My experience of North America KubeCon 2020

North America KubeCon 2020 was my first time attending a tech conference, it was even more of a unique experience due to it being virtual! Even though I didn’t get to experience it all in person, It was still a great event. In this blog post, I will share with you my experience of a couple sessions and some of the pros and cons of attending a conference virtually.

Positives

Having never attending a tech conference in person, I can only guess what it is like. I imagine the atmosphere is incredible and everyone is very open and friendly. A virtual conference will undoubtably struggle in this regard to provide a similar experience. However, KubeCon has done it’s best to replace this aspect of the conference through the use of slack channels and by incorporating virtual happy hour sessions which allowed people to take part in movie trivia and escape rooms. One of the biggest things that made me feel more connected to the other people attending was the ‘sparkle board’ that included a summary of everyone’s tweets. This was really nice to see and made me feel much more connected to people who also attended KubeCon. It was great to have another opportunity to see Constance’s dog again on the board!

One of the benefits on attending virtual KubeCon is that if there are multiple sessions you’d like to attend which happen to clash, you can just pick one to watch live and watch the other one later on through the use of the watch-on-demand’ button which is great! This is really beneficial if you’d like to watch sessions that clash. I’m not sure if this is a possibility for in-person KubeCon but it would be a great addition if, once we return to normality, these sessions were recorded then after the conference people could log on and watch any sessions they were unable to attend.

Being able to attend a conference for North America is also a unique experience that I wouldn’t be able to have if it was not virtual, it would have been much more difficult to go all the way to America for this conference! So this was a really good opportunity to experience a conference I would not have been able to attend. At least once this pandemic is over, there is still the European conference I can attend! I’m sure there are many conferences which are purely American based and have not yet branched out to Europe so this is a good opportunity to attend these virtually.

Another benefit of attending KubeCon virtually is that if there is a break or a lull in the sessions you want to attend, it’s a great opportunity to just continue working on any jira tickets you have assigned to you. I imagine during an in-person conference this time would largely be used for wandering around, getting food or talking to people at the conference. Being able to discuss the conference to people there or just to make some tech friends would have been a lovely experience to have. Since this was unfortunately not a possibility, I felt I wanted to make the most of my time so I got on with my work on these opportunities.

Being able to freely write up notes from the sessions is much easier to do virtually. From the images I’ve seen from in-person KubeCon is that there are hundreds of people in a dark room. I imagine this makes it very difficult to write notes! I unfortunately very easily forget things unless I immediately write it down. Being able to write information down during a session also helps me properly understand the subject matter so I think this was a very positive part of attending a conference virtually for me.

Negatives

One of the worst parts about attending a conference virtually is that being able to listen to the sessions solely relies on the stability of my internet. Unfortunately, my internet access is very unreliable in the evening, and this proved to be very challenging when I am trying to watch the KubeCon sessions. When my internet kept dropping, it made it very difficult to fully understand what is going on in the talk since the video will pause for a minute or two then join back in at the live time which leaves me with a couple minutes gap in the discussion. This can make it quite confusing, especially if I miss out on an important part! Luckily there is the watch on demand button which allows me to watch a session while it isn’t live so the video won’t jump about.

Sessions

Speeding up Analysis Pipelines with Remote Container Images by CERN

A couple of people from CERN gave a talk about speeding up analysis pipelines with remote container images which was very interesting. They began their talk by explaining what they do and gave a brief overview of the Large Hadron Collider — where proton beams collide near to the speed of light. They then went on to talk about their on-premise datacenter. In 2015, I visited CERN and saw this huge datacenter in person so it was cool to hear them mention it! Although the datacenter is very large, it is not big enough for their needs so a large grid computing infrastructure has been built that acts as a giant super computer for physicists. They then went on to explain how they used Kubernetes. They managed to utilise it to gain very fast startup times, reduced network usage and a low CPU overhead. However, their main issue which they still face is that they want to speed up image optimisation. I hope they manage to fix this and maybe I will attend KubeCon next year and see how they’ve gotten on!

Building Effective Attack Detection in the Cloud

Within this session, the speakers discussed the differences between using telemetry to detect issues for on-premise vs the cloud. The main difference for telemetry detection is that the cloud has an additional surrounding layer called the control plane which we can add telemetry to. The two men leading the session then went on to talk about the potential security issues if an attacker compromises the pipeline which was really interesting to hear since I had not thought about a security attack in this way before. They also went on to explain how there should be clear communication between DevOps and developers. Explanations of devOps techniques should be written up as documentation so junior developers can read it, this enforces better knowledge sharing.