KubeCon NA 2020 Top 5 Takeaways
Published on Dec 2, 2020 | 4 Mins Read
Photo by CNCF
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is one of the best cloud conferences to attend in 2020. It’s the flagship event organized by The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) — The sub-foundation of the Linux Foundation supporting the advancement of cloud native technologies. Usually it takes place every year in November.
I had the opportunity to attend KubeCon for the second time. Not only it was virtual like many conferences in 2020, but it was well-organized. Kudos to the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon team for pulling this off and delivering a great experience. All the conference sessions, keynotes, and breakout sessions will be available on Youtube in early December.
The keynote speaker Priyanka Sharma — General Manager of the CNCF — shared few updates regarding graduated and incubating projects, new member organizations joining the CNCF, and the end-user community. During these hard times in 2020, we lost a beloved member of the community — Dan Kohn — the former executive director of the CNCF. Dan helped to grow KubeCon from few hundreds five years ago to over 10,000 as of the event last year. The speakers paid tribute to his legacy.
This year, all networking activities were done via Slack except few events such as the daily Ask Me Anything (AMA) Happy Hour with Priyanka which was done via Zoom. I had the pleasure to mix and mingle with many professionals, vendors, and speakers on Slack and virtually during the happy hour.
I think it was great idea to learn and share knowledge from not only technologists but business leaders given the immense pressure they are under due to the COVID-19 crisis. Technologists are capable of solving very hard problems but they look for inspiration and direction especially during hard times.
Below are the top 5 takeaways from the 4-day event.
Containers in Production Exponential Growth
According to the Cloud Native Survey 2020, the use of containers in production is up 300% from the first survey in 2016. This is based on an extended community survey of more 1,000 responses mostly employees of large organizations demonstrating the use of cloud native in enterprises.
As more and more enterprises run containers in production, a set of new challenges will emerge in terms of enterprise-readiness, scalability, security, multi-cluster management, and more. I attended few sessions to learn and better understand those challenges. My favorite one was by two software engineers from Airbnb Engineering sharing yet another 10 More Weird Ways to Blow Up Your Kubernetes Cluster which is a continuation to a popular talk given last year.
It’s fascinating to see the community sharing not only success stories but failures. This is how we collectively can learn how to keep cloud native well, fail faster, and sleep better at night.
Also, I enjoyed the following sessions :
Together, We Can Flatten the Steep Learning Curve
During the virtual mix and mingle , I posted a Simple Poll on the Slack channel to take the pulse of the community . I asked the following question:
“What is the most challenging aspect of adopting cloud native in your organization?” and the options were :
Getting executive buy-in
Going live (in production)
Security (containers & platform)
The Steep Learning Curve ( Kubernetes,..etc)
I expected going live and security to be the top two voted for. To my surprise, the top two voted for were The Steep Learning Curve followed by Security.
This is another reason to continue attending KubeCon whenever you can. Not only you get to learn about a lot of things quickly, but meet with technology & business leaders who share experiences, use-cases, success-and-failure stories with the community. You can easily walk to the maintainers of your favorite cloud native project to network, ask questions, or inquire about the upcoming release. I learnt a lot attending the following sessions :
Security, Security, and Security
Unfortunately, security is often an afterthought in many organizations. CNCF announced the general availability of the Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) certification. This is going to be a great opportunity to educate, provide a baseline, and motivate professionals to learn more and stay current when it comes to securing cloud native platforms and applications.
As discussed in one of the keynotes — Are Certifications Worth It? by Cheryl Hung — this long awaited certification is now available based on requests from many organizations including service providers and consulting companies. A valid Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) is required before sitting for the CKS certification. While there is no official training available to prepare for the exam, the community put together a list of curated resources and it’s available on Github.
Today more than ever security is of paramount importance and especially when it comes to cloud native applications and platforms as I pointed out in a previous blog post. The following sessions focused on the different aspects of cloud native security including the container runtime, platform, and code:
Product Thinking Goes Cloud Native
Products over projects has been used in software engineering for some time. The Product thinking mindset focuses more on business outcomes — faster time to market (TTM), lower total cost of ownership (TCO), improved user experience(UX) ,…etc — rather than project outcomes. While this way of thinking might not work for all organizations, many organizations are reaping the benefits of the product thinking approach.
Operating in a product-mode enables teams to laser focus on the end-user or customer needs, manage risk, and continuously learn and improve. That way, work is done in short iterations and improved gradually to drive business outcomes.
Wether you’re building the next generation platform in your organization or buying, adopting the product mindset can be effective when it comes to cloud native platforms and applications. Keynote speaker Alena Prokharchyk — Software Engineer at Apple — shared Apple’s cloud native journey and the migration from Apache Mesos to Kubernetes. While the journey has neither been swift nor easy, but it helped to lay foundation for the next generation of innovations.
The following sessions focused on building and scaling a platform:
Community Matters In Cloud Native
Unlike large tech conferences that are dominated by one cloud provider or vendor, KubeCon is a true reflection of what it’s all about and that is its Community. Imagine walking into your favorite restaurant one day and it’s an open buffet day. Sure enough, not every single item in the buffet was seen in the menu but you’re getting a pretty good deal with an opportunity to order your favorite dish à la carte.
While all Co-located events required additional registration and sometimes extra fee was required, they provide a lot of value to teams and organizations especially those working with a particular cloud provider, vendor, or specialized in a particular domain (i.e: Security).
One thing to note about about the cloud native community is that it’s not only diverse, but growing and evolving rapidly. The conference organizers fully understand that it takes more than smart engineers to build a great diverse community. The following sessions focused on very interesting and somewhat entertaining non-technical topics:
Overall, this was a fantastic experience. I learnt a lot about new projects, the trends in the industry, and met wonderful people. One thing I enjoyed most in a virtual setting was the ability to attend multiple sessions at the same time. The one thing that we all miss for sure is the human connection.
If you are a visual learner like me and prefer to capture ideas in mind maps or sketches, check out Jerry Hargrove’s KubeCon 2020 Sketchnotes . Not only he’s a talented professional, but an artist. Let’s all hope we will meet again at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2021 in Los Angeles, CA.
