Table of contents
Introduction
Two weeks ago, I attended the 2022 edition of the Kubernetes conference held in Valencia, Spain. Given that it’s my first ever tech conference, I find it necessary to document my experience at the event. This would serve as a record in time of the many beautiful things I love about working in the software engineering field. My writeup is divided into four sections
- The talks
- The technologies
- The people
- The city
These four headings wrap up my overall experience at the event. Without further ado, let’s begin.
Before we proceed, for people who have no idea what Kubernetes is or what cloud-native means, I found this article by Edidiong Asikpo the best place to learn what cloud-native is.
So what is Kubernetes? Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. You have 1000 containers, e.g. docker containers; do you want to deploy them to your customers smoothly and efficiently? That’s where Kubernetes comes in. Check out the documentation for more explanation on getting started with Kubernetes.
Kubernetes conference (KubeCon) is held yearly by the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which gathers developers, companies, technologists, SREs, DevOps engineers and many open-source enthusiasts to meet, collaborate and discuss the further education and advancement of cloud-native computing. The European edition was held from 16th May to 20th May 2022 in Valencia, Spain. Some of the most popular companies involved in CNCF are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Gitlab and many more.
The Talks
KubeConEU is the biggest tech conference I’ve ever attended as it consisted of various talks, events, and meetings from multiple speakers and organisations. I might be biased because it’s my first tech conference ever, but I am not exaggerating when I say it was a packed event—a 200% score to the organisers. Given many talks and events going on simultaneously and virtually, it was impossible to attend them all. Here are the few I attended sorted by the day of the week
Monday 16th May
I arrived in Valencia, Spain, on Monday, and I didn’t get the opportunity to attend any talks. My day was spent chiefly checking in to the hotel and registering for the conference. The registration was pretty fast; you type in your email address, your details come up, and you confirm they are correct. Then you print it, and viola, and you’re done.
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Tuesday 17th May
For day 2, I attended a virtual talk by Google Cloud called “Build with the most automated and scalable Kubernetes”. I also attended a few lightning talks. Some of them are
- What made your container fat by Dan Čermák
- Locating and debugging failures with Linkerd and Telepresence by Edidiong Asikpo and Alejandro Pedraza.
- Beginner to Maintainer Journey of a Student by Debabrata Panigrahi
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Wednesday 18th May
Day 3 started with the first keynote address given by the executive director of CNCF, Priyanka Sharma. It was followed with subsequent keynotes from different speakers and a showcase of some of the adoption of Kubernetes in various fields like space.
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Mercedes Benz gave my favourite keynote about their experience running Kubernetes for seven years. It was nice to see how Kubernetes is being adopted in various domains.
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Finally, I visited the IBM Cloud’s booth for the day, where I won a Nintendo Switch from a raffle. What can I say? I’m a .
Photo by sewb.dev
Thursday 18th May.
Day 2 of KubeConEU 2022 keynotes consisted of talks about Kubernetes project updates and Cloud-Native Chasm by Emily Fox from Apple. I also attended a lecture by Omid Azizi, “Reproducing production issues in your CI pipeline using eBPF”. I learned about Pixie and how to add traffic replay to your testing workflows. Lastly, I attended the all attendee party sponsored by Kasteen, Veeam and Snyk.
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Friday 19th May.
The day started with the keynote addresses from different speakers and booth walks. Then I attended a career mentorship session sponsored by AWS. This was the last day of the conference, and you could feel the vibe and energy of the event slowly fading.
It was a fantastic experience listening to different speakers diving into various cloud-native related concepts. It was also refreshing to see that the event had side attractions planned to keep attendees engaged and refreshed. For example, the event consisted of organised yoga sessions after each keynote and a bike tour of the beautiful Valencia city.
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
In addition, there was a job board where people could post open positions, and it was one of my favourite parts of the conference. I have a video recording of the job board; you can reach me on Twitter if you’d love to get it.
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
The technologies
I discovered some new and exciting software technologies that I hadn’t heard of or even tried before. I’d try to mention a few I remember. I also have worked with some, but it was nice to see the faces behind awesome projects that I’ve come to love. I’d also be trying them out in the future, and I’d document my experiences with them, so stay tuned 😉.
- ArgoCD: One of my favourite CNCF projects. Check them out here ArgoCD makes achieving GitOps in Kubernetes environments easy.
- ArangoDB: A multi-model graph database with a unified query language similar to SQL. I enjoyed chatting with their engineer and getting to know the product better, one I’d be trying out. Check them out here
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
- RedHat: Not a new product, but I’m giving them a shoutout because they had the best company swag 😄. Redhat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions. They have a lot of products, and you should check them out here.
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
- Prometheus: The ultimate monitoring system that has grown to be the best friend of every SRE/DevOps engineer. Excited to try it out in my next project. Here’s Prometheus documentation
- Zesty: This is another company I enjoyed talking with. SO Zesty is an automated cloud optimisation platform that helps you reduce costs and frees up cloud resources. I’m impressed that they have a service that enables you to save up to 60% on EC2 costs. You should check them out.
Honestly, there are a lot of companies I enjoyed talking to and getting to know their offerings and services that I didn’t mention. It was also fun getting swags and lots and lots of stickers.
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
The people
My summary can’t be complete without talking about the people of #kubeconEU 2022. My KubeConEU 2022 experience was extraordinary, not just because it was a well planned and executed event, but because it’s an event that brought together some of the most unique and brilliant people I’ve seen. It was a blissful experience filled with every opportunity to connect and network with the event organisers to all attendees. You could be sitting down and enjoying a bowl of dried crunchy fruits, and someone says hi to you, and you start talking about Kubernetes. Forty minutes into the conversation, you discover that you’re talking with the CTO of a company you’ve applied to. It was surreal seeing so many people willing to talk, connect and collaborate. I also got the chance to meet some folks I knew from Twitter and LinkedIn. It was rewarding being able to fit the personality to their online profiles. I met people who didn’t make the conference feel lonely, people who are now part of the pleasant memories KubeConEU has blessed me.
Photo by Bakare Emmanuel
Photo by Bakare Emmanuel
Photo by Bakare Emmanuel
Photo by Bakare Emmanuel
The city
Valencia, Spain, is the most beautiful city I’ve seen in Europe. Everything about the city is perfect. From the fantastic hot weather to the friendly and welcoming people, there was just something that made KubeConEU 2022 more special. The architectural masterpieces are truly magnificent. From the opera house to the KubeConEU 2022 event location, there’s always something that would marvel you everywhere you turn. Then there’s the beach, the beautiful Valencia beach where I got to try the delicious and famous Paella Valenciana.
Photo by Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Photo by Oluwadamiloju Yusuf
Photo by Bakare Emmanuel
Conclusion
So that wraps up my kubeconEU 2022 experience. Not a single regret or wrong moment throughout my stay in Valencia, Spain, and it’s a city that will live in my heart for a long time. The next kubeconEU will be hosted in Amsterdam, Netherlands; see you there 😉!