I have several parts to my Kubecon experience this year round. For starters, I made it to Rejekts this year, which hadn't been possible in Paris. And most importantly, my talk, which hadn't been accepted to the main KubeCon lineup, had been accepted for Rejekts! So this was also going to be my first time presenting outside of Mauritius.
My Talk
My presentation was on the first day of the 2 day pre-conference in the second (and "minor") track called the Waterloo. I presented on a fun project I had worked on to make a Kubernetes cluster span across Mauritius as a whole - with some nodes in my place, some nodes in a friend's place, and some nodes in yet another friend's place. Together, we had a Kubernetes cluster spread across the island, where we treated nodes as "disposable". The motive was the [lacking] state of Cloud Service Providers within Mauritius and that major CSPs such as Azure, GCP, and AWS are an ocean away in South Africa.
The downside with the nearest servers being in SA is, first, the ping. Secondly, we have only one undersea connection to SA, and in the eventuality that the cable gets damaged, our connection is absolutely ruined.
I kept the presentation very short, hoping to engage with the audience which consists of mainly Europeans who have much better cloud services than us. As I like to put it, my talk wasn't technical but rather a cultural exchange.
As with all my slides, the Rejekts slides are also on my Github repo, but the video recording is also available to watch here.
The Rejekts Experience
Rejekts was held at 116 Pall Mall which is an "ancient" building with many portraits of British royalty, and massive paintings of historical battles. The place was decked out with flowing curtains and huge chandeliers and that was the fanciest place I will ever have had a conference at.
Other than my talk, I had a lot of fun attending other talks, and getting to discuss with people about the tech situation in Mauritius. One of my favourite talks was the one right before mine: Tech is broken And AI won't fix it by Simon Emms, who put the pitiful human side of tech on show in both a brutal but incredibly funny way. I hope more people watch that talk, as it (in my opinion) shows that we are applying crappy patch to crappy patch in an effort to solve a much bigger problem in Tech.
During the lunch break, and after the conference, I had the chance to visit more of London, including the London Eye, and the Big Ben. Though, more interesting to me was the Greggs - a national treasure of the UK.