Paris exhibition a big hit with Altenar's DevOps duo

A recent trip to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 in Paris provided valuable learning into the future of the industry for Altenar’s technology team.

DevOps Automation Manager Alex Movergan and Automation Engineer Artem Davydov attended the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference in the French capital and are now passing on their learnings to the rest of the team.

The event sees adopters and technologists from the open source and cloud native industry join together for four days of presentations and networking opportunities, and the trip exceeded expectations for the Altenar duo.

“It was a fantastic conference,” said Alex. “It was my first time attending an IT conference on that scale so I didn’t really know what to expect but it was definitely one of the best conferences I’ve been to so far.

“There were a few things which were really impressive. There were a lot of vendors from the open-source community who produce the software that we heavily use at Altenar. We could go to a booth, ask a question and the guy said: ‘Yes, that’s fine, I’ve just pushed the pull request so that the software works this way.’?

“Then he goes into his production server and it’s huge so we asked who he worked for and it was Reddit! He showed us Reddit’s production environment and how big it is.

“There were other occasions like that so all the key players in the industry were not only there, answering questions and talking about best practices, but also sharing their future plans and road maps.?

“These aren’t things which you can read on their website but it’s very useful to know where things are heading. It means we can adjust our product plans accordingly and know what to expect in the future.”

The conference backed up the confidence in Altenar’s use of technology and also provided a glimpse into the future of the industry.

Alex added: “I didn’t get the feeling that we are doing things wrong - we are quite up to date with technology - but there are new technologies which will eventually replace what we use and we haven’t started that migration yet.

"Being there allowed us to get a better understanding on how we should use these tools, how we can be better prepared for the migration and what we should look out for.”

Artem was equally as impressed by the event and believes he now has a better understanding of the direction Altenar should be heading in.

“I was going to the conference just to be on the pulse of technology,” he said. “I had some concerns before going about some technologies but after listening to some of the presentations, I now feel like we need to do it and make the implementations.

“The main goal of this conference was to make some networking connections regarding open-source projects and ask some technology questions to find out how we can resolve some issues.”

Meeting up with other members of the industry was a valuable experience and there were some undoubted highlights for Alex.

“I was very thrilled when I saw the CEO of Buoyant, who are creators of Linkedr - one of the leading service mesh companies,” he said. “Recently we both appeared on episodes of the same podcast at a similar time so it was good to speak to him and tell him.

“Liz Rice was also there. I’ve met her before and she is one of the people behind eBPF - this is one of the game-changing technologies which is happening in the cloud world.

“That was exciting but at the end of the day you see that they are just people like everyone else and you can talk to them and ask them anything. That is the key concept of open source - we are all there to contribute and not just consume.

“It was impossible to cover even half of the conference so we split up and focused mainly on the service mesh such as Istio, eBPF and Cilium as well as operators for databases such as CloudNativePG.”

Artem explained: “Cilium will be the next step in our road map for Altenar. It will be a game changer to our ability in all environments. For our product it will be much quicker to solve problems in our clusters, and it gives us more upscale ability and more security.

“The conference was also useful for learning more about Kyverno, which is a policy engine designed for Kubernetes, while AI is also a big talking point in the industry and it was interesting to hear about KubeRay.”

Trips to further technology exhibitions are planned for later in the year as the Altenar team ensures the use of cutting-edge technology remains at the heart of the company’s strategy.