Round 3 of KubeCon, here we go! I've been to KubeCon in both Paris '24 and London '25 where I gave a talk at Rejekts. Yet, I was still able to one-up last year's, this time giving a talk at the actual KubeCon event!
Day 0
As I was a speaker this year, I was given the all-access pass instead of the core-kubecon-only ticket which I bought for myself the last two times. This unlocked a bunch of CNCF-hosted co-located talks at the main venue, meaning I did skip on the SUSE-hosted co-located event for once. In the morning, I was at the project lightning talks, which have maintainers of numerous projects on the cloud native landscape take the stage for 5 minutes to talk about what they are working on, new releases, and projections for the future. I particularly like the project lightning talks to learn about projects and think of my problems that they could solve.
Afterwards, I went along with my friends from the Home Operations community for lunch as there didn't seem to be any at the conference venue itself. I don't have much more to add other than it was a good sandwich.
After lunch, we all went our own ways to the different co-located events. I made it to the digital sovereignty track, and later went walking around the different booths with my friends. I also had the speaker room for 15 minutes to test my laptop out, and make sure it would work with the AV system for my lightning talk. It was very useful, because I had forgotten my mini DP to HDMI adapter in my suitcase. Testing is important, people!!
There were not many sponsor or project booths on day 0 - the "solutions showcase" booths are a feature of the main conference. However, the different tracks of the day had their own individual sponsors who had small booths near their respective halls, so I was still able to chat with a few companies, particularly VCluster regarding my KRaft project.
I also got dragged to the Cilium table by my friends who use it religiously... and look down on me for using Flannel (which is much less resource hungry in my defense). Following the Rejekts talk on how Cilium using eBPF blows the competitors' NFTables implementations out of the water, I had a newfound appreciation for them.
After the main event of that day, I tagged along with my friends to an event Isovalent was hosting in the hotel right next to the conference center. I had wanted to learn more about Cilium so I could give it a try on my homelab eventually, and the idea of working on some labs was very appealing. The event was really cool with nice food and fun labs to play around with.
My friend Ron didn't have a laptop on him so set himself with the challenge of using his phone which, you can imagine, is not ideal for writing yaml and phoneops-ing. He also had the challenge of bypassing his adblockers and other levvels of hardening.
My other friend, Freek, lent him his split keyboard which was connected over USB-C to make yaml-writing easier. The last issue was that Ron had never used a split keyboard before so was no more productive on the split than the phone keyboard, which prompted me to trade my Surface Pro for his setup.
Our table ended the night with me pushing an update for KRaft from my laptop while its battery was in the red. It was a race to compile Rust without cache on the underpowered CPU with only 8GB of RAM before the battery ran out completely. It got through and I was able to show the project to newly made friends at the table.
Days 1-3
Much like last year, I already knew which talks I wanted to catch live and which could be watched from the comfort of my bed on Youtube when I got home. Given I was staying with a friend some 45 minutes of train rides away from the conference center, I opted to skip on the keynotes for the most part. Instead, I spent a lot of time in the solutions showcase and project pavilion.
Project Pavilion
The CNCF landscape is incredibly vast with hundreds of free and open source projects residing under that umbrella. The project pavilion is an area where maintainers get to host a booth for half a day or two to talk about what their projects are all about. I got to have a look at the Longhorn booth for news about the v2 engine finally becoming production ready. The Helm people were there again this year, once again with their metal knight's helm. The star of the show for me was the K3s booth.
It was the first time that the K3s project was accepted for a booth at the project pavilion, and I first learnt of it during the monthly meetings that I have a habit of joining. On the second day of KubeCon, I ditched my friends who were busy with the CTF and joined Manuel at the K3s booth to help manage the crowd. I had the opportunity to talk to users (fans) of K3s, as well as to show people who were learning about K3s for the first time everything there is to love about this lightweight Kubernetes distribution which is also completely open source under the CNCF.
On the third day, I was also able to drag some of my friends (longtime Talos stans) to the K3s booth and make them appreciate the project!
Solutions Showcase
This is the area featuring all the companies which sponsor KubeCon; that is, the booths run by people who have something to sell you. I didn't have that many booths shortlisted to visit, and a lot were those I got dragged to by my friends.
Some notable interactions I had:
- SUSE – same as last year... and the year before. My friend Jeff wasn't at KubeCon this year round, so the booth did lose some cool points for me. However I still got the chance to talk to a few people regarding the technology stacks I currently use at work. I also had a short talk with someone regarding K3k, Rancher's Kubernetes in Kubernetes project, which I have been using for KRaft. I have made a Rust crate built on top of the kube-rs project for interacting with the K3k CRDs, and I wanted to have a small talk about that.
- OVH – digital sovereignty is the trend right now in Europe, with the US showing itself to be an increasingly unstable partner which is still in control of many critical services used by EU governments and companies. Just think AWS, or MS Windows, or just Office 365. OVH is basically the European AWS with VPSs, managed Kubernetes, databases, all kinds of object storage, and too many features to list here.
- VCluster – The original Kubernetes in Kubernetes people. I didn't use them for KRaft, instead opting for K3k initially, because working with VClusters from a programmatic point of view was incredibly painful. I had a wonderful chat with the people at the booth and talked to them about my KRaft project and what I had found lacking in VCluster so long ago. Amazingly, a lot of my past gripes have been fixed, so I might add VCluster as an option to KRaft now.
- Mirantis – I of course had to go support my friend Prashant, who works at Mirantis and was staffing the booth. I'm more of a K3s person myself, but I can appreciate Mirantis's K0s distro which has a similar design goal for being a lightweight Kubernetes distro that can run on beefy servers, down to tiny Raspberry Pis on the edge. I didn't win a skateboard this year, which is probably for the better as I was already at the weight limit for my suitcase.
- Dash0 – The observability company. They provide OpenTelemetry-first observability and position themselves as a serious competitor to DataDog. I was able to drag some friends to their booth for the impressive demos. A lot of people associate observability with some kind of Grafana dashboard, but Dash0 provides much more than that, with tools allowing extremely in-depth analysis of cluster and application performance. And, as a bonus point, they even let you silence certain logs at their level, which is useful if you have a particularly noisy application which would otherwise eat into your bill at the end of the month.
The Talks
I didn't attend that many talks this time round, but some of the notable ones:
- Will It Kubernetes – it was a nice talk from a homelabber about his journey to reassemble all the computers, laptops, SBCs, and otherwise junk, to make a K3s homelab. As someone similarly infected by homelab syndrome, I was really curious to see what path Niklas took on his journey. I was pretty surprised to see that, much like me, he started out with K3s, Longhorn, MinIO S3 backups, and ArgoCD! We got to talk after his presentation and share homelab stories.
- Rust Vs. Go: Building a Container Network Stack From Scratch – I have engaged in too many discussions with friends about Go vs Rust, with some more valuable than others. Seeing this talk, especially in the Cloud Native space, was a breath of fresh air (and finally, justice to the Rust squad). It was very interesting to see the motivation behind choosing Rust, as well as the response from the developers behind the project.
- K3s Contribfest – Do you want to contribute to a CNCF project? Maybe you can't write sophisticated Go code, but you can always test out releases, or share your expertise in other operating systems, such as Windows. The K3s contribfest was a great opportunity to learn more about the project, its ambitions and philosophy, and find places where you can help out. I was able to drag one of my Talos friends to this session and, afterwards, he shifted from "why don't you use Talos" to "aah, I understand why K3s is also cool" which is huge :)
- Capture the Flag – I didn't participate directly in the CTF myself. Rather, I chose to follow along with my friends who were working together. I can proudly say that I gave zero useful advice. In my defense though, my talk was happening in the afternoon and I was a ball of nerves and my stomach was in a knot. That being said, I really enjoyed following along, and it was the first time I had attended the CTF at KubeCon.
My Talk
My presentation CFP got accepted as a lightning talk this year! The lightning talks are a series of short (5 minute long) presentations given back-to-back - hence the "lightning". They were scheduled for the end of Day 2, as from 16:45, and mine was the the second-last in the lineup. I headed to the Auditorium for the first talk, so I'd have the chance to get my nerves under control, and familiarised with the proceedings and the amphitheater. I wanted backups in the event *something* chose to not work, so I had my friend Freek prepare his laptop with my slides as just-in-case.
The other lightning talks were nice, don't get me wrong, but I was only half-listening as I was going through my slides to make sure there were no surprises, and to get my timing right. I'm used to giving long talks of 30 minutes to an hour, so pacing myself for 5 minutes was a new challenge. Finally, my turn came.
Standing on the stage was scary; I'm not used to such a height advantage over my peers, so having people literally looking up at me was a new feeling. I setup my laptop, connected over HDMI, got the green light, then started talking. I won't tell you what I talked about because I have numerous blog posts and readmes scattered over the place which talk about my project in great depth. It took me a second to get used to the atmosphere, but I think my talk went pretty well. All my friends told me it was a good talk, and some said it was the best of the lightning talks which... well, they're my friends, they're biased. The 5 minutes sped by and I had to hurry a little bit over some segments, but what matters is that I got to tell my story and the audience enjoyed it.
psst, the recording is on youtube
The Netherlands
It's become routine, when I go abroad for a conference, to write a mini section about the country/city I was in, paired with how much better that place is than Mauritus. So of course, there needs to be this year's edition! After all, a lot has changed since London!
Much like last year, I was travelling alone; I think my mum has given up on tech and Kubernetes anyways. While this does theoretically mean I was free from parental supervision and could get up to some next-level tomfoolery, I was staying with Freek, a friend from a niche community of homelabbers. I was also attending KubeCon in the company of some 15+ other friends, unlike last year when I was mostly solo. And being around so many responsible adults must have rubbed off on me.
Most of KubeCon was spent in the company of my friends. Unlike last year, there wasn't really a moment that I spent alone at the conference center, which I am so happy about. KubeCon is a lot more fun when you're tagging along with someone or they're following you around.
I wasn't staying directly in Amsterdam, but rather some 45 minutes away by train, which gets me to my first point: the public transport. My first experience with the train system was leaving the airport as I had to get a train from the airport to Leiden, where I changed line before heading to Freek's. This was my introduction to the Dutch public transport app, where you can plan trips and view all arrivals and departure times for not only trains but buses as well. Thanks to that app, I made it to Freek's in one piece, despite not having internet and not knowing a word of Dutch. What a difference it made to have accurate timing information and not getting to the metro station and only then figuring how long till the next departure, as one does in Mauritius.
Another big difference was the pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. The day after I arrived, Freek brought me to the beach on a bike, which was definitely an experience! The Dutch bike was so different to my mountain-ish bike back home, and I felt both very high and unstable, particularly with the small wheels. Anyways, having proper cycle paths and priority for bicycles was heavenly, compared to Mauritius where you routinely fight drivers to exist on the road. I did not feel like my life was at risk on a bike in the Netherlands 😄
Oh, and also, the Dutch beaches are saaaaad. They look (and are) so cold and depressing, compared to our local beaches. For the Europeans reading this, you can find pictures of Mauritian beaches on a previous blogpost.
I'll probably end off on the friends I made this year. Last year, I was really happy to have made new friends around my age (and maturity), from spending time around my cousin. It was really nice, given the much older tech community in Mauritius, and I remember writing something along the lines of "being myself" in last year's blogpost.
This year was so much more of being social, and I got to make new friends from otherwise online aliases, as well as solidify existing irl friends from last year. With more special events with the homeops squad, such as lunch on day 0, dinner on day 1, and a few smaller get-togethers, I got to spend so much time with my online friends. While I love the tech community back home in Mauritius, it was really freeing to be in the Netherlands with my "online" friends and I felt like myself. Coming back to Mauritius felt like a huge culture shock, and I didn't feel like myself for a while, which is also why this blogpost took so long to get out.
Wow it was hard to get everyone, and I missed a few people I didn't get pictures with >:/