KubeCon EU - 2016 - London, short review #kubecon #kubernetes
I fell in love with Kubernetes, a year ago, during a day job research initiative around containers, micro-services, orchestra-tors and platforms as a service frameworks. I'm not a sysadmin, neither an OPs guy, I am a developer. I like to write code, design software, improve them, refactor them, re-architecting them. From the developer's perspective kubernetes is eventually the right technology (IMHO) to abstract many of the challenges of a micro-services based architecture, at the same time is easy to learn at least it's main idea's- without being sysAdmin Hulk. Last summer, when the first KubeCon tool place in California, I was telling to my self Man I wish I was there, it would be great to be in a conference for a technology that is in it's infancy and is picking up'. A few months later, KubeCon EU is announced and I registered no matter what.
A few months forward, I am sitting happy enough on a big room, along with other Kube-nauts, waiting for the keynote talk by Kelsey Hightower, who I was very happy to meet in person and ask about the latest details of his book, which I've done a early review a couple of months ago. By the way he is a great presenter, fun to watch and very honest towards the maturity and simplicity of Kubernetes. I really liked statements like the following from his talk - which show that the people behind pushing kubernetes are pragmatists and not unicorn riders!
It happens that KubeCon 2016, happened in a very intense period of my life, it was only 10 days that I have fully relocated to London, so everything was so _new?maybe.
Due to my developer background, I was mostly interested on use cases talks, rather than specific technical updates on the framework, which anyway I follow on the github page and the relevant slack channel.
I have to note that, the introduction of Ingres, Deployments and deamon sets, were very nice addition to the recent versions - and they are going to simplify the workload of many teams embracing kubernetes. My favorite part of Kubernetes is anyway the combination of Services/ Replication Controllers and load balancers (ingres) and how I can apply it on top of any legacy
- statically design deployment.
It was more than obvious, that Kubernetes is picking up on adoption in various and different organizations, we saw examples from the New York Times, the Met Office Informatics Lab and the UK home Office (which by the way has a very impressive github page). Of course we had talks from RedHat which is already embracing Kubernetes through OpenShift. I think it is matter of time, that we are going to see even more examples in future kubecons and then the use cases track is going to be even bigger.
Kubernetes is eventually picking up in the local scene as well, and my bet is that in a year or so the examples and demand for related skills is going to be higher, I kind of did my own research while job searching here in the UK, and in many companies still the idea of orhecstrators or Platforms as a Service is just an idea, or a research initiative, while many companies still evaluate containers, micro-service based solutions or they live happy enough leveraging Amazon services :).
The event planning and execution was very nice, so congrats to the conference organizers. The premises of CodeNode in London were more than sufficient for that amount of people and the number of sessions. Maybe as a proposal for future KubeCons in the future is to consider adding some live streams? Also, I would love to see more sessions on use cases but with real code and examples on the specifics of the deployments. In some cases I can understand that this was not possible, for example use cases like the UK home office, could not easily provide specific details. In some other cases a more technical oriented session would be even more useful.
Last but not least, finally I got to get a proper Kubernetes sticker for my laptop! Yaay! So go Kube and I trully hope that soon enough I will be able to see kubernetes in my day to day work or projects.