KubeCon - Day two, still going strong

Bonjour! ?a va? Ca va bien! Mais je ne parle toujours pas fran?ais! So... let's continue in English.

To be honest, it would be a good laugh if my last blog would be completely in perfect French ??

But, yes, day two! The schedule has been filled and the day started a bit bad because I lost half of my blog (of course LinkedIn said my concept had been saved, but it wasn't saved!). But well, after all that stress Evie Tieleman and Wilmar Den Ouden were kind enough to wait for me downstairs at the hotel, and on their recommendation I ordered a Croissant Amande at Boulangerie Lucia & Marcelo... well, as if heaven descended down on me! That was great!

So with my spirits lifted quite a bit by that divine breakfast, we headed to the metro for Day 2 of KubeCon!

Arrived at KubeCon (or at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles), I quickly fixed the blog.

Well, I luckily scheduled my KubeCon talks ahead of time. So after fixing the blog, I could dive right into action. Just to give you an idea of how that scheduling goes, a screenshot from the schedule site:

You can leave checks on the events you think are interesting and can filter your view to show only those. I usually select a few in the same time slot and decide between those just before the events.

So this morning I decided to go to some soft-skill meetings. Starting with...

The Journey of organizing a KCD

And, before joining this meeting I didn't even know what a KCD was. Kuesidilla? (that's a stupid joke, I know it's spelled with a Q... and even then it's a stupid joke ??)

A KCD is a Kubernetes Community Day. These events are held by more local communities, a kind of smaller and localized KubeCons. The purpose of these is to help sustain the cloud native communities. These are supported events by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation... but you knew that right?!).

I think it was an interesting talk and well, don't know if I see myself organizing such an event right away, but maybe in the future, it will definitely be interesting to organize or perhaps help organize one. I'll have to look if these are ever held in or around Rotterdam (or Tilburg... which I often call Chillburg... but... that doesn't matter for this talk about KCDs, but I just wanted to let you know ??).

We are organizing our own event, actually only meant for our Customers to attend, GuidaCon! But maybe GuidaCon will be a nice try-out to see how well we do at organizing an event. And then next time? ??

Really want to give a shoutout to Jade Lassery and her partner Luiz Bernardo Levenhagen . They had a nice relaxed and friendly energy... and that's exactly the type of energy I like. (besides energy coming from Energon of course ??... these jokes today... so bad... bear with me, they'll probably improve... ah, who am I kidding, they won't ??)

Now if you ever want to organize a KCD, have a look at: https://github.com/CNCF/kubernetes-community-days

Giving and Receiving professional feedback

So I had already decided to make it a soft-skill morning. So my next session was one about Giving and receiving professional feedback. Now, of course, working at Guida all feedback we give and receive is professional. ??

Kidding of course! I thought it was good to hear some of these things again. Although many of the tips and tricks might be open doors. But my main takeaways of these were:

• Try to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. How would you like to receive feedback?
• Put aside your biases and assumptions about the person of the person's intent. If someone was being unfriendly, you don't know what happened in their day. But also when giving feedback, be sure you keep an open mind, and give someone a way to work with so they keep having a path forward. Even if you don't agree with something. Be friendly and approach their ideas with curiosity (why have you set this up this way?).
• And, when giving "negative" feedback, perhaps try to use the sandwich technique. Say something positive, give your negative feedback, but finish with some positive feedback. However, using this technique, try to keep it authentic to yourself. And if you know the person you give the feedback to, and you know they won't appreciate the sugarcoating. Be direct. Well... being from the Netherlands, I think we generally appreciate not using the sandwich technique, as we like a bit of directness ?? (but also then, I think there is a clear difference between directness and being an ass).
• Try to see feedback as a gift. Someone probably wants you to succeed or help you. Feedback is just some information with which you can probably grow (if this feedback was professional feedback of course)
• And lastly, why not use emojis in your texts? They can help with sending out your indirect language. If you would talk to someone, you can read each other's body language. This gets lost in sending texts to each other. Emojis can help to get some of that body language across. But keep in mind that you can of course also get your body language wrong, so think about if it's appropriate.

Well... interesting stuff and although I think we all always think we give professional feedback. I think it was good and helpful to hear these things again. Just to remind yourself again of these points.

Thanks, Ana Margarita Medina ?????? , Danielle Lancashire , Hilliary Lipsig , and Xander Grzywinski for the interesting talk.

But... Lunchtime!

We picked up our lunch bag (every day they have a selection of poultry, beef, or vegetarian lunch items) and went to our new favorite roof. The Eiffel Tower was still present in the distance. Not that I was expecting it to not be there, but hey, you never know.

After lunch, I got overheated on the roof so Hans van den Bogert and Wilmar Den Ouden kindly joined me inside where it was cool (because I went there... hahaaaaaa... ahum).

And in that time it's ideal to check up on our Teams channels and see if there are any issues sent in, because normal operation goes on as well. But in this case, Hans and Wilmar were looking into a Redis issue which caused a P2 during the night (for which I got woken up at 2 a.m.). I assisted them with minimal support, but I guess every bit helps right? ?? (and let's be honest, hearing my soothing voice alone is helpful enough of course!)

But... the lunch break doesn't last forever, so I made sure to go to the next item in my schedule on time, so I wouldn't risk the room being full and having no place for me.

Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry

... that is the session I joined. And I liked this one because it was more of a hands-on session. We got to install OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and a demo application. With the Demo application, we could generate some logging and in Jaeger, you could have a look at the tracing which is collected by OpenTelemetry. Cool stuff. And, to be honest, I think this is something we should definitely consider providing for our Customers. Often languages like PHP have already some built-in support for tracing, so getting trace info for OpenTelemetry would involve too many application changes. And having tracing in your application is almost a requirement for research of issues or unwanted behavior.

So to get tracing:

You need to install OpenTelemetry on your cluster. Some openTelemetry collector. In this collector, you define what exporters there are (in this demo Jaeger for tracing and Prometheus for metrics). Then you deploy your instrumented workload. So the Instrumentation is a CRD that defines where openTelemetry collectors run and some information about the application that is running (for example in which language is it written so it knows how to interpret logging for example).

There are two ways of Instrumentation, auto-instrumentation and manual-instrumentation. For the demo auto-instrumentation was used, which has the convenience of not having to change the application itself and still get decent information.

So when the collector is running and the instrumentation is set up, we are ready to perform some actions in the application and watch tracing information in Jaeger.

This was fairly simple to set up, and tracing is in place. So interesting stuff indeed!

If you want to hobby yourself a bit, checkout the repository for this demo: https://github.com/pavolloffay/kubecon-eu-2024-opentelemetry-kubernetes-tracing-tutorial/blob/main/01-welcome-setup.md

Next off we went to see how Lego keeps their bricks flowing.

Lego's approach to platform engineering

And EVERY single thing Lego said... was nothing new for us at Guida . This made the talk of Lego a bit boring, but also its some validation that how we run things, isn't that weird.

So if you want your software to run as smoothly as a Lego factory, have a talk with Tjitse Kooistra and get in on our Guida Managed Kubernetes Service. ??

You'll have a High-Available, GitOps-ready platform with observability built-in ready for action in no time. ?? As a bonus we might throw in a meeting with your favorite Customer Success Engineer of course.

The End of day 2 of KubeCon

So I did attend one more meeting about OpenTelemetry in combination with Prometheus. But my sleep shortage kicked in (remember I had to wake up at 2 a.m.? could get to sleep right away, etc. etc.). So, I wasn't focused, they were talking too fast, the said, "Here is a QR code you can scan for the information" and then at the MINUTE I reached for my phone the clicked on to the next slide, so I couldn't scan the damn code... yes... time to call it a day.

And, some more people called it a day. So Hans van den Bogert , Nick van 't Hart , Albert van 't Hart , Marino Vink , and myself called it a day and went back to the hotel. After freshening up a bit, we all joined downstairs of the hotel lobby and went to Maison Peret.

There I had my first escargot, got one from Evie Tieleman . And you would think a snail is a horrible thing to eat, but I liked it. Was a bit similar to a mussel.

Last thing... I forgot to mention, but somewhere during the day, Nick van 't Hart and I strolled around on the show floor a bit and we came across some arcade machines and pinball machines. And when you can play pinball, you play pinball!

Tomorrow, is the last day. We get to find out if I won that X-Wing. Together with Albert van 't Hart and I have a talk with someone from CNCF to see what more we can do with our partnership over there, and of course, I'll attend some more sessions. Stay tuned. Maybe I'll finish the last blog today, so you don't have to wait until the morning. But we'll see how much energy I have left and if I can get it done on the train ride.

Stay tuned, and houdoe! (that's southern Netherlands for goodbye).