person’s legs in black shoes with a strap and light-colored socks on a carpeted floor. — I couldn’t go full glam with my stilettos, but still managed to dress up for Rejekts!

I’d only been to Rejekts one other time, in Amsterdam (2023), and I loved both times attending this conference. It was an incredibly cozy and intimate conferences, with mini-KubeCon vibes in terms of hanging out with awesome people, having awesome conversations, and without the theatrics of KubeCon. If you’ve never been to a Rejekts, I highly recommend that you check one out!

While at the conference, I met Eromosele Akhigbe, who came to SLC all the way from Nigeria. We had a great time chatting, and I found out that he had been awarded the CNCF’s Dan Khon Scholarship, which enabled him to attend the conference. He is incredibly smart, and I know that he’ll be going places! We spoke a bunch during KubeCon, and after a few conversations, I knew that I had to have him participate in one of our Humans of OTel interviews. (More on the interviews later!)

KubeCon

Co-Located Events

KubeCon itself started on Wednesday, November 13th; however, on Tuesday, November 12th, the conferene venue was host to a number of co-located events, including Observability Day, Platform Engineering Day, OpenFeature Summit, OpenTofu Day, ArgoCon, BackstageCon, and others. And I was fortunate enough to speak at both Observability Day and Platform Engineering Day. 🤯

Reese and I spoke at Observability Day together, giving the same talk that we gave at Rejekts the day before. This was our third Observablity Day speaking togethre! And this Observability Day marked the first time that it got split into two tracks, which just shows how Observability has picked up steam. As an extra-special treat, some of my awesome tech friends like Hazel Weakly and former work wifey Ana Margarita Medina attended our talk, as well a number of new my DevRel teammates at Dynatrace! Oh, did I mention that I started a new job in early November? You can check out our talk here:

Later that same day, I spoke at Platform Engineering Day with fellow Torontonian and all around awesome human, Marino Wijay. It was our first talk together, and it was the first time that either of us spoke at Platform Engineering Day. We spoke about Policy-as-Code: what it is, available tools, and how it can make life easier by providing a repeatable, secure, and safe way to implement security policies. You can check out the recording of our talk here:

I love co-located events day, especially catching up with various friends in Observability and Platform Engineering before the madness of KubeCon started.

A collage of six conference images. The top row shows a woman in a pink top presenting on stage with a man. The middle row features group selfies in a conference setting. The bottom row includes more group selfies with attendees wearing badges, highlighting networking and social interactions at the event. — Highlights from the Co-Located Events Day!

Ambassador Breakfast & Kickoff

This was my fourth KubeCon as a CNCF Ambassador, and as per tradition, there is an Ambassador Breakfast on the first day of the conference. The 7:30am breakfast start time is soooo hard to wake up for, given that KubeCon days are long and packed, but I always make sure that I attend, because it’s a great way to connect with fellow Ambassadors, old and new.

A collage of four images from a conference. The top left image shows two people standing in front of a sign that reads ‘AMBASSADOR + KUBESTRONAUT.’ The top right image shows two people taking a selfie, one of whom is making a peace sign. The bottom left image shows two people posing for a photo, one wearing a hoodie with the word ‘AMBASSADOR’ on it. The bottom right image shows a speaker presenting at a conference with a screen displaying ‘KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America’ — Meeting friends at the CNCF Ambassador breakfast!

Following the breakfast, we all came together for our Ambassador photo, and then walked over to the main ballroom for the KubeCon opener and keynotes, which is always a very epic production.

A large group of people gathered in a spacious, well-lit room with modern decor, posing for a photo. Some are standing, others are kneeling or sitting on the floor, and many are wearing lanyards with name tags, suggesting a conference or event. The room features a patterned carpet, large windows on the left side, and two large cylindrical pillars. — CNCF Ambassador and Kubstronaut class photo

I wanted to give a big, huge shoutout to Nancy Chauhan, who was awarded a TAGGIE at KubeCon. Nancy is a fellow CNCF Ambassador who created the CNCF’s Women in Cloud Native group and is an active member of TAG Environmental Sustainability. I met her at KubeCon in Paris earlier this year, and she a lovely human who is super hard-working and dedicated. I’m super proud to call her my friend. And I had her on my podcast a few months back!

A collage of six conference photos. Top left: two people interact with a golden retriever dog. Top center: three people stand in front of a ‘Telemetry’ backdrop. Top right: four people stand together, one holding a cup. Bottom left: three people pose with an inflatable bear. Bottom center: a crowd seated in an auditorium or conference hall. Bottom right: two people pose in an exhibition hall. — Loved meeting so many friends at KubeCon! 🤘

OpenTelemetry Observatory & Humans of OTel

I didn’t have any talks during KubeCon proper, but I definitely kept busy. For the third KubeCon in a row, there was an OpenTelemetry (OTel) Observatory. I absolutely LOVE the Observatory, because it’s a great place for OTel contributors and practitioners to get together, hang out, and discuss OTel. And the booth just keeps getting better and better each time!

And for the third KubeCon in a row, Reese and I also recorded another set of interviews for The Humans of OpenTelemetry. Again, newly-minted CNCF Ambassador 🎉 (and new teammate!), Henrik Rexed, was our producer, giving our recordings an extra professional quality. We recorded interviews on both the Wednesday and Thursday. It was such a treat to interview so many amazing OTel practitioners and contributors. I can’t wait to share the final produt with y’all!

A collage of six photos showing various individuals being interviewed or recorded on camera at a conference or event. The backdrop displays the text ‘OpenTelemetry Observatory,’ with booths and banners in the background. The individuals are speaking into microphones, with cameras and lighting equipment set up around them. The busy scene includes other attendees and various equipment, indicating a professional event focused on technology or media. — Behind-the-scenes from the Humans of OTel interviews at KubeCon NA 2024!

Henrik also came up with the idea of doing a Humans of OpenTelemetry Livestream. We ran the livestream on the Thursday morning. It featured interiews with OTel co-founder (and former teammate) Ted Young, and OTel practitioner Hazel Weakly. Ted shared some cool new project updates, and Hazel talked OTel from an end-user’s perspective. You can catch the recording here.

Three people are seated on a blue couch and a white armchair in a room with beige walls. There is a wooden table in front of them with a red lantern on it. The setup includes professional lighting equipment and a camera, indicating that this is likely a recording or interview session. — Behind-the-scenes of our Humans of OTel Livestream!

OpenTelemetry Project Updates

On Wednesday the 13th, Reese and I also checked out the OpenTelemetry project updates. We were a bit late coming in, and as Reese and I walked into the room, my name was being called out as one of the winners of of the first-ever OTel Community awards. I knew about the awards, but I did NOT expect to be one of the winners. It was definitely a highlight of the conference for me, and I am still floored. Feeling so much love, y’all! 🥺 You can check out the official OTel blog post with the list of winners and nominees.

A collage of four photos related to OpenTelemetry. The top-left shows two people in front of an OpenTelemetry banner. The top-right lists the 2024 OpenTelemetry Community Stars. The bottom-left praises Adriana for her contributions. The bottom-right shows an award plaque next to an octopus plush toy and a penguin snow globe. — Alex Boten and I were two of the four winners of the first-ever OTel Community Stars awards!

As for project updates…one of the big updates that stuck out in my mind is that OpenTelemetry Logs is finally getting its own API. There is currently a logs bridge API, which is different from the Traces and Metrics API, because it’s not used by application developers to create logs. Instead, they use this bridge API to set up log appenders in the standard language-specific logging libraries. That will soon change, and I’m very stoked for it!

Another interesting bit of information is something that I learned from talking to Ted for the Humans of OTel Livestream. In recent months, there has been a lot of work going into front-end Observability. This makes a lot of sense, because we often interact with our systems through UIs, whether it’s a Web UI or a mobile app, and having greater insight into how users interact with their applications in the front-end is super important.

Surprisingly, this was missing from OTel. But why? The challenge with front-end Observability from an OTel perspective is that OTel was built with more of a focus on back-end dev, which drove a number of initial architectural decisions. This means that some re-jigging and re-architecting was needed in order to be able to accommodate the front-end stuff before actually beginning the work on the front-end stuff. And now, things are finally moving in a direction whereby the building blocks are in place to faciliate that front-end OTel. 🎉

DEI Community Hub & BIPOC Working Group

Besides the Observatory, I also checked out the DEI Community Hub in between Humans of OTel recordings. I wasn’t able to stay long but hung out long enough to take parts in some great conversations around challenges and successes around diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A two-part image showing a sign and a conference room. The left side features a circular sign with snowflakes that reads ‘Meet me at the DEI Community Hub sponsored by Google Cloud,’ along with KubeCon and CloudNativeCon logos. The right side shows an open door to a conference room with a ‘Free Form Community Brainstorming’ session in progress. — I popped in briefly to check out the DEI Community Hub!

I found out about the DEI Community Hub because, before attending KubeCon, I had recently joined the CNCF’s Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Working Group. While at KubeCon, I had the opportunity to meet one of the leads, Catherine Paganini, in person. Catherine has such great energy and great ideas for moving the group’s mission forward. I’m super stoked to be a part of this group.

The BIPOC working group works closely with the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group, and has taken much of its operational cues from what has worked well in that group. Because my good friend Hazel Weakly is deaf, I actually learned first-hand about some of the challenges faced by the deaf and hard of hearing.

Hazel has limited hearing, which is assisted by a combination of hearing aids and lip-reading, so I can still communicate with her by speaking; however, there are times when communication is challenging. For example, I still mask indoors, so Hazel can’t read my lips when I speak with her. Which means that I need to stand relatively close to her when she speaks. Sometimes she misses what I say, and so I have to repeat myself. But, as she recently taught me, repeating the same thing over and over isn’t helpful to her, because her brain just interprets it as garble, so the best thing I can do is find a way to rephrase it. In fact, she told me, that’s a general rule when interacting with folks in the deaf and hard of hearing community.

I also met other CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing community members. This was my first time speaking with these folks via an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter, and I’m embarrassed to say that I got off on the wrong foot when speaking to a deaf person via an interpreter. At first I started started speaking directly to their interpreter, and not to them, until I caught myself and started addressing them directly. It is something that I won’t forget, and I am so grateful to have met so many lovely folks in that community.

Because I’d been interacting with folks in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, it’s given me a new level of awareness of things being done at KubeCon to accommodate this group. For example, the keynote featured a picture-in-picture display of an ASL interpreter and captions on-screen. In addition, I learned that the front rows are typically reserved for deaf and hard of hearing folks, so that they can better see the captions and intepreters. Unfortunately, as I was sitting at the keynote, I noticed that the captions were at the bottom of the screen. I sent Hazel a screen shot and asked if that was accessible to her. To which (unsurprisingly) she said no, and that she couldn’t even see the ASL interpreter very clearly.

So I posted my concerns in the CNCF Ambassador Slack channel and a few other folks also chimed in. As a result, the feedback was be passed to the appropriate folks to ensure that it was actioned. I would’ve never thought about this had it not been for my friendship with Hazel and for my interactions with other members of the deaf and hard of hearing community.

A screenshot of a Slack conversation with three messages and an image of a keynote presentation. Adriana Villela comments on the visibility of keynote captions at 9:21 AM. The attached image shows a large screen at a conference with a speaker and a slide titled ‘New Member Benefits,’ where the caption is difficult to read. Anastasiia Gubska and Katie Greenley respond, acknowledging the issue and noting plans to improve caption visibility in future events.

This really underscores that we don’t fully understand the challenges faced by certain groups of people unless we put ourselves in their shoes or happen to be close with someone from a marginalized community. Which blows my mind.

This got me thinking back to my ankle injury. To be honest, I was worried about how mobile I would be in SLC. The KubeCon venues are always huge, which means tons of walking. My hotel was about 1.3km from the conference venue. Not a problem if you don’t have an injury or disability. It’s a bit of a problem if you do. Would I have to Uber to the conference? Would I need a cane or crutches to walk about?

I was super lucky that by the time I got to SLC, my ankle had healed enough such that I was able to walk at a decent pace without any pain. But being injured like that made me realize that while my ankle will heal fully and I’ll be able to easily walk long distances and go up and down the stairs without a second thought, what about those who don’t have that luxury?

I started looking at the world in the different light. If you need to get to another floor, how easily can you get there? Are there elevators nearby? Are there escalators nearby? Are they functioning? So many things to consider, and so many things that we barely think about if we don’t have a disability.

And all this relates to DEI as well. We are sometimes not aware that our words and actions can hurt others, especially those in marginalized groups. Knowing someone in a marginalized group changes your perspective, because you now have a personal connection, and it’s no longer some “anonymous problem”.

Final Thoughts

All in all, I had a lovely time in Salt Lake City. It blows my mind that with every KubeCon I attend, there are more and more people that meet along the way and look forward to seeing. It feels like a reunion, and I love that. We may have just wrapped up KubeCon NA, but I’m already looking forward to KubeCon EU in London, England! 🇬🇧

A neon sign with blue lighting displays the text ‘KubeCon + CloudNativeCon’ mounted on a wooden wall. — See you in London!