10 things that I enjoyed about KubeCon Virtual 2020
KubeCon (also known as CloudNativeCon) Europe took place from Aug 17th till Aug 20th 2020 as an all-virtual event — and that led to a very different experience for many past attendees including me! And overall, my experience was fantastic — contrary to what I was expecting given it was all virtual setup. I definitely missed the feeling of walking around the expo hall and visiting the sessions with thousands of like-minded people but a big shout out to the KubeCon crew that was able to turn this into a Virtual Event in such a short time during these times.
Below are 10 reasons that I enjoyed this years’s virtual KubeCon immensely (in no particular order).
1. Welcoming landing page
One of the ‘omg’ moments of KubeCon is realising the scale of the conference. The scale alleviates the realisation that this is a huge conference where you are going to meet a lot of like-minded individuals, learn the best open-source trends, challenge some choices and walk out being a better technologist overall! Having that ‘omg’ moment in person is a lot more easier. To illustrate, ici is a picture I picked up from a google image search for ‘KubeCon Barcelona 2019’. And you can tell, this conference is huge!
Now, we are in 2020 and in a different world. The KubeCon crew had to go virtual but you could tell that they were very keen to create an amazing virtual experience. This was evident from their landing page where we had the general manager of CNCF, Priyanka Sharma greeting attendees. Overall, the portal had a facile way to consume different content ranging from keynotes, expo hall (where we had some fantastic sponsor booths), networking salons (more on that later!), session selection options… while being at home.
2. Interactive Slack channels
Let’s talk next about networking. In my opinion, one of the key successes of tech conference in the recent years have been meeting like-mind people and having some fantastic discussions! Of course, the conference talks and demos are interesting — but it’s the conversations that makes it a unique experience. The actual talks and sessions in the tech conferences can all be consumed on YouTube or Pluralsight and other learning platforms.
With that in mind, the big question that I had stepping into KubeCon 2020 was — how will the KubeCon crew facilitate networking naturally? Thanks to NetApp, we, the attendees were greeted to a slack chat lounge where multiple different channels were created where the community were chilling and having some great conversations. The channels list was long and very well constructed — check out the list here. I came across some fantastic conversations across multiple channels and topics.
Here is an example of all the channels that I had joined for KubeCon networking:
My observation was that people with all levels of experience were hanging out on these channels and generally, the community was very responsive. And so, KubeCon was able to achieve something that is so difficult to achieve otherwise — create a community feeling at a huge conference while running in virtually.
High-fives and fist-bumps for that CNCF! 🥳🥳🥳
To illustrate my point, here is an example of us discussing the CNCF Technology Radar after Cheryl’s keynote (Ref: https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C018E2F8UEA/p1597763834221100
3. Interesting Day One
KubeCon has an interesting concept on day-1 — they usually host some co-located events which are not organised by CNCF and then, afternoon onwards, they kick off some 101 sessions and tutorial sessions. Last year in Barcelona, when I attended KubeCon for the first time, I almost felt like it was a warm-up day for the 3 intense days ahead. I was not sure what to expect this year specially with the concept of ‘co-located’ being a bit redundant because of the nature of the event.
However, I was glad to come across an interesting event for the morning — a roost hackathon (https://roost.hackerearth.com/) which allowed me to get hands-on with a tool called roost which claims to make Kubernetes developer collaboration easy (https://docs.roost.io/). I was able to get the IDE setup and try it out all before the conference talks had even started!
And in the afternoon (London time, of course!), I was glad to come across some good 101 talks. Here are couple of examples that I particularly enjoyed — the first one would something I would suggest all software developers to go through to understand the fundamentals of this landscape:
4. Great side chats
To continue the collaboration, some of my colleagues and I were had a side conversation in a private channel — the aim being to discuss some of the key learnings and experiences. As part of these discussions, I was able to learn and pick up on multiple updates and trends — emphasising the advantage of taking part in tel conferences as a community as against doing alone!
Some examples that I learnt purely by discussing with another attendees include:
5. Broad spectrum of talks
Honestly, I was spoilt for choices when it came to talks that I wanted to attend. Topics ranged from application development, case studies, CI/CD, community discussions, customising and extending kubernetes, CNCF experiences, lightening talks, application of cloud native trends to machine learning, maintainer tracks, networking, observability, operations, performance, runtimes, security & identity & policy, serverless, service mesh, storage, etc. I was like a kid in a candy shop — wanting to try multiple options all in one bite!
As a result, multiple times, I had issues like this (an example of a fantastic problem to have!)
It is worth clarifying that the event portal did enable us to watch the video after the talk was done on-demand — which meant that we were not really missing out the clashing talks. Additionally, in truly CNCF style, they will be releasing all these videos on Youtube similar to what they did with KubeCon North America 2019:
6. Inspiring keynotes
One of the attractive parts of tech conferences for me is to listen to the keynote speakers. Why you ask? Because that is where they can define the overall strategy / the vision / the high-level picture about what they want us, the attendees, to tak out of these couple of days. And as technologists, it’s very easy at times, to miss that big picture. KubeCon Virtual 2020 had some great keynote speakers — citing some great quotes that got tweeted around. See below some examples:
a. “Our lives have disparu remote — our challenges have gone global”
(Ref: https://twitter.com/bridgetkromhout/status/1295716912823971844)
b. “Don’t be a passive consumer of #cloudnative, you’ve so much to share. It is about connecting with people, keep introducing yourself to others”
(Ref: https://twitter.com/arungupta/status/1295722162028867584)
c. Talks about the need for the network to évoluer for #CloudNative + binge-watching Silicon Valley :D
(Ref: https://twitter.com/CloudNativeFdn/status/1295724364332244992)
d. Talk about design thinking and using chat-ops to be more efficient
(Ref: https://twitter.com/randizuckerberg/status/989183943521067011)
7. Fantastic and open community!
I know I talked about the interactive slack channels before but this one needs a mention of it’s own — the fantastic CNCF community! Over the period of few days, I was multiple people joining in and discussing all sorts of things keenly all with an aim to contribute to the community. The discussions ranged from the future of meetups, contributing to CNCF, mentoring and a lot more! Here are just 3 examples of the many that you can find in this open community:
a. Discussion about the future of meetups — very timely indeed
b. Discussion about someone wanting to start contributing to CNCF projects — this one is very near to my cœur because I was in the same position about a year ago
c. Call out to get involved with mentoring — which enables gens with all sorts of experiences to collaborate together
8. Great deep-dive sessions
As the phrase goes ‘Content is Key’. So, even with all the fantastic points, KubeCon would have missed the spark if the sessions lacked the meat required. However, KubeCon had plenty of great deep-dive sessions that i personally got a lot out of. Here are some examples that I felt were great
9. Games, music, etc.
Thanks to RedHat, there were a bunch of games that you could play when you wanted to take a brain break between sessions. Here are some examples of what we had as options:
Also, on Tuesday evening, we had a virtual Meet & Greet with Michael Hicks + Band — which was an experience in itself. Great setup!
10. Relevant use-case discussions
Personally, for me, KubeCon is not just about learning the technology and the frameworks. It’s also about understanding how different companies and industries apply these frameworks to solve real business problems. And so, I attended few sessions where the focus was about different
a. This talk demonstrated how ABN AMRO switched from AWS to Azure and the steps they took while doing that
b. This talk demonstrated the potential of Kubernetes to accelerate drug discovery and enable cooperative competition in IP-sensitive industries
c. The talk by Hannah Foxwell which focussed on building successful engineering teams and beginning to apply user-centric design to reduce the cognitive load on developers. There were couple of fantastic articles shared by the community following up the talk which I have linked here:
Wrap up
… and with that KubeCon virtual 2020 came to a wrap. These 10 pointers are what I saw — i am sure there were multiple other pointers that 100s and 1000s of attendees experienced during this conference Fantastic conference overall!
Here is my ‘call to action’ to anyone reading…
- If you attended KubeCon Virtual 2020, please share your top pointer about the conference
- If you didn’t attend but are interested to learn more about KubeCon and/or cloud-native technologies, check out some of the links shared on here and connect to folks on Slack, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
- If you randomly stumbled upon this article, share some love with lots of claps! 😂
- If you are a KubeCon crew or CNCF staff, please take a bow for all the hard work — well done to you 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Credits
Big shout out to Art, Karthik and Matt for being awesome co-attendees and continuously sharing feedback about the talks that they were attending! ❤️
