Attending My First KubeCon
Note: This Blog post has been originally posted on my personal website.
Well, it’s been 4 Months since I came back from KubeCon EU 2023 and this blog post has been on my TODO list since then but the more I thought of writing about it there were some more priority things to do and I had to deprioritize this Blog post. But now after spending some weekends on it, I have just pinned down the experience I had attending my first KubeCon.
I think this blog post will be a letter to me that will remind me of the things that I might forget in the long run.
Overview
As the title says this blog post will be my experience of attending my first KubeCon and maybe will be my thought of going on my first international flight or should I say my life’s first flight. Yes, it’s true this was my first time sitting on the flight.
Just a heads-up through this blog post you will not find me attending many talks as my motivation was to interact with as many people as possible.
First Day
18 April: The first day of the KubeCon was co-localted and sponsored co-located events. As this was the first time CiliumCon was happening I was very excited to attend that event.
I attended the talk The Cilium Story — Why We Created Cilium — Thomas Graf .It’s been a while since I have been following the Cilium project and Thomas as well I had already watched some of his old videos talking about cilium but attending it in person was a different kind of experience from me.His talk was mostly about Cilium and other projects that he and his company built like Hubble, Tetragon etc. and I like his Slide specifically where he mentioned eBPF superpower and showed eleven from Stranger Things. After this talk, I wanted to attend sponsor co-located events the main confusion was which one should I go to because there were lots of them happening at the same time.
As the event took place in a different venue this was a good opportunity for us to explore the beautiful city as well. We decided to go for the Azure Day Hosted by Microsoft which was quite a distance from the main venue but we went there anyway and we good chance to interact with some folks where we discussed DevOps, interviews and how living and working from Amsterdam feels like because the folks with whom we interacting with one of them was India and she shared how she is living in Amsterdam from last 2 years and what it feels like.
Second Day and Third Day
19,20 April: Officially the event started and it was sad that I was a bit late and due to which I didn’t get the opportunity to sit in the main Hall where the Keynote was happening(and the reason was it was already full) and we where ask to sit in a different room where the live stream was played.
Once the keynote finished all the booths were open and the swag hunt started. 🫣
My main plan for the next 2 days was to go to most of the booths interact with them and learn about the different projects. At first, I was a bit overwhelmed as there were a lot of them. The whole day was spent interacting with lots of people and learning about different projects.
Some of the projects that I liked the most
- Akuity : As I already have some experience working with Argocd. This was something that caught my interest and the people behind the company was the creator of Argocd Itself. It was Cool to see how they were offering some of the awesome features on top of Argocd.
- Isovalent : Well I think I should say this(If you ask me was there any booth where you spend the most of your time . It will surely be Isovalent). Here I got an opportunity to meet Liz rice. It was a fanboy moment for me and well I was also able to get the signed copy of the ebpf book from Lize Rice after spending hours in the queue but it was worth it.
- Cerbos: Though I didn’t get an opportunity to take a deeper look at their product after the brief overview it seems that Cerbos helps users separate their authorization process from their core application code.
- Groundcover: This is the project that is used to monitor your whole k8s cluster what I liked most about it is they were using eBPF Instrumentation. And they offer a Cool dashboard for that.
Fourth Day
21 April: I was the Scholarship recipient to attend this conference. They also organized a Mentoring session where we got a chance to interact with Industry leaders from some Big Companies. The best part about this session was how it was organized it was for 60 min and they divided the time into 3 sections for 20 min each where we could go on different tables based on our preference to discuss about the things we wanted like career, technical, community, anything.
Here when I want to the technical table there I got and the opportunity to interact with people from different countries sharing their life experience the fun part was here we didn’t swap our tables as we spent 40 minutes talking about different technology, freelancing, community, managers and whatnot. And I think this was best spend 60 min for me.After that I attended my last talk of the Day i.e. Keeping It Simple: Cilium Networking for Multicloud Kubernetes — Liz Rice
Can you spot me? 😄
Conclusion
For me attending this event was a whole different experience in many terms as travelling to a whole new country, meeting people from different walks of life, talking with them and getting a different view on how things are and from me It has just started.
