My experience with CNCF KubeCon

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona, Spain (from 20 to 23rd May 2019) was my first international conference invite. KubeCon is kind of a conference where you will meet all cloud-native enthusiasts, researchers, engineers and everyone working to build cloud-native applications easier. I applied for a Diversity Scholarship and fortunately, I was amongst the 56 people selected to be a part of KubeCon 2019 at Barcelona.

In KubeCon, you get to be a part of Keynotes, breakout sessions and get to attend co-located workshops, panel discussions and many more events. Everything runs in parallel so you need to manage and prioritize your schedule. Registration for most of the co-located events starts a month prior to the conference date.

There were multiple sessions to pick from, mostly centered around how people use cloud native opensource tools to improve certain deliverables, mistakes they might have made using the cloud native tools and how we shouldn’t do what they did or just an introduction to new ways of doing things.

There were sessions on Cloud Native projects, Lightning talks on diverse topics and also an opportunity to meet maintainers of some of the tools we use in the cloud native space.

On Day1, I have attended the “Kubernetes Operator Framework Workshop” which was designed and delivered by Red Hat Engineers. This workshop helped me in building the Operator fundamentals and post workshop I got an opportunity to discuss real time issues and scenarios. Resources used for this workshop can be found at: https://learn.openshift.com [Building Operators on OpenShift]

From Day2, I attended breakout sessions and booth demos. These are some of the sessions I’ve attended and found interesting:

• Modern CI/CD with Tekton and Prow Automated via Jenkins X

• Kubeflow: Bringing CloudNative Platform for ML to Kubernetes

• Scale Kubernetes Service Endpoints 100x

• Real World Kubernetes Deployment Patterns

• Kubernetes Metrics API using Prometheus

Furthermore, I did participate in Diversity lunch and learn activity sponsored by Google. The agenda was to meet people with common interest in the provided components, topics and sit in round table fashion, discuss things and find out ongoing challenges, best practices, and next actions based on each team discussion.

I was a part of “Monitoring Team” where we discussed about monitoring and tracing in cloud infrastructure. At the end, we concluded with Prometheus as the most promising tool.

KubeCon focus and role of CNCF: The major role and focus of CNCF for such events is towards Open Source Contributions, adapting community driven projects, graduating them and make it usable to solve real world problems. Once it is available in the community, people would start using it in small scale environment to the enterprise level and share their best practices, failures, research in such conferences.

Some of the great Projects which were adopted and graduated by CNCF are:

• Kubernetes

• Prometheus

• Fluentd

• Etcd

This list keep on increasing as it gets more support from the community: https://www.cncf.io/projects/

Overall, KubeCon was a dream experience for me. I gained a lot of knowledge and met many people who are always ready to share and help! When community provide you such life-changing opportunity, then contributing to the community becomes more of a passion than a job.

To locate all the adventures, you can view the awesome photos from the event here. The video playlist for the sessions including keynotes, lightning talks can be found here

Rutvik Kshirsagar is working as a Sr.Tech Support Engineer at Red Hat. He is responsible for providing solutions to the clients who are using hybrid cloud ecosystems at scale. Primarily he works on OpenShift Container Platform and Stackrox for delivering devsecops best practices that satisfies the mission critical workload requirements. Apart from the day to day work, he enjoys reading technical blogs, coding, and following opensource activities that are happening across the globe. He can be reached out on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email