What is KubeCon + CloudNativeCon ?

KubeCon is the flagship event of The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where developers, organisations and users from around the world meet, ideate and discuss the present and the future of cloud-native space.

It is a 5 Day event with the first two days being reserved for co-located events and the main event starts from Day 3.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is held twice a year, both in-person and virtually, this was the second KubeCon of the year held in Detroit, Michigan (North America), the first one being KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU held in Valencia, Spain.

My Experience and Learnings

This was my first KubeCon as a student. I attended the event virtually.

Day 1️⃣

Attended 2 sessions on Day-1, great start

Data on Kubernetes Day

Organised by DoK Community, it was a 8 hour long event streamed live from KubeCon on Youtube. You can visit the event schedule here and watch the recording on their YouTube Channel.

This was a beginner friendly event with some amazing talks which came in handy because I am pretty beginner myself, with my DevOps Journey being just 3 months old. The session was very fun with entertainment break in between from time to time in which there were performances from the community including comedy sketches and musicals.

If I have to choose a few of my most favourite talks, those would be:

• Medical / Healthcare data on Kubernetes
• Kubernetes 360º
• Formula 1 telemetry processing using Apache Kafka on Kubernetes
• Choosing Kubernetes for Stateful Applications

Building for the future with Kubernetes by Google Cloud

This session did overlap with the DoK Day and had to watch the recording for some parts later, there were some good insights on deployment using Kubernetes and some hands on demo using Google Cloud.

The recording is available to watch on-demand for anyone.

Day 2️⃣

• Hands on Hacking Containers and ways to prevent it by Snyk

Along with some lightning talks, these were short 5-10 min talks given by industry experts on various topics.

Day 3️⃣

This was the official starting day of KubeCon with first in agenda being the keynote sessions, the first one being a welcome Keynote form the Executive Director of CNCF Priyanka Sharma which gave a lot of insight on the present and future of Cloud-Native. My day ended after the keynote sessions.

Day 4️⃣

Top 10 Biggest Mistakes you shouldn't make in OpenSource

learned a few tips and tricks on how not to open source by Bill Mulligan and Divya Mohan

my most favourite learnings from the session

• Trying to start big
• Not doing the research
• Not sharing your learning
• Not seeking mentorship

Chaos Engineering 😵‍💫

This session was about deliberately inducing failures in your software to verify its resilience in face of random disruptions.

How CNET uses CNCF Landscape

This session specially was really interesting and a much needed one because as a beginner, DevOps gets confusing sometimes, having an insight from a big media company on how they uses DevOps to serve their audience was very good, it kinda gave a Third person view on DevOps workflow and how all the things that make up a DevOps cycle work together and is utilised in real world.

Day 5️⃣

The final day of KubeCon was here just in no time

Crossplane Intro and Deep Dive

learned about what crossplane is and what it does and how it can be used to level up your deployments.

Networking session on Zoom

This was a mentor-mentee session where mentors answered any and all questions mentees had regarding cloud native, open source, careers etc.

What could I have done better 🤔

• spent more time making my schedule
• attended more networking sessions
• attended / visited more solutions showcase and virtual booths

next time 😬😮‍💨🤞

Conclusion 😊

This was a good experience overall and I am glad that I attended it. Learned a lot from people's experiences and knowledge about the Cloud native ecosystem, best practises and Cloud Native Tech in general.

This was a ton of fun and I hope to attend it in-person next year.

as always, Thank you for reading and I hope you liked it. 😁

See you in the next one. 👋