Last week Chef was in Berlin for the 2017 edition of Kubecon EU. For me personally, this was my second CloudNativeCon/Kubecon, and it definitely lived up to my expectations. The attendees of CloudNativeCon/Kubecon seem to be some of the brightest conference attendees I’ve seen. Couple that with the great Open Source Software community in Europe, and you have a great mix of people that lead to compelling presentation and great conversations.
The week kicked off with several Meetups throughout Berlin. Monday Chef hosted a Meetup with our friends at Endocode. Fletcher Nichol, Sr. Software Development Engineer at Chef, talked about what is new in Habitat, as a follow on to the Hands on Habitat event we held in Berlin in February. Ian Henry, Technical Community Advocate at Chef, talked about the OpsWorks for Chef Automate service that is available in AWS.
Tuesday the Chef team headed over to a Cloud Native Computing Meetup held by Kinvolk. Kelsey Hightower kicked off the event with an Ask Me Anything session. Joe Beda also talked about how clustering drives organizational efficiency, and Thomas Graf presented on a project called Cilium.
The conference was in full force on Wednesday and continued through Thursday. It’s quite amazing seeing how the Kubernetes community has grown so rapidly. There were around 1500 attendees which was up significantly from the last conference in Seattle, and triple the amount that attended the last European edition of the conference. The vendor presence has also grown, which is the sign of a growing market. Just like the topnotch attendees and conversations, the talks were once again of a high quality. There a good mix of practical knowledge, deep dives into Kubernetes internals, and real world user stories. Below is a list of some interesting talks:
Chen Goldberg gave a great presentation on the growth of the Kubernetes community.
Kelsey Hightower talked about Kubernetes and Federation (worldwide outages made easy!).
Richard Fliam, of Comcast VIPER, spoke about scaling an organization’s capabilities with Kubernetes.
Richard made some excellent points about how our technology choices create organizational drag, and how the choices of our past have to be rethought as we scale to new levels of compute. This of course made me think of Habitat and the work we are doing to redefine how we think of automation, the operating system, and architectural patterns. Richard’s talk also highlighted for me how automation needs to cascade through a system. It’s no good to have one part of a system and not the others. Comcasts ability to automatically to start a new system, and it automatically join Kubernetes, and be available for workloads is a great example of this idea of automation at all levels.
Overall CloudNativeCon/KubeCon is a great experience. The level of energy is fantastic, and the opportunity for learning is high. I’m already looking forward to the next show in December.
To learn more about Habitat, join us at ChefConf 2017 in Austin, Texas May 22 – 24!