KubeCon NA 2023
Last week KubeCon NA, was personally the most amazing and rewarding KubeCon so far!
The highlight of my week was meeting with people interested in the just published and printed Platform Engineering on Kubernetes book.
I cannot thank enough the people who queued and waited for a signed copy of both my book and the report sponsored by Codefresh titled Software Deployment for Kubernetes. Of course, these wouldn't have been possible without Diagrid's sponsoring more than 100 copies of my book for the attendees to take away. 🙏🙏
It was terrific to receive support from all my cloud-native friends, and I will be forever grateful for the overwhelming amount of support I've received this last week.
With the book out of the way, let's talk about the conference, co-located events and pre-conference rejekts!
Cloud Native Rejekts
I arrived in Chicago on Saturday before the conference, so I had the pleasure of attending Cloud Native Rejekts thanks to the kindness of Solo.io, especially Marino, who shared a ticket with me. I always enjoy Rejekts because you can meet great speakers and community members in a very relaxed atmosphere before the craziness of the conference starts.
You can watch all the recordings for both days and both rooms that are already uploaded to YouTube here:
From Rejekts, I took the task to review the tools provided by KubeShop: https://kubeshop.io/ as I met with Courtney, and I was convinced that these tools deserve more attention.
First-ever AppDeveloperCon (co-located event)
I had the honor to present with my friend Oleg from AtomicJar the event's first session on Monday at 9:15 am with a full and very enthusiastic room full of developers!
First of all, I wasn't expecting that many people at the event, and I expected not everyone in the room to be developers, but I was wrong. Based on the audience response, my guesstimate goes as follows: 30% Java Developers, 30% Go developers, 20% .NET developers, and 10% the remaining stacks (Node, Rust, etc.).
We presented the fresh integration between Dapr and Testcontainers, and the message landed nicely on the audience.
Here are the slides from our presentation and the GitHub repository where you can find the example we showed that can be run on any Kubernetes cluster.
GitHub Repository 🍕 : https://github.com/salaboy/pizza
It was also excellent to see the response from developers to our booth, and the queue for the book signing was mind-blowing!
Workflows, AI & ML, plus developer experience, were the topics that resonated the most with me. The Dagger project and its new modules system are something that I want to investigate.
AppDeveloperCon is going to Europe, so I look forward to seeing how it works.
Based on the presentations that I watched, I took a strong interest on Dagger Modules (Project Zenith), which provides language-agnostic integrations between Dagger and other tools. Check Solomon's video about it from a month ago here. Kudos to the Dagger Team, big fan here!
CNCF Ambassadors
Before the conference started, I had the pleasure of meeting all the CNCF Ambassadors, and I was surprised by how many friends were there already.
Annual Report
I strongly recommend people reading this to apply and get involved with the ambassadorship program.
KubeCon Main conference
The conference was a bit of a blur; I met hundreds of people and had amazing conversations about various topics. Strangely enough, I've spent much time chatting with different companies and attendees at the sponsor's booths this year.
Besides the failed ML demo at the Keynote, I value live demos, so I hope that Priyanka keeps trying, as things fail daily. It is all about ensuring people can run and troubleshoot issues when working with cloud-native technologies.
I am looking forward to spending some time this week trying it locally on my laptop: github.com/cncf/llm-starter-pack including looking at weave-scope https://www.weave.works/docs/scope/latest/installing/
I found interesting the heavy emphasis on Dynamic Resource Allocation. I wonder if this is a blocker for large organizations right now or if it is just a big feature that got the spotlight. I will be researching this more for sure:
The big trends were LLM models on Kubernetes Platform Engineering followed by Developer Experience and Security (Secure Supply Chain, SBOMs, etc.) .
Besides reinforcing that I expect a bigger, better, and much more developer-focused conference next year, I have little to add to the trends.
I was looking a bit at Acorn and Radius and I have to say that I wasn't impressed yet. My main takeaway from the conference is to do a second pass on these projects and try to understand where these projects are going.
Before you go, remember that KubeCon EU - Paris and AppDeveloperCon are following, so please submit your proposals before it's too late:
Do you want me to review or comment on your proposals? Get in touch via Twitter/X @Salaboy
KubeCon Pics!
