Sometimes Dragons

KubeCon North America 2019: Day 2

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This is part of a series of daily posts on my experiences at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019. You can read more about the conference and the series in my Day 0 post.

"Keep Cloud Native Classy" sign hanging outside the San Diego Convention Center

Because I posted early yesterday (just before 5 PM local time), I have a lot to catch up on from yesterday evening. First and foremost, San Diego got some rain last night, and it turns out that San Diego is never ready for rain. The result: a brownout at the San Diego Convention Center, the venue for many KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events. To its credit, the CNCF quickly relocated affected sessions to different rooms this morning:  

There may be some witticisms to be made about Kubernetes and portability, but I will leave that to those of you who specialize in witticisms.

More Tuesday night highlights

Last night also saw the second keynote of the conference. In keeping with my interest in observability, I was very much looking forward to Sarah Novotny (Microsoft) and Liz Fong-Jones (Honeycomb)’s talk on OpenTelemetry, which included a project update AND a live demo (which some lucky folks got to preview on the #OPSLive stream on Monday):

While the demo itself did not turn out exactly as planned, consensus was that the entire enterprise was worth an evening trip to the keynote hall.

Another evening keynote highlight: Kelsey Hightower (Google)’s talk on “Reflections.” The response to this talk–which was, by all accounts, very much a demonstration of master-class storytelling–indicates that the CNCF should consider more careful prioritization of narrative in the way it presents even technical information on the keynote stage. 

Hightower’s talk also speaks very much to the importance of inclusion and the effects of exclusion:

And indeed, KubeCon is experienced by some as welcoming and focused on community. However, this sense of welcoming is not quite enough to overcome some of the representational imbalances and prevalent biases that, as Hightower’s talk points out, are still at play in the tech industry.

Wednesday Highlights

Although I was heavily booked with meetings today, I did manage to catch the morning keynote and a few other events. Highlights include:

The motto-esque proclamation of “Project over Company” from Tim Hockin (Google) and Kal Henidak (Azure) in their talk on “The Long Road to IPv4/IPv6 Dual-stack Kubernetes.”

Some Telco news regarding 5G:

A standing-room-only crowd for a session on OpenTelemetry:

Another rainy evening (which intruded upon the all-conference party): 

The rain also drove me indoors where I had a chance to catch up with Tracy Miranda (CloudBees/Continuous Delivery Foundation), meet some new lovely people, and talk tech without talking shop. 

Pupdate: I have yet to find time to make it to Puppy Pawpalooza; prioritizing this may have to be part of me self-care on Day 3.

Related posts:

Disclaimer: The CNCF is a RedMonk client and paid for my T&E to KubeCon. Microsoft, Google, and CloudBees are RedMonk clients. Honeycomb and the CDF are not RedMonk clients.

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