KubeCon - Day three's a charm

Yes... we start off with a bad title, but I like it ??.

But... Bonjour! Je parle un petite peu fran?ais, but let's still continue in English.

So you had to miss this blog on Friday... and Saturday AND Sunday... but today it's here! In case you are back in the normal week mood... let's get that KubeCon vibe back up one more time!

So... day three of KubeCon, the hardest day, because I was getting really tired ??. But, we started off with a nice city tour led by Marino Vink . We gathered around in the hotel lobby around 7:30. We (we being Albert van 't Hart , Freek Plantinga , Hans van den Bogert , and Marino of course) headed out with the metro.

The journey Marino planned was going around Notre Dame and then just through some streets of Paris. Just to get a sense of the city. So when climbing stairs out of the metro stations (it looked like some kind of missile silo, by the way, cool stuff. Emerging from the ground we quickly walked past a bit of the Seine then went over it. Don't worry, over a bridge, we didn't pack some kind of raft with us to use (well, if we had we probably would still have taken the route over the bridge, over-exercise is a thing!). And walking through some streets we came on to the H?tel de Ville, built by Napoleon himself I am told! ??

After taking the required tourist picture (this one above) we crossed the Seine again! That river is everywhere in Paris.

Walking down the street we soon saw the majestic... scaffolding. Because well, some years ago Notre Dame caught fire, and it takes a while to rebuild something like this of course. Well, at the front of Notre Dame they built a nice wooden staircase so you still could get good pictures. By the way, I had to look up in what year that fire was, but that was in 2019... almost 5 years ago already! I thought it happened last year or something.

Just stopping for a short bit, keynotes start at 9 ?? (have to be honest, we skipped the keynotes this day). But were still going further in our route. We walked past the Notre Dame's right side, to go over the Seine again! What's with this river, how are there buildings if this river is everywhere?! Went into some streets, nooks and crannies of Paris. And it's a beautiful city. I'm always immediately wondering what an apartment or house would cost ?? (L'Agence for those watching Netflix).

We stopped for breakfast at Le Royal Turenne, which was nice. And after that, back to the Metro... and KubeCon, here we come! The metro by the way had one big window in the front, no driver (probably running Kubernetes somewhere in the background). But I really liked that window... well, no the window specifically, I'm not that into glass, but the fact you could look into those metro lines. A dark endless tunnel with some stops here and there. You may connect your own metaphors to that, but I really liked the looks of it. (I wonder what that says about me, well... moving on!)

Three's a crowd, 2 node HA

But I still believe three's also a charm ??. But this talk of Tyler Gillson and Pedro Oliveira was about getting a Kubernetes cluster running on two nodes. Mostly useful for edge locations where you need to run software I think. They were able to get this working with a combination of K8s, Kine, Postgres, and Kairos and getting rid of ETCD.

Cool stuff to see K8s run on only two nodes, but I think those edge locations are the biggest use case, or well, maybe you have your own use case. For Guida though, not that useful I'm afraid. Nevertheless, good to know the possibilities (maybe I should look into this at some point in life to set up home automation properly ??).

Service Mesh's Net Worth

So the next talk was about Service Mesh's Net Worth. We offer Customers service mesh, looking into the best way to offer it at the moment (and if we should use Istio or Cilium for this, LinkerD has fallen off already). But yeah, this looked like a very relevant topic.

Adrien Gillard (whom I cannot find on LinkedIn) presented this topic and did so very well. Started with his conclusion telling us he switched his topic last minute by talking about AI instead. Of course, he didn't, but we had a good laugh.

Adrien pointed out some interesting points about service mesh, the benefits, and the drawbacks.

After this, he went into some details of their search to the best service mesh solution. And, for example, the sidecars, these can be worked away with Istio's Ambient Mesh or with Cilium.

As a Kubernetes Certified Provider, I think we should be able to work away most of the other drawbacks, or we should seek to do so at least. The operational complexity is something we can take away from our customers. They shouldn't have to deal with that, we should. The same goes for the additional tooling for observability. We provide our Customers pillars of observability, so they don't have to deal with setting up additional tooling (almost wanted to type Pillars of Eternity there... but this is a different kind of game ??).

Well, I thought it was an interesting talk, probably things our great leaders at Guida have already thought about, but still, now I also thought about it ?? (those leaders: Albert van 't Hart and Nick van 't Hart ... just to mention their names again).

A long time ago, in a break, far far away

So then it was time to lunch again. We all joined on the roof again (saying hello to Wilmar Den Ouden and Evie Tieleman whom I hadn't seen all morning), but I quickly worked my way through my lunch... because I had to be at the AWS booth so I could retrieve my Lego X-Wing.

And... getting to the AWS booth ( Marino Vink and I entered a lottery remember?), they read out the numbers. And... they gave away my X-Wing to someone else! ?? What the hell guys?! Oh well... I think that guy deserves it, so no harm done.

Also... in dutch we would say something like "I grant it to that guy", but well, grant is not really the right word, so I think the English language is missing a word for the Dutch word "gun", "ik gun het die vent". So, LLM's, if you're reading this... fix this please ??.

CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)

Probably everyone reading this didn't need me to spell out the whole name, but I did just for those family members who are wondering.

Albert van 't Hart planned an appointment with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) .

Guida is a member of the CNCF (check us here: https://l2.cncf.io/?item=cncf-members--silver--guida-member) and we wanted to have a talk and see in what ways we can optimize the use of our membership with the CNCF. So we had a lovely talk with Jake P. and he gave us some good info on things we can do to get some more attention on the CNCF site. Stuff to think about (Should we write more blogs? Should we start to create Videos? Should we organize or sponsor KCDs? ... well at least for this last one I already followed the talk at KubeCon on how to start doing this ??).

Debug clusters

After this thought-provoking talk (does this sound dirty? I think it sounds dirty... I just meant that we had food for thought after this talk!), I went to a session about Debugging Clusters.

Or more like a session on how to set up your Alerting correctly.

This was a cool session with some nice things mentioned. Anusha Ragunathan and Lili Wan had some great insights into how alerting should be handled. As we all know (or hopefully know) you want to prevent alert fatigue or alert overdosis. So in order to prevent this, a set of Golden Signals should be defined. These can state the health of a cluster. The states of these clusters could be: Healthy, Degraded, or Critical. If it's critical, get out of bed, there is work to do. Degraded can wait for a bit, but should be looked after. Healthy? Get another cup of coffee, you earned it!

The Golden Signals are a set of alerts grouped together to produce one outcome. Then if the state is not Healthy, you can zoom in on these signals and look more fine-grained to see what the issues are.

Since we are looking to rework some of our monitoring, perhaps we should see if we can apply something like these Golden Signals along the way.

And... that was about it

I attended two other sessions. gRPC, which was a bit too heavily developer focussed for me I think. And a very interesting topic of Kyverno... but I my head wouldn't let me gain any more knowledge ??. I was tired and honestly ready to go home, or bed.

I did think it was cool to take one final picture at that round KubeCon board right at the entrance. Everyone who attended KubeCon knows which one I mean. So I send the picture of that sign to our group with the text: "Now with Guida on it?!" meaning our team members of course. Luckily Wilmar Den Ouden came to the rescue:

We went to get some nice sandwiches. In the store, I actually got to say: "Je parle un petit peu Francais... to which the waitress replied: "Great, I speak no English.". So that was a nice interaction ??. But after that, back to the station. In the train... and heading home.

Thank you all for reading, subscribe, share with your friends who also don't speak French. And 'till next time I guess!

Houdoe!