CNCF Kubecon Austin Texas (Part 1 of 2)

So it happened again, I got chosen to attend the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's CloudNativeCon and KubeCon as a diversity scholarship recipient (due to my sexuality in my case). This trip would take me 5000 miles away to the unique and at times bizarre city of Austin Texas.

I would also be joined by a colleague in the form of one Serana Chosone who was also a recipient of the scholarship. We started out with a 13 hour flight on Monday the 4th of December followed by a car crash on the way back to the hotel as our uber was side swiped by a young driver who wanted to be where we were. This ended up jaring my back pretty badly (exacerbating my existing back issues as I suffer with degenerative disc disease) for the entirety of the week which impacted on my experience on the whole but I made the best of a bad situation by powering through the pain.

First picture of the plane and in the hotel with Sera:

We grabbed some delicious Tortas from the Taco Joint around the corner from the hotel as our first meal on US soil which was interesting and super flavourful.

The Tuesday was a pre-conference day so we took the time to do some exploration of the area seeing as the weather was ok. Took in the sights on South/Congress ave such as the oddities along South Congress (such as the awesome Monkey See Monkey Do, Torchy's tacos (who did the BEST Queso!) and that sort of area as well as the main area up towards the capitol building and the many pieces of street art along the way.

View from the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge (aka the bat-bridge) which often has a large number of bats under or around it.

The capitol building exterior. Fun fact: Due to the granite used in construction of the building, it emits trace amounts of radiation!

The interior of the capitol building which gave me some vertigo on the upper floors.

Some interesting street art below.

After exploring for a bit we headed over to the convention centre to register and pick up our badges which was smooth and painless (well apart from the back that is). We headed back to the hotel before heading over to a place called Conan's pizza which rocks the "Keep Austin Weird" definition quite well (as the entire place is themed around Conan the Barbarian). The restaurant did a mean Chicago style pizza!

Wednesday brought the start of Kubecon (and the horrid weather too it seems), making it over before the start of the Keynotes that kicked off the conference.

Over 4000 people crammed into the spacious main stage area for the keynote presentations which were kicked off by Dan Kohn (the executive director of the CNCF) who announced that since March a further 5 projects were donated to the CNCF!

These newly added projects were as follows (check the links for more information) which were delved into by Michelle Noorali:

1. CNI - Container networking interface.
2. Envoy - Edge and service proxy built at Lyft which had a 1.5.0 release during Kubecon.
3. Jager - a Distributed Tracing System.
4. Notary - The Notary project comprises a server and a client for running and interacting with trusted collections. 
5. TUF - The Update Framework which is a framework for securing software update systems.

Dan then went into the diversity scholarships stating that the originally had the funding for 20 people to attend... then the awesome diversity team managed to get an additional chunk of funding from Microsoft and Google as well as other parties to bring the total raised to $250,000! This in turn allowed me to attend so I'm ever thankful to the team of Michelle Noorali, Kris Nova, Erica von Buelow and Jessie Frazelle (as well as the rest of the CNCF) for giving me the chance to go to such an incredible conference. (Photo credit to Kevin J Allen).

Also of note was the releases of version 1.9 of Kubernetes, Version 2.0 of Prometheus. Alibaba cloud dropped the bombshell of the number of transactions they processed over their "singles day" sales event (375,000 orders per second) and spinning up over 10k containers in under 10 mins on their debut to KubeCon which was impressive.

Imad Sousou from Intel talked about KataContainers which takes Intel's Clear Containers and the Hyper runV technology to create a lightweight, fast and secure solution.

Diane Marsh from Netflix came into to talk about their processes at Netflix (dropping the Stranger Things references left and right) showing how they developed the Spinnaker CD platform which looks super interesting.

Adrian Cockroft from AWS then went over some items from Re:Invent such as EKS.

At this time the Sponsor booth crawl opened up where I ended up spending the majority of my time at the conference speaking to the vast myriad of vendors showing off the latest technologies and ideologies that had been put on show. Below is a roadmap of interesting items I saw on day 1 of the conference.

Roadmap of useful tools from day 1:

• More from the Calico project @Tigera
• Service meshes like @IstioMesh
• Data workloads/ML like @kubeflow
• Function-as-a-Service like @openfaas
• Kubernetes-as-a-Service with a cost saving focus from @Super Giant (who had easily the coolest shirt swag of the con).
• Advanced app deploys like @HelmPack
• Container Orchestration powered by @Rex-Ray

I'll follow up this with another post going into the second day of the convention (which'd be our last) to continue the adventure in another post but until then, thanks for reading!