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Some Musings From KubeCon EU 2021 (Virtual Edition)

Wed, 12 May 2021 18:48:00 +0100

I’ve just finished binging on a whole host of talks from KubeCon EU 2021, and thought I’d scribble down some of my immediate thoughts - from the talks I “went” to, as well as more generally about virtual conferencing these days. Which is a bit of a change of pace, let’s be honest.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

I should caveat this post with the obvious - my experiences are heavily based around how I chose to take in the conference - the sessions I picked, the things I got involved with and the things I didn’t. Conferences for me tend to be focused on learning about or picking up tips on bits of technology or techniques that I already have some idea about in the first place, rather than totally new things that I don’t think I’m going to have any practical use for in my current line of work. I’m also not that great at the “networking” thing 😅

KubeCon - Reflections

Fri, 24 May 2019 09:00:00 -0100

Barcelona night skyline - taken from Riot Games’ website

This blog post summarises my thoughts on a very entertaining and informative trip to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona, May 2019. It was my first trip there and I picked up a variety of useful bits ’n’ pieces while I was there.

Any Stand-out Themes?

In trying to sum things up, I find myself struggling for any stand-out themes. Thinking about this a little more, I reckon this is probably a fairly natural thing to happen when comparing to “big vendor” conferences where they have large product & marketing teams driving their goals. Here, however, is a community event of largely open source software. Even the larger commercial vendors embrace the spirit of it all. It’s actually really refreshing.

KubeCon - Other Cool Things

Thu, 23 May 2019 23:00:00 -0100

Yes, this was a wall of donuts to celebrate Kubernetes 5th birthday!

I’m going to use this blog post to talk about a couple of other things I learnt about while at KubeCon 2019. These don’t slow neatly into my other posts from my time at the conference, but I still felt they were interesting enough to call out separately.

How Changing Kubernetes Itself Works

I went to a couple of talks focusing on some proposals for improving Kubernetes itself. As well as liking the content being proposed, it was interesting to learn a little bit about how the process of making changes to Kubernetes - what is a giant open source behemoth now - actually works.

KubeCon - Service Meshes

Thu, 23 May 2019 20:00:00 -0100

So, why service meshes? ~~Because I am architect, and architects are born to love service meshes.~~ Because actually I can totally see the value of a service mesh, I just can’t quite seem to convince anyone that they’re worth biting the bullet on yet.

It’s a design pattern I’m totally sold on and just need to find the killer need for so we can start reaping some of those sweet, sweet benefits. Or crying at the complexity and brittle overlay we’ve subjected ourselves too. Maybe.

KubeCon - Observability

Thu, 23 May 2019 18:00:00 -0100

One of the (many) topics I was keen to get into while at KubeCon was observability. This is something that is just so totally and utterly crucial when running this whole “distributed microservice” thing that you really need good solutions to this stuff to make a success of it.

In the case of my team right now, we have some good stuff going on. Prometheus & Grafana are great - digging those a lot. We’re standardising some dashboards for teams that aren’t too fussed, and we’re also seeing some teams do some really funky things beyond that with their instrumented code.

KubeCon - The Keynotes

Thu, 23 May 2019 09:00:00 -0100

Intro by the CNCF Director

Dan Kohn’s talk starts with a screenshot of the game Civ VI - who doesn’t want to see a turn-based strategy game reference in a talk to nearly 8,000 ~~IT professionals~~ geeks - he is emphasising the idea that in the game you could not train Knights without first discovering Stirrups.

Civ VI Tech Tree

He builds on this with further “real” examples of two people independently discovering things - he uses the examples of Facebook (watch the film the Social Network if you’re not sure about this reference!), Natural Evolution, Calculus - the idea being that simultaneous invention is not an uncommon thing, it is triggered by a spark of creativity and - crucially for his point to land - the pre-requisite things need to be in place (such as computers and the internet, in the case of Facebook).