I went to Kubecon Amsterdam! This is what happened on day 2.

After a good night sleep and a refreshing shower I am ready to commence the second day of Kubecon! Ironically, a Kubernetes cluster I manage went down overnight, so the first 2 hours in the morning I was literally troubleshooting a cluster while in the talk..

After a good night sleep and a refreshing shower I am ready to commence the second day of Kubecon! Ironically, a Kubernetes cluster I manage went down overnight, so the first 2 hours in the morning I was literally troubleshooting a cluster while in the talk..

Morning

That talk was “Cloud Native Quantum; running quantum serverless workloads on Kubernetes”, by Paul Schweigert and Paul and Michael Maximilien from IBM. I chose the talk especially because it was something completely new to me, and not related to my work field. Even though the level of the talk was advertised as beginner, I found it hard to understand everything, as it seems Quantum computing is just complex whether you are a novice or a pro.

After the talk I went for an early lunch. When I was finished I walked back to the Solutions hall, as I had seen that the people from Splunk brought a racing simulator to demonstrate their observability platform. I queued up to join the Splunk competion, but I didn’t break records. To my defense, I don’t play much computer games anymore since I have to stare at screens for hours on end professionally.

Splunk-race

Afternoon

I had better luck joining the Capture the Flag contest. After a slow start I collaborated with guys from WithSecure, and eventually ended in the 11th spot, with equal points as the numbers 2-10. Around a 100 professionals joined the hunt.

The rest of the afternoon I spent more time attending talks, and joined for “Mind the Gap!”, by Christophe Tafani-Dereeper and Diego Comas, about their experiences with mixing Kubernetes clusters and Cloud Services (for example, a database as a service like AWS’ RDS). This type of architecture is something we encounter a lot as DevOps engineers, so it was interesting to learn how you can maximize the utily of managed services while avoiding vendor lock-in.

As last talk of the day I picked “Longhorn, intro and deep dive” by David Ko from Suse. David is from Asia, and his English was hard to follow at moments. However, this wasn’t a problem because the content of his talk was extremely interesting. If you are familiar with distributed storage (it’s a hard problem to tackle), you might have already worked with CEPH. Longhorn is similar, but (in oppositon to CEPH) completely Cloud Native, and offers really nice built in features, like snapshots and disaster recovery! Make sure you watch the talk to learn more about how this product is architected, it’s very impressive.

I ended the second day of Kubecon with a simple Thai dinner, somewhere in a more authentic part of Amsterdam, and then went back to the hotel to sleep early; tomorrow is the last day already!

Amsterdam

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