My day 1 at KubeCon Europe 2022 started early and my expectations are high. I arrived after 7.30am and I was impressed how easy and fast the check-in was even I had to show my ID and COVID certificate, which would allow me to get inside to the badge printer.
The event location is quite huge and it is very important that you check the map before you enter the building. I had to learn it the hard way and had no clue where I find the breakout rooms or the event center, which was even a different building. The helpdesks were busy with a long queue of people who probably also were running around like me, like a headless chicken. 😀 But after a half day of running from one room to another, I found my way to the sessions.
Keynote Sessions
Priyanka Sharma, the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) kicked off this spectacular event with some very interesting numbers:
- 65% of the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon visitors are first-timers like me!
- The number if CNCF projects is growing fast
- In 2016, the first KubeCon in North America had around 700 people
- KubeCon 2022 Europe has >7’000 people onsite and >10’000 joining virtually
Priyanka’s message was about collaboration for long-term success. The CNCF is about a large continuously growing community that must work together, and each person can contribute in her/his own way.
These were the four big announcements she presented during the keynote session:
- KubeCon Europe 2023 is going to happen in Amsterdam
- New Prometheus Certification Associate Exam
- Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Certification
- Boeing joins CNCF as a Platinum member
After that Boeing presented their company and mission and we heard Mercedes Benz telling their story of “7 years running Kubernetes”. Mercedes Benz operates more than 900 Kubernetes clusters and 3’500 machines all over the world. They also mentioned that they migrated their clusters to Cluster API, a Kubernetes project with VMware as one of the main contributors.
After a short break it was time for my scheduled breakout sessions.
West Side CD: The Deployment Ballet Goes On
Benoit Moussaud from VMware Tanzu presented a different way of CI/CD with Cartographer, which ” is a Kubernetes-native Choreographer providing higher modularity and scalability for the software supply chain”:
Overview and State of Knative
The next session was in the event center building, which hosted the presentation of Mauricio Salatino, VMware and Carlos Santana, IBM. They gave an overview of the Knative philosophy of being “Kubernetes native”.
Knative offers a simplified developer experience deploying and managing stateless and event-driven applications. Maurico mentioned the following Knative features:
- Simpler Abstractions
- Autoscaling
- Progressive Rollout
- Event Integrations
- Event Handling
- Pluggable
From Kubernetes to PaaS to … Err, What’s Next?
The third session I would like to highlight was from Daniel Bryant, Ambassador Labs. The key message of his presentation was about the “golden path” aka a paved platform. Â
At the beginning of his presentation Daniel started with the “real question” how much you should build yourself and how you should you assemble the control plane for effective use. Before going deeper into that topic he also joked around, and we know that 50% of all jokes are true, that the CNCF landscape and each KubeCon is not helping very much to make things for developers and operators easy:
It was very interesting and important to hear from him, that you cannot provide a good developer experience without a good user experience. Enterprises and platform teams need to treat the platform as a product and focus on tooling and interoperability.
Daniel said, that you need to think and design in/for different personas, user research is key and that you should watch your users doing things or using tools. Then you understand how you need can provide a good user experience for platforms. I personally believe that design thinking is key here.
Another interesting fact he mentioned is how the focus changed from the past KubeCons to the actual one. People focused mostly on operations and realized that the platform as a product mindset and approach is the way forward to provide also a good developer experience.
If you want to know more how VMware relates to that topic, have a look at this article from December 2018 and a more recent one from 2022. This approach is also part of VMware Tanzu Labs:
The VMware Tanzu Labs platform-as-product approach combines Product Management (PM), User-Centered Design (UCD), Agile, eXtreme Programming (XP), and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. A dedicated, balanced platform team uses these practices to both build and run the platform product.
Conclusion
It was a long day with a lot of impressions and new information. 😀 I definitely felt the spirit and the expertise of this large community! I am already excited and curious about tomorrow! Enjoy KubeCon Europe 2022!
PS: Are you looking for a job? KubeCon and the community got you covered!
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