Introduction

When I was doing PG-DAC course (Post Graduation Diploma In Advance Computing). Then I have come across the Kubernetes orchestration tool. Before knowing Kubernetes, I wanted to become a java developer. There was very small session on Kubernetes But when I realize the true power of Kubernetes, then I became very curious to know more about CNCF and Kubernetes. In this way, I have involved with Kubernetes organization and Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem. I am writing this article to share about my experience at Kubecon and CloudNativeCon NA 2022. Through this article, I will guide you as well how you can also attend this event.

What is Kubecon and CloudNativeCon Event?

Basically, Kubecon and CloudNativeCon is a global conference gathers end users and technologists together from various open source and cloud native communities. But for me, it is no less than any festival. Technologists from all over the world and the presentations from big tech companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cruise, VMware and so on, they share their new ideas, Innovations and talk about the current trends and new technologies in cloud native ecosystem. I get to learn many new things in these talks. Apart from this, Open Source Project maintainers talk about the updates of their respective open source projects.

How can I attend this event?

In this section, I am going to explain what's things you need to do to attend Kubecon and CloudNativeCon event.

Registration for Event

To participate in the Kubecon event, you need to register first. We can attend kubecon event in two ways, one is In-person, and the other is a virtual way. In this way, the Linux Foundation has set its different registration fees structure based on the method of event attendance. It could be virtual or physical, it depends on your interest how you want to attend the event. I was going to attend this event for the first time, so I decided to register for the virtual event. A few months before the start of the event, we get the date and information of In-person and virtual event registration on their portal. Bookmark this link 👇 to know the schedule of every Linux Foundation event. https://events.linuxfoundation.org/

You can check in this screenshot, how many days before I have did registration for event.

Please take a look, this link is for registration to event and to know about the registration fees structure of In-person and virtual participant.

How to apply for scholarship?

Now you may have a question, I am a student and if I can't arrange this much money, what scholarship can I get for this? Hence, the answer YES to support some needy people through Dan Kohn Scholarship Fund they give you discount coupons for registration which you have to use during event registration.

But there are some terms and eligibility for this scholarship as, you can see in the above screenshot I was applied for Need Based Scholarship and due to my open-source contributions, I got this scholarship.

My Experience At Event

I have experienced many things in this event, as there are many talks happen in this event and their schedule of sessions is quite overwhelming. Hence, you may get confused, so know my experience.

Know these things about the Kubecon Event

As I told you earlier, I have registered for virtual event then A few days before the start of the event I got mail from CNCF event team about username and password. Like you, I had the lot of questions before the start of the event, like what the event would be like?, what would be happening during the event? Like this. Now the biggest question before me was to whom to ask these questions? Later I asked my questions about this on the CNCF Slack channels, and immediately I got some responses from folks. As these channels are event specifics, that will be changing for every CNCF events, but you should join the CNCF workspace at least.

Check this link to know more about the event Slack Channels for Kubecon, you get a clear idea about how the CNCF event team creates the workspace channels for helping event attendees.

In that Slack channel, I got to know very important information like how CNCF event team uses sched.com so that we can set our schedule as per our wish before the event starts. And you can see the schedule which you have set in CNCF virtual dashboard in agenda section.

sched.com provides you with some filters that you can select the talk type to understand which sessions you can attend. The first two days of the event were very disappointing for me, as virtual attendees could not attend the co-located sessions on these two days.

My First Keynote Session Experience

It was really great to attend keynote sessions. I joined my first event session on 26th October, that session was the keynote session. The virtual Kubecon and CloudNativeCon event dashboard look like this 👇

In that session, Priyanka Sharma welcomed everyone, and she gave some information about CNCF and how CNCF has changed the life of end users. After this, she gave information about some projects in CNCF landscape and explained in short about different roles of open-source contribution like what is maintainer of repo role?, what is approver role? And how you can make your open-source contribution to CNCF.

Keynode Sessions Which I Liked Most

All the keynote sessions were Interesting, but I liked these two keynote sessions most

1. What a RUSH! Let's Deploy Straight To Production - by Whitney Lee and Mauricio Salatino.
2. Let's Hear From End User (Cruise) - Jonny Langefeld and Nitish Krishna

Now Let's see, Why i liked these presentations.

What a RUSH! Let's Deploy Straight To Production

Honestly, I haven't seen this kind of presentation and visualization technique before, It was really great session by Whitney Lee and Mauricio Salatino. That time, I couldn't stop myself to share about this session on LinkedIn. Hence, you can imagine, how was this session?

They explained in this session, how easily developer can automate and deploy their changes directly on production. Whitney and Mauricio divided this presentation in three parts like

1. Requesting a New Environment
2. Creating and Deploying Spiderize Function
3. How Spiderize Function Goes to Production

You can assume, this is just like we do while developing application based on React JS. We can see our changes live on browser same concept they have implemented here, but the only difference is that we can see our changes directly on production environment, so this is very much interesting concept I got to learned in this talk. I will highly recommend you to check out this link and to know more about this keynote tutorial.

Let's Hear From End User (Cruise)

This is one of the greatest example to know about the true power of Kubernetes. This talk was more about the Driver less cars. Cruise has developed Driver less cars using the Kubernetes. These AVs are built in such a way that, which does not have steering wheel, no gas padle, no engine compartment and have just open space for customers.

Cruise implements this using CNCF projects. Jonny mentioned in this presentation without Kubernetes it would be really difficult to manage clusters, and they even can't imagine about managing clusters. Cruise currently maintains a fleet of more than 70 fully automated clusters. With more and more demand for separation and quick iteration for testing and rolling out into new regions. Cruise used the Software As A Services like Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE) and Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS) to take care of so many layers of provisioning. Also, Cruise used Kubernetes API and Kube-builder to create Cluster object using API cluster.pass.getcruise.com/v1aplha1 which hides all these provisioning stuff behind this one API call. Like this way, they have full control over the fields which they want to expose to cluster.

Peer Group Mentoring + Career Networking Session

It was one last good experience for me. In this talk, I got to learned many things from the mentors of CNCF community mentors. This is just like a question and answer session for us. People around the world asking questions to Justin Garrison, Jai Campbell and Kiran Rin Oliver. And they have shared everything about their experience of attending Kubecon and involvement with the community. Interesting fact about this was session is, At the end of this talk, we all are connected on various social platforms like twitter and LinkedIn. Like this way, I have connected with many folks and make many friends from all around the globe, and it's hard to share everything through this single article. I am taking lot of memories with me from this event. It was really amazing, fun and learning of attending Kubecon and CloudNativeCon NA 2022.

I hope, This article would be helpful for you to know about this incredible event. If you really like this article, then feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and share this articles with your friends.