Getting shipped to Kubecon

I got a chance to go to KubeCon this year! 🤓 KubeCon is Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) flagship conference held thrice across the globe, gathering Open Source and Cloud Native enthusiasts in one place. I was quite lucky to be one of the few Diversity Scholarship recipients for the 2019 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon | Open Source Summit China, held at breathtakingly beautiful Shanghai.

The application

I was introduced to Cloud Native Computing Foundation by a friend (@kshitij10496 ^_^) when I was applying to the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program in 2018 and eventually got selected as a student under gRPC. I got a fantastic mentor (@nathanielmanistaatgoogle ❤️) who introduced me to the huge community behind the project and guided me over the summer as I worked on enabling building of gRPC Python with Bazel. You can find out more about my project on the GSoC website here.

During the course of the summer, I found out about KubeCon and felt it would be a great chance to meet with the community. CNCF sponsors a few diversity scholarships to attend the conference each year and I was more than elated when I found out my application was picked! The scholarship provides entry tickets to the conference as well as reimbursement for air travel ✈️ to the venue as well as accommodation 🏨 during the conference, upto a certain cap (mine was $1500, which was beyond generous to travel from my home country, India).

The conference

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon was by far the largest conference I’ve ever attended. Held at the Shanghai Expo Centre, it was spread over 3 days and had over 200 talks. I was primarily interested in gRPC, Jaeger, Envoy and Kubernetes related talks and tried to organise my schedule in a way as to make it to as many as I could! Due to many of the talks being presented in Chinese, the organisers had arranged for live transaltions (by a real person, relayed through a handy device) at every talk, which was really helpful.

Image courtesy of CNCF

The very first meetup I attended there was the first-time contributors workshop at the Kubernetes Contributor Summit, where we were introduced to the different components behind Kubernetes and how we can make our first contribution to the project. I’ve listed below some of my favourite talks from the conference:

• Lightning Talk: Back From the Future: A Time Traveler’s Take on Serverless - Yunong Xiao, Tencent
• Keynote: Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux & Git, in conversation with Dirk Hohndel, VP & Chief Open Source Officer, VMware
• Deep Dive: Jaeger – Steve Flanders, Omnition
• Intro: Envoy - Lizan Zhou, Tetrate
• Observability in Service Mesh Powered by Envoy and Apache SkyWalking - Sheng Wu & Lizan Zhou, Tetrate
• Kubernetes Housekeeping - Damini Satya Kammakomati & Mitesh Jain, Salesforce
• Selling Open Source Strategy - Michael Cheng, Facebook

The speakers were also kind enough to stay back and answer any questions we had! It was quite overwhelming learning how China has ramped up on Open Source in the past few years and much work was going on in the Cloud Native space that I was never aware of.

The Sponsor Showcase was the next biggest attraction where CNCF sponsors were present at their booths, presenting their latest work and introducing themselves to the attendees (also bombarding them with tons of goodies!). Over the course of the 2 days, I made it a point to try and talk to every single booth, meeting a lot of really amazing people on the way. The last day also had a lot of traditional Chinese artists, sharing some very interesting pieces to take back home.

Wrapping up

The overall experience was one I’ll cherish for a very long time to come. The conference definitely helped me learn a ton that I’ve brought back and already working on introducing to people at work and my team.

Thank you CNCF, GSoC and China!