Take Five With Tom Fenton
5 Reasons Why I'm Going to KubeCon + NativeCon Europe 2019
Here's why I'm traveling 5,000 miles to attend the Linux Foundation event in Barcelona, Spain.
It was four months ago that KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 was held in Seattle at the Washington Convention Center. It was sold out with more than 8,000 attendees. KubeCon + NativeCon Europe 2019 will take place in Barcelona, Spain, at the Fira Gran Via Conference Centre May 20-23, 2019. After thinking it over, I decided that I would invest a week of time and suffer being in the air for 5,000 miles to attend it. Following are the five reasons I used to talk myself into going to KubeCon Europe 2019 at the end of month.
TAKE 1
Different vendors than KubeCon North America. Not only will all the major vendors be at KubeCon Europe, including Redhat, VMware, Microsoft and Cisco, but many vendors that were not able to attend the Seattle event will also be there. It will be interesting to chat with these local vendors to see what exciting technologies and ideas they have for Kubernetes and cloud-native applications.
TAKE 2
The unprecedented rate of change of Kubernetes. Since KubeCon + CloudNative Con in Seattle just four months ago, Kubernetes has had two major releases and will probably announce another either at, or shortly after, KubeCon Europe; gaining visibility into these releases and seeing what's on the roadmap for future releases is of great interest to me.
TAKE 3
Discussions with Diamanti. Diamanti developed the first Kubernetes hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliance and has been one of the companies that I've had an eye on the past couple of years. I had a chance to chat with them in Seattle last December, and since then we've continued our conversation about the best way to measure the performance of Kubernetes. I'm looking forward to having a chance to continue these discussions in person in Barcelona.
TAKE 4
Canonical's insight on MicroK8s. One week before KubeCon 2018 in Seattle, Canonical (the folks behind Ubuntu) released MicroK8s, a snap package that can be installed on Linux distributions very easily. Its small disk and memory footprint make it a good entry point for those interested in exploring K8s. I'm planning on meeting with Canonical in Barcelona to get some more insight on MicroK8s, and to discuss the latest developments that have been incorporated into it.
TAKE 5
Meeting different Kubernetes users. I saved my most important reason for going to KubeCon Europe for last on this list. I'll be chatting with a bunch of different end users in Barcelona to see how they're adopting Kubernetes, what sort of problems it's solving for them, and what direction they'd like to see it head in the future.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He currently works as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.