Last week, May 19-23, Barcelona hosted the main European conference on Kubernetes and related technologies, one of the largest Open Source events in the world - . We took part in it for the first time, becoming a silver sponsor of the event and the first Russian company at KubeCon with its own stand. A delegation of six Flant employees was sent to it, and this is what we saw...
The event as a whole
KubeCon is a global event that is already held in three regions: the USA (since 2015), Europe (since 2016) and China (since 2018). The scale of such events is immediately impressive. If at the first European KubeCon (2016 in London) there were about 400 visitors, then last year (2018 in Copenhagen) there were already 4300, and now - 7700. (At the last American conference - even more.)
The full duration of KubeCon is 5 days, the first two of which can be considered preparatory (the stands are not yet operational). On the first day (Sunday) there was a specialized event on Ceph - . The next day, until 17:00, there will be other seminars and meetings on specific technologies, after which there will be the first events for all conference visitors. And as soon as the doors officially opened, it became clear that there would be not many people, but a lot.
The room also housed (about 200) stands of sponsors and partners: from small ones with modest stands to huge lounge areas at SAP, Microsoft, Google... However, everything was suitable for such a scale: a wonderful ventilation and cooling system (there was no feeling of stuffiness, it was always nice and cool) , spacious passages between stands.
Near our stand
In the stand area, Flant was the only company from Russia, and this fact itself attracted the Russian-speaking public. Many of them already knew about us, and then conversations began with the phrases: “Oh, we didn’t expect to see you! What are you doing here?"
Found in the vast
With the rest of the event participants, the discussion usually began with questions about who we are and what we do. Many were also touched by the phrase “DevOps as a service” at our stand: “How can this be? DevOps is a culture. How can culture be turned into a service?..” Which was an excellent reason to talk about what we do and how we bring the notorious culture to clients.
Among the visitors to the stand there were a lot of solo DevOps: freelancers and members of small teams. They were interested in our and a no-bullshit approach. The feedback we've received suggests that our existing tools fit well into a variety of workflows and can solve pressing problems. The projects that attracted the most attention were и , all sorts of features of deployment in Kubernetes. People were also clearly concerned about the issue of managing many clusters: the solution that we will soon announce turned out to be relevant even for freelancers. Engineers from large IT companies such as Google, SAP, IBM also listened with enthusiasm about the accumulated Open Source developments...
Representatives of companies from Eastern Europe, as well as Germany and England were most interested in direct services. A separate story is several Japanese who admitted that our approach is radically different from what is offered there. Potential clients were interested in the approach to turnkey infrastructure support, experience and willingness to flexibly adapt to customer requirements.
We also met companies with a similar profile to us from different countries: some approached us, and some we approached ourselves. Sharing our experience, with two of them we discussed the existing contribution of the two parties to Open Source and the possibilities of further interaction - time will tell what will come of it.
If we talk about the discussions at the stand in general, then I personally was very interested in hearing about new projects and ideas. In particular, I recommend paying attention to (development orchestrator for Kubernetes) and (continuous profiling, working with Prometheus and others): their demos looked promising, and the authors create with noticeable enthusiasm.
Finally, I note that there were no language problems: everyone had a decent level of English. If any nuances emerged, then phones, facial expressions and gestures were easily connected. Apparently cloud native admins don't work from .
Other stands and interesting people
KubeCon participants raffled off more expensive toys at their booths than we are used to seeing at Russian conferences. Not to mention the main sponsors, who could boast of huge TVs and other attractive buzzers... On Tuesday evening, a special 2 hours were allocated for the drawing of numerous prizes - then there were especially many people, and the holiday atmosphere was clearly felt.
What seemed more interesting to me, however, was the very movement of the largest companies towards the Open Source community. Even understanding their commercial motives (among other things), five years ago it would have been impossible to imagine that everything that representatives of companies like Microsoft and Oracle were talking about both at the stand and in the reports would relate to Open Source products.
Among the recognizable celebrities we met, for example, Mark Shuttleworth:
Our technical director Dmitry Stolyarov and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth
When I thanked him for Ubuntu, because this is my first distribution and the beginning of my acquaintance with Linux, he replied that it was not him who should be thanked, but “those guys over there in orange T-shirts,” hinting at all Canonical employees.
I also had the pleasure of talking with:
- the Ubuntu team that is working on the project ;
- SAP team that is involved in the project ;
- maintainer и — Frederic Branczyk;
- creator and maintainer — James Munnelly
I brought “Beluga” to the last one because he helped me a lot in CNCF Slack with questions about the Kubernetes API. Here he is trying to open it (in the end, three of us opened it...):
James Munnelly examines his gift
We chat with Brian Brazil, the main maintainer of Prometheus
Reports, meetings and other activities
Monday at KubeCon is officially devoted to the so-called pre-conference events and solving other pressing issues (like preparing booths). It turned out to be more free for us, and therefore we decided to visit Continuous Delivery Summit, organized by the recently created CDF fund (we already wrote about it ).
It was interesting to hear about the unification of various forces involved in the development of products and approaches to organizing continuous delivery. I had a chance to see the creator of Jenkins, and also listen to a report about Jenkins X (we also talk about it ).
Personally, I was even more fascinated by the story of another project of this foundation - . The attempt to standardize approaches to CD in Kubernetes clearly deserves our attention. In particular, they are captivated by Tekton’s flexible insertion capabilities into their conveyors and connections. via API. By promoting Tekton as a standard, its authors (Google) want to reduce the fragmentation of CI/CD utilities, and we agree with them.
The total number of reports at the event, which included both “regular” (half-hour) speeches, keynotes, short sessions (lightning talks), and numerous events for communities (updates from projects, meetings of developers and users, presentations of new maintainers), measured in hundreds. The scale of what is happening (more precisely, what has already happened) can be assessed by .
Report in the main hall of KubeCon Europe 2019. Photo from the organizers
Since we were all constantly involved in the booth area, there was practically no time to attend the main streams of presentations. However, there is no need to be upset: the CNCF organization has already published for everyone video recordings of event reports. They can be found in .
On the last day, KubeCon visitors were treated to a final party lasting about 3 hours. Everyone who wanted to see it was taken to Poble Espanyol, a Spanish castle that was built for the 1988 Olympics. Within its walls, 7 thousand IT specialists were given water, food and entertainment - it became clear how many people came from all over the world. Perhaps even too much:
But the view is amazing:
Conclusion
European KubeCon is an event that will be remembered for its scale, high level of organization, focus on supporting and developing a huge Open Source community of people truly passionate about their work. We have yet to listen to the main reports from the conference, but based on the experience of the recordings available from previous KubeCons, their level and relevance is unlikely to raise questions.
We also made a number of conclusions for ourselves based on our own participation. Mini-presentations of our Open Source projects are an excellent opportunity to “start a conversation” with the wider community. It was not a discovery that the presentation of a full-fledged report would bring even greater benefit in this sense (by the way, the competition for reports for KubeConEU'19 amounted to 7 applications for one available place). We also understood which presentations would be useful and what should be written on the stand itself in order to remove some of the questions and quickly move on to a more detailed discussion.
Photos with KubeCon from the organizers can be found in .
UPDATE (June 4): CNCF sent official statistics for the event. Here she is:
PS For help in preparing the material, I thank my colleague Vladimir Kramarenko ().
P.P.S
Read also on our blog:
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Source: habr.com