My first KubeCon !

This is my first Linkedin post and there is no better way to start than talk about my experience at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon @ San Diego . It all started with Kubernetes (K8s) Days, Bengaluru, where i met few of the TOC members and SIG leads. That's what inspired me to attend KubeCon. Its all about getting the opportunity to interact with the community who are steering the K8s ship. 

Before the main event, there are co-located events that happen where companies in the k8s eco-system participate and conduct hands-on workshops to help evangelize features/products and also talk about k8s topics that range from introduction to k8s to how to write custom operators and extend the k8s platform. Unfortunately, i couldn't attend these this time.

Now coming to the main event, it was the largest gathering so far with more than 12k attendees! When you enter the keynote session hall for the first time, the people and their energy just hits you. I will not talk about what was covered in each of the sessions that was presented (videos are already out there on YouTube!). As a Product Manager, here are few important points covered during the event that i want to highlight: 

1. The message is clear that Kubernetes is not the end goal but means to reach the end goal. K8s eco-system gives you the tools to build better and bigger systems that help solve problems.
2. When someone says kubernetes is complex, there is a reason why its complex. Supporting different cloud environments, container runtimes, CNI, CSI etc to make sure the applications run seamlessly does result in complexity.
3. As a customer, the approach should not be looking at the top down stack, trying to consume everything that's out there on the CNCF landscape. Start with a problem you want to solve and debate whether k8s is really needed in the first place. Not every scenario is a greenfield one where you start with K8s by default. If applications are running fine within a VM and you have an eco-system built to manage data and other aspects such as security, continue to have that.
4. If you still decide to do a lift and shift of an entire stack, do so in phases as opposed to taking the approach of doing it all at once. I recommend watching the session on how Freddie Mac took the approach of using a service mesh to first establish the connectivity between legacy and new deployments and then eventually transition onto the new stack.
5. Even when you lift and shift, there are potential customer use cases where they have containerized the existing monolith app as is to start reaping the benefits of micro-service architecture and K8s platform. This surely is not the end goal but its more of a starting point. I recommend watching "Moving a startup from PaaS to K8s" talk to know how a customer actually did this to bring down the cost and increase scalability.
6. K8s is being deployed in places one cannot imagine. The Department of Defense talk covered how they are running K8s on F-16's! That's what i would like to call as "K8s" on the "Edge" in "Cloud" !
7. Security should *NOT* be an afterthought while working with containers/K8s.

The most important call for action at the event were:

1. Embrace diversity and lift each other and always be there for one another. (Kelsey Hightower).
2. Make sure individual company goals and interests does not come in the way of how CNCF and K8s communities function. (Bryan Liles)

As a PM, I would personally like to see a separate "Customer Journey" track in the upcoming KubeCon's where we could just have customers talk about how they leveraged the products/tools from CNCF landscape to start their K8s journey and what problems did it solve for them. This would give great insights in understanding the pain points of customers and how we could solve them going forward.

The highlight of the event for me personally was the "Mentoring + Networking" session where i was able to interact with a couple of SIG, working group chairs & co-chairs, getting insights on varied topics like how to start contributing to the community to talking about individual SIG charter . Remember, coding is not the only way to contribute! If you haven't been part of this session, please do sign up for it in the future.

It was awesome to see so many vendors in the CNCF landscape set up their booths and talk about their products (and, not to forget the prizes and goodies they gave away!). My personal interest and focus was on Storage, data management, backup and DR given that i come from a storage background. Storage and Data management is still a tough problem to solve in the container world and so a special shout-out to startups like Portworx, Robin.io, Kasten and projects like Rook, Velero in working towards solving these problems to a large extent.

From a career perspective, i believe this is a great time to be DevOps engineer OR SRE (..of course the application developers will always be in demand!). CNCF also shared a new Job board (https://jobs.cncf.io) page that lists opportunities across various companies who are hiring container experts.

A special thanks to my management @ DellEMC who agreed to my request to attend this conference in-spite of me joining the company only a few months back. It was a great learning experience for me and looking forward to attending many more KubeCon's in the future.