I made it to KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe yet again this year, making it my second KubeCon ever! I had attended last year, in 2024, though that trip had been financed by my parents on the occasion of my A-level results. On the other hand, this year, everything was paid for by myself.
More interesting about this year's KubeCon experience is that I had the opportunity to attend the Rejekts pre-conference where I gave a talk! You can read about that experience in a separate blogpost here.
Day 0
Similar to last year, I had bought the extra Rancher Day ticket so already had my afternoon booked. In the morning, I took the Elizabeth line to the Excel center, where the main KubeCon event would take place. There, I got my badge and attended the morning's project lightning talks. I particularly enjoyed the K3s talk from Orlin, which was a call to action to help the project grow. Having used K3s for a long time, I'm interested in learning how I can contribute to such a cool project.
During the lightning talks, I also got the chance to meet some of my friends from the Discord server Home Operations which is a community of people, like myself, who find purpose in running Kubernetes-based homelabs. It was fun to finally meet so many people who I had always known solely by their online alias.
After the talks, I got back on the metro and headed in the opposite direction for the Rancher Day event. Unlike last year, the event was more precisely called SUSE Rancher Day, placing emphasis on the SUSE brand - likely following the rebranding of Rancher's enterprise offerings.
I had a lot of fun at this event, and got to play around with the new tool procured by SUSE, now called SUSE Observability which gives... well... observability into Kubernetes clusters and their deployments, with the ability to easily diagnose issues and find the root cause. I was also really happy to meet Erin and Jeff, who I had met last year.
Days 1-3
Compared to last year, the main KubeCon event seemed to pass by much faster; I guess that this time, I knew which booths I wanted to attend, and which sessions were worth catching live. Though, for the most part, I hovered around the Solutions Showcase, talking to vendors and project ambassadors for the projects on the CNCF landscape.
All three days started out with the keynotes in the auditorium. On the first day, I was late by only 20 minutes but by then the auditorium was already full, and I went over to one of the breakout rooms where the keynotes were streamed.
Following the keynotes, I usually went around the Solutions Showcase, which is the name for the areas with sponsors' booths. The Project Pavilion, found in the same area, hosted representatives of different CNCF projects.
Project Pavilion
When you go to landscape.cncf.io you will be greeted by the numerous projects in the CNCF landscape (if your computer doesn't freeze). Part of these tiles belong to projects which aren't owned by the CNCF, such as HPE Storage to name one.
Throughout Kubecon, the CNCF-owned projects have the opportunity to hold booths in the Project Pavilion area, where they can show off their technology and interact with their userbase. One of the most notable was the Longhorn stand, where I talked to David from SUSE about how I'm using Longhorn, and about the Longhorn v2 engine which promises major speed upgrades over v1.
Another interesting one was Vitess, which is a sharded database built for massive scales and resiliency. Admittedly, I don't see myself using Vitess in any project, be it personal or professional (cloudnativepg is enough), but it was fun to see the demo and how the architecture of Vitess looks like under the polish of kubectl.
Solutions Showcase
The rest of the area is taken up with the sponsors' booths. These are the people who have something to sell you in some form or another. Compared to last year where I had tried to visit pretty much every booth, this time I focused on the vendors who I knew had something I was interested in.
On a completely unrelated note, I passed by the SUSE booth twice to get both a plush gecko and a SUSE t-shirt.
Some of the booths I particularly enjoyed (in no specific order):
- SUSE - I wanted to talk further with the people there about future plans for Harvester, which is the virtualisation platform we are shifting to at work. Also I consider a few of them my friends, so if I had some downtime in the afternoon, I'd just hang around there and talk to whoever was manning the booths. SUSE also has some new products - SUSE Observability and SUSE AI and, naturally, I wanted to know more about them. Finally, Jeff was very proud of me for working for a SUSE partner since last time (right after my A-levels) last year!
- Ampere - They make CPUs. I passed by their booth on the first day and ended up spending 45 minutes talking about their CPUs and server offerings. I myself quite like Ampere. For starters, they use an ARM64 architecture instead of the AMD64 you find in traditional Intel/AMD CPUs. ARM chips are much more efficient than x86, meaning less heat produced. This is important for datacenters, as the latest Xeon/Threadripper chips need either water/immersion cooling, or for a rack to be half-filled, with space between the servers for cooling. On the other hand, you can stack a rack full of Ampere CPUs which need nothing more than air cooling. Additionally Ampere CPUs have much denser cores, with 64, 128, and 192 cores in a single CPU, and 256 and 512 cores in the pipeline.
Admittedly, Windows server doesn't run on ARM, but the guy at the booth mentioned that it's easy to allocate an extra core or two for an x86 emulation layer.
And finally, servers built around the ARM chips cost around 1/3 of the x86 competition, with a 128c 128GB RAM configuration coming in at some $7-8000
- Mirantis - Actually I knew about their company and presence at Kubecon through Prashant, who's an active member of Cloud Native Mauritius. I learnt about all their offerings including k0s and k0smotron. While I have considered myself a SUSE person, I admire and respect Mirantis for their commitment to Open Source as they contributed both k0s and k0smotron to the CNCF.
k0s definitely caught my attention, as it's a fully compliant (albeit streamlined) distribution of Kubernetes, targeting servers on the edge. SUSE has a similar distribution called K3s, and it was fun testing the two and comparing their performance and architecture (hint: they're very close in resource usage).
On the last day, I attended one of their demos and found myself walking away with a cool skateboard :D
- Traefik - they were having a fun time with the nginx ingress vulnerability from a week prior. I use a lot of k3s and it ships with traefik by default. Admittedly, my only issue was with certmanager not retrieving my certificates, but that's not a Traefik issue. But it was cool to meet the Traefik people and share all the places I use it in.
- VCluster - I've used VCluster in the past when I wanted to hold a workshop at DevCon in 2024 but I found the documentation a bit minimal, and geared towards use, not for building on top of vcluster. At the base, vcluster lets you run a Kubernetes cluster inside of Kubernetes, providing isolation and easy management. I was interested in discussing the level of isolation (namely, does Longhorn on the host work with the vclusters without additional configuration - it does). So, I'm looking forward to building more cool platforms while leveraging vcluster :)
- Honorable mention: VMware. Nobody visited them. It was funny.
The Talks
I am very happy that there were less AI talks, be it AI for Kubernetes or Kubernetes for AI - it's not at all my field of interest. And while my focus was on the Project Pavilion and Solutions Showcase, I got to attend a few very interesting talks:
- Longorn with David Ko from SUSE - I was curious about the state of development of Longhorn, as well as the roadmap and priorities for the project. I was also interested in the changes brought about by the v2 engine and the performance boosts you get out of it. If you haven't tried Longhorn yet, I would definitely recommend it for its ease of use and simplicity, without sacrificing robustness or customisability.
- Helm Contribfest - Curious about the Helm ecosystem and how I could contribute, I attended this episode of the contribfest to learn about the ways Helm can use help and grow with the community. Despite being a massive project which pretty much everyone relies on, Helm is still maintained a fairly small (but overloaded) team.
- Lightning Talks - Both on Day 0 and on Day 2. The lightning talks on the second day were very fun on Kubernetes concepts and use cases, including Rust's presence in Youki, a CNCF container runtime. Prashant from Mirantis (and from Mauritius) also took the stage to talk about a project which used Raspberry Pi buoys and lightweight k0s for monitoring coral and the sea, a mile away from the shoreline, and using cellular for connectivity.
The End
Despite KubeCon flying by fast, I felt as though I had made the most I could of the few days of talks and networking and am already looking forward to KubeCon Amsterdam (if my budget so permits). In the meantime, I have a lot of inspiration and many project ideas to try out!
London
(please don't take this part too seriously, I left it very humourous)
KubeCon this year was made quite a lot more interesting than last year's in Paris. Because, this year, I was travelling all alone, without a parent to make sure I wasn't getting too drunk! I was also staying at my cousin's place in London which was positioned perfectly between the SUSE day and Kubecon. Getting around wasn't hard either thanks to mainly the Elizabeth and District lines. The Elizabeth was critical in me getting all over the place, especially to the Excel centre for Kubecon, while the District line got me to Rejekts. And if you missed the metro, no worry! There's no 10-20 minute intervals like back home, but rather, I only ever had to wait some 2 minutes.
I got around London only through metro and walking, leaving the iconic double-decker buses for the tourists ;) Once again, I will complain that Mauritian pedestrian infrastructure is pathetic compared to that in London where I felt graced by wide pavements in good condition, pedestrian crossings, and respectful drivers. Not once did I feel like my life was squarely in the hands of cars rushing by, mere inches away from me (and yes PLouis, I'm also looking at you).
As for food, I ate a lot less stereotypically British food than I expected. Like, not once did I have baked beans on toast, or fish and chips. Alisha cooked a lot of really nice food, some of it originating from back home. Also, as far as eating out, it was a huge variety of mainly Asian food, save for the copious amounts of Greggs sandwiches I had. And if at some point you come back to my website to explain my alcoholism, it can be traced back to the soju I had during this trip (South Korean wine, made from rice, and with a very fruity taste). The highlight was the day out my cousin had planned for my birthday <3
And because this segment got long enough already, I'll finish on the friends I made along the way. On a personal note, I haven't gone to university. Most of my friends from school are at uni abroad. And even among the IT community in Mauritius (of which I am an active participant) most of my friends are easily 10+ years my senior. So, since school ended in November of 2023, I have been struggling, to a certain extent, with the loneliness that my particular situation has forced on me. Because of that, I was very happy to meet my cousin's friends and tag along for things like dinner, midnight bagels, game nights, and so forth. And I was so incredibly happy to spend my birthday with all of them. I got to be myself a bit, and that meant a lot to me. I hope to be back to London soon to meet my friends there again :)
