Going Dutch at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon—and with it, I hope, in-person events in general—are back, bigly. I was one of the ten thousand people attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU conference this week in the wonderful city of Amsterdam (more about Amsterdam later). This conference was every bit as exciting and buzzy as any of the KubeCons I attended pre-COVID-19 pandemic. The conference sold out, and the crowd was psyched to hear about their favorite CNCF projects and the companies that built solutions around them.
The projects themselves are more diverse now. Cloud native is no longer just containers and Kubernetes (goodbye Container Journal, hello Cloud Native Now). The many projects around observability now dominate much of the conversation here. Open Telemetry is the second-biggest open source project in the CNCF (Kubernetes is still number one) and service mesh seems to be finally gaining traction.
The show floor is huge, but the booths are not spaced as far apart as they were in Detroit or Valencia. That makes for tighter quarters, which I think contributes to the buzzy effect. While the usual cloud-native companies are here, there are many “mainstream” tech vendors, too, that you don’t necessarily think of in terms of cloud native. While the majority of the booths are standard, about 10 x 10, some of the bigger ones are quite a bit bigger with all of the bells and whistles you would expect at a tech trade show. There were even mascots in costume being led around by handlers.
Outside the show floor, the sessions were well-attended. There seems to be something for everyone, as each of the 40-something CNCF projects has something going on. There is also lots of training offered here, and I understand those also are well-attended.
On Tuesday, April 18, the ancillary conferences—formerly called the day zero conferences—were held. I heard many of those were standing-room only. All in all, it seems it was a very successful KubeCon!
Another conference trend that comes through loud and clear to me is that KubeCon is not just for developers. The emphasis on ops, SRE, platform engineering and security is unmistakable. Not that devs are being dissed or anything; it’s more like devs are being pulled into more of the ops end of things. Sort of an anti-shift left, if you will. I, for one, welcome this development. I think it really points to cloud native becoming the de facto standard for the compute platform in the cloud and everywhere else.
Also, a big shout out to the CNCF and the Linux Foundation for nurturing this community through COVID-19 and helping it come back in force here in Amsterdam.
Speaking of Amsterdam, what a great city for a conference! The mass transit system makes it a breeze to get just about anywhere. The system is modern, clean, safe and easy to use. On top of that, holding the show at just about peak tulip season was a brilliant idea. Getting here two days early gave our team the opportunity to tour some of the great museums in town, see many of the beautiful flowers and even take a somber tour of the Anne Frank House and the Jewish Quarter. All in all, this year’s KubeCon made me remember why in-person events are so great.
Now, it is on to San Francisco, California, for what promises to be an equally exciting RSA Conference!
Image Source: Photo by krystina rogers on Unsplash
