Take Five With Tom Fenton
5 Must-See KubeCon 2022 Sessions
KubeCon North America 2022, presented by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), will be held Oct. 26-28 at the Huntington Place in Detroit (with a pre-event on Oct. 24-25), and will be the third large-scale tech conference that I will have attended since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Being the de facto Kubernetes (K8s) conference, most of the sessions in the catalog are focused on K8s, but other technologies will also be covered at this conference. I took a close look at the KubeCon 2022 content catalog to hand pick a list of must-see KubeCon sessions, and while the number of sessions this year is limited compared to pre-COVID years, there will still be more events than I will have time to see. But, as my editor reminded me, this article is a Take Five with Tom Fenton, so here are the top five sessions at KubeCon 2022 that I am looking forward to.
TAKE 1: Kubernetes On the Edge with K3s For a Smart Metering Use Case - Harry Lee, Melio AI
This session combines two of my favorite subjects: Edge computing and K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes implementation developed by Rancher that only takes 50MB of disk space and 300MB of RAM. In this session, Harry will discuss how he used K3s to build a smart energy metering solution for remote industrial plants.
TAKE 2: What's Going ARM: Adopting ARM64 At Airbnb - Melanie Cebula, Airbnb
By embracing ARM processors, companies can greatly reduce the cost of deploying computer services, including K8s, in a datacenter. This session caught my eye because of a very specific topic she lists in the abstract, "How we designed multi-arch support" -- which can flummox even the most competent computer professional.
TAKE 3: Tutorial: Set Up Your Shell For Kubernetes Productivity And Be Efficient Quickly - Sebastien "Prune" Thomas, Wunderkind & Archy Ayrat Khayretdinov, Google
One of the drawbacks to working remotely is missing out on tribal knowledge, watercooler discussions, and the myriad conversations you might have regarding the minutia of your job. However, tutorials like one can serve to fill in a small part of that lost content. As I spend a fair amount of time with the command line, I am sure that this session will repay the time that I invest going to this session multiple times over.
TAKE 4: Rook: Intro And Deep Dive With Ceph Storage - Travis Nielsen & Blaine Gardner, Red Hat; Alexander Trost, Koor Technologies; Satoru Takeuchi, Cybozu, Inc.
Rook is one of the defining projects with regards to storage in K8s. This session promises to cover a lot of ground, but what I am most interested to hear is their discussion of the new features in v1.10.
TAKE 5: Getting Started with Kubernetes: Hands-on Workshop Hosted by Nigel Poulton and Linode
I attended this session a few years ago and found it to be an excellent primer to get started with K8s. As my K8s skills may be a little rusty, I figure that it wouldn’t hurt to reattend it. This is classified as a pre-event (it is on Tuesday) and it does have an additional fee, but if you need to acquaint (or reacquaint) yourself with K8s, I can testify that this session will be well worth your time.
Attending In Person
Currently (and subject to change), if you do attend the conference, you will be required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or provide a negative COVID-19 test and wear a mask while onsite at the event.
You can register for the event here. To attend the event in person, it will be $800 for an individual pass and $150 for a student. The virtual rate is $75.
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 previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also 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.