Kubernetes London Meetup - picking up momentum #kubernetes #london

One of the great things, when living in London is that you have access to meetup's and communities for almost every technology you will ever manage to get interested in. After attending the first EU Kubernetes Conference - KubeCon (2 months ago), this was my second time attending the 'Kubernetes London Community' in one of their regular meetup's at the premises of SkillsMater.

I would like to give credit's to the 2 main organizers Peter Idah & Milos Gajdos for working towards, building a vibrant community for a technology that IMHO is not only trending but will become very relevant. I am might be a bit biased, but Kubernetes is one of the few things out of this DevOps / Containers / Microservices tsunami of technologies, that is going to make a change - market wise. Thumbs up to GoogleCloudfor sponsoring beers and pizzas before the talks - good job. I would be very happy next time with an uber cool Kubernetes TShirt for my summer vacation!

The Dev in the DevOps

I always feel, like a silent minority in that kind of meetups, especially the Kubernetes one. Despite the fact that I totally relate to the concepts and the technology, I do belong more to the Dev side of the DevOps culture rather than the Ops. As I have stated numerous times and in some of my introductory talks around Kubernetes, I came 'close_ to this technology and evaluated it's potential strengths, from the software developer's / architect perspective rather the Ops or DevOps developer. For me Kubernetesis an excellent abstraction for concerns that as a software developer I don't have to worry about, especially when I need to focus on delivering / writing business code. These abstractions safeguard concerns and mitigate risks that I will have in the future, when my solution potentially will need to be flexible, scale-able, deployment environment neutral etc. I do follow the developments of the go language, I do try to relate to the complexities and specifics of AWS or Google Container Engine, but the main priority for me is the code the solutions me and the team I belong to, needs to write and architect. I am not glorifying the Ops centric technologies, I see them as an enabler and a problem solver for 'business and technical concerns_ many software solutions will face. But, as you might have experienced before, a lot of software projects do die, or never get to the mainstream in order to phase challenges that technologies or environments like Kubernetesor the Cloud have to offer. I do worry about the fact that we the developers, have found a new box_ of emerging technologies, that for sure are relevant but we kind of settle (or we consider uncool) the actual code written to provide the solutions. Still out main concern should be whatever lives within the container - and not the container neither the infrastructure around it. Yes they are important but not the main priority. Enough for my devs first rant - I hope I don't get flamed by the Ops audience - which I have total respect.

About the meet-up

The first talk was from Martin Devlin, from Pearson Plc, Bitesize PaaS Project. They are using Kubernetes for then upcoming platform. I did keep some notes regarding some of the solutions they keep in the mix for their platform. Unfortunately I did not have the chance to elaborate, but I kind of wondered, why you would need to use services like Consul, or Vault within Kubernetes where actually the framework already abstracts and provides in some extend this needs. Maybe at Pearson they do have special cases and requirements, which of course I can not relate to. The Vaultsection was interesting enough. A kind and positive reminder to the Martin_ for any future presentation, it would be nice he could add some more diagrams and more slides so that we can have a better idea of their solution and what was presented.

The second talk, was from Justin Santa Barbara. Really great talk, from one of the most important committers of Kubernetes, responsible for the AWS support. One of the many questions I get to have or hear in talks regarding ** Kubernetes** adoption, is Can we use this in AWS, can we use this feature of AWS with Kubernetes_? etc. So it was really great to have Justin presenting and passing his views and describing the current state and road map towards this area.

I really liked his _all kubernetes view of things, which totally makes sense for me. Kubernetesis providing a rich set of functionality in different areas around application deployment, that eventually containerized applications that will be living inside this environment could be aware of these (capabilities) or even use them.

Very nice interactive presentation and I do hope the London Kubernetes community to host more committers and devs of ** Kubernetes**in the future. In my notes from Justin's presentation was, the _PetSet' Controllers that is coming soon enough, and will eventually answer the question How about hosting my cluster-aware MySQL or ElasticSearch within kubernetes. Last but not least, there were a lot of questions around the applicability and availability of the Ubernetes' type of deployment (meaning multiple kube clusters in different regions/zones - acting as one).

It was really, time well spent yesterday and I am really looking forward for the future meetups and developments of this _emerging London community'. If you are considering adopting, or trialing Kuberneteswithin your company in London, I totally encourage you to join this community and share the experience.

Go Kube!