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KubeCon NA and beyond

Michael Friedrich

• 5 min read
KubeCon NA and beyond

I started marking interesting sessions on my sched.com profile, also knowing about overlaps. I recommend reserving a focus time block after KubeCon to watch parallel sessions on-demand. The keynotes are always insightful and thoughtful, and inclusive.

On Wednesday, we were happy to host our first GitLab Developer Evangelism AMA session.

Congratz to Ian Coldwater for winning the CNCF Top Ambassador Award - and for joining Twilio as Director of DevSecOps!

Talks and Learnings

My personal highlight is the talk from Justin Garrison who created an interactive journey on how to create a streaming service - Infrastructure for Entertainment. It felt as if I would be part of the story, wonderfully refreshing and engaging :-) I want everyone, including me, to take notes and match the experience next time.

Other highlights I recommend watching on-demand, mainly themed around CI/CD, GitOps, Observability & Security:

Platform and virtual experience

The platform greatly improved from KubeCon EU in August. The video streams now also start in the same window. The integrated schedule looks a bit old, and the sched.com schedule feels more natural. The best strategy is to look through the sched.com overview and mark all sessions you are interested in - quite a few for more.

I love that sched.com has the "Watch in the event platform" button, either for live sessions or watching on-demand later on. The introduction to the sessions always start with a reminder to being kind and the Q&A sessions hosted in Slack later on.

North America means a bit of a time zone adjustment for EU citizens where they keynotes start at 7pm CET and the happy hour is somewhere at 1am in the morning. Everything you cannot attend live can be watched on demand though, and it creates a bit of an "all-remote async workflow" with responding in Slack threads too, just like working at GitLab :-)

Social networking

The integration with Slack works quite well, some more suggestions on channels would be great. I believe we will iterate on this and see this enhanced next time :) We also voted for coffee chat hangout sessions in the US morning - we are big fans of no-agenda social meetings. That brought a new opportunity ...

Nico asked me to join the KubeCon pre-show earlier today where I bumped into Abubakar who had been invited by Priyanka. Julie hosted us and we enjoyed talking about our experience, visions and ideas about KubeCon, CNCF projects and personal experiences.

One of the questions in the Twitch chat was how we keep up-to-date with the many CNCF projects and latest technology in general. Following Twitter lists and project maintainers or thought leaders is one of my hidden gems.

Hosting our weekly #everyonecancontribute cafe on Wednesday, 6pm CET / 9 am PT adds another highlight for me: Learning and sharing about the latest tech, or having guests from an OSS (CNCF) projects, like Keptn as CD control pane last week. The sessions are live-streamed onto GitLab Unfiltered on YouTube, send me a DM on Twitter to get a Zoom invite.

Prediction: Observability and OpenTelemetry

Constance shared the current development of the OpenTelemtry collector in the keynotes. For the next KubeCon EU in May, we will see more CNCF projects integrating with OpenTelementry and Tracing in general. The journey to Observability with metrics, traces, logs and even more is in full swing.

The OpenTelemetry API and SDK implementations for many languages are one of my areas I want to dive deeper in the future. As we are learning Rust currently, this provides a good angle in designing and developing applications with tracing from the beginning :)

Prediction: CI/CD with focus on progressive delivery

Keptn as control pane with SLO calculations before staging hits production will reach a wider audience. It natively integrates with Prometheus and existing CI/CD pipelines.

8. Cafe: Keptn, an event-based control plane for continuous delivery and automated operations for cloud-native applications.
Highlights Alois kicked off with an introduction to Keptn and its idea on a control pane for continuous delivery. Develo ...
EveryoneCanContribute

Looking forward to 2021 and more Cloud Native development! 🔥