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    21 Nov, 2019
    KubeCon 2019 Day 3 and Event Summary
    Cloud

    Keynotes

    Bryan Liles kicked off the day 3 morning keynotes with a discussion of “finding Kubernetes’ Rails moment”—basically focusing on how Kubernetes enables folks to work on/solve higher-level problems. Key phrase from Bryan’s discussion (which, as usual, incorporated the humor I love to see from Bryan): “Kubernetes isn’t the destination. Kubernetes is the vehicle that takes us to the destination.” Ian Coldwater delivered a talk on looking at Kubernetes from the attacker’s point of view, and using that perspective to secure and harden Kubernetes. Two folks from Walmart also discussed their use case, which involves running Kubernetes clusters in retail locations to support a point-of-sale (POS) application at the check-out register. Finally, there was a discussion of chaos engineering from folks at Gremlin and Target.

    No Breakout Sessions

    Due to booth duty and my flight home, I wasn’t able to attend any breakout sessions today.

    Event Summary

    If I’m completely honest, I didn’t get as much out of the event as I’d hoped. I’m not yet sure if that is because I didn’t get to attend as many sessions as I’d hoped/planned (due to problems with sessions being moved/rescheduled or whatever), if my choice of sessions was just poor, if it was just me/my personality, if I’m not the target audience for this event, or if it is some combination of these factors. I did enjoy seeing other folks in the community, meeting some folks that I hadn’t met before, and being able to help answer some questions. From that perspective, the event was a success.

    Feel free to contact me on Twitter if you’d like to discuss anything in more detail.

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    21 Nov, 2019
    KubeCon 2019 Day 2 Summary
    Cloud

    Keynotes

    This morning’s keynotes were, in my opinion, better than yesterday’s morning keynotes. (I missed the closing keynotes yesterday due to customer meetings and calls.) Only a couple of keynotes really stuck out. Vicki Cheung provided some useful suggestions for tools that are helping to “close the gap” on user experience, and there was an interesting (but a bit overly long) session with a live demo on running a 5G mobile core on Kubernetes.

    Running Large-Scale Stateful Workloads

    Due to some power outages at the conference venue resulting from rain in San Diego, the Prometheus session I had planned to attend got moved to a different time. As a result, I sat in this session by Lyft instead. The topic was about running large-scale stateful workloads, but the content was really about a custom solution Lyft built (called Flyte) that leveraged CRDs and custom controllers to help manage stateful workloads. While it’s awesome that companies like Lyft can extend Kubernetes to address their specific needs, this session isn’t helpful to more “ordinary” companies that are trying to figure out how to run their stateful workloads on Kubernetes. I’d really like the CNCF and the conference committee to try to promote talks that are more applicable to the general audience instead of these “Look what we built!” sessions.

    Leveling Up your CD: Unlocking Progressive Delivery on Kubernetes

    This was a useful session covering Argo and some functionality being added to Argo to support what’s being called progressive delivery. Progressive delivery is defined by them as continuous delivery with some fine-grained controls over the blast radius, and the presenters demonstrated new features in Argo that provide fine-grained control over rollouts and the use of canary deployments (they showed a feature whereby Prometheus metrics can be used to determine the validity of a canary deployment and roll it back if unsuccessful). Argo was already on my “list of things to dig into,” but now I think it’s moved up a few spots on that list.

    I had on my schedule to attend a talk on Krane, but the room moved from what was on my schedule (I don’t know if this is related to the power outages in other areas of the conference venue or what). After realizing this and wandering around trying to find the room, I realized I’d missed too much of the session so gave up.

    That’s it for day 2. Tune in tomorrow for a recap on day 3, the final day of the event.

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