I have been always excited about KubeCon and anything that's related to Kubernetes. That's the magic word to get me to listen, keenly with undivided attention.

Better late than later, right? I learnt about Kubernetes Community Days 2023 (In-person) event on Twitter. I almost immediately got the tickets as I knew they would run out fast (28th March)

Every day since I got the tickets, the eager me was counting days for June 2 & 3. I couldn't wait to experience the KubeCon vibes in India, in my city Bengaluru.

So, it finally happened. I had bookmarked the event page with the lined-up sessions and talks for the day, feeling all prepared to attend them in all excitement. I reached the venue within time, collected the registration tags and coupons (very well-planned and seamless) and ate some breakfast.
A happy tummy means an attentive mind 😁 and guess what, I got a chance to make some new friends!
So, thank you organizers for making it a well thought and wholesome experience for us.

The agenda board had a full view of what was lined up for this 2-day event. I wish I could clone myself and be in 2 places at the same because there were parallel sessions in the Main Hall / Audi but I chose the sessions I could relate more with. I look forward to knowing the details, presentations/slides from the other side that I missed out on.

• It all began with an energizing beatboxing performance and candid Keynote address: State of Kubernetes and CNCF: A path to a sustainable and secure future by Nabarun Pal and Nikhita Raghunath which I particularly loved as they included relatable examples of Kubernetes World in analogies of Bengaluru and trending topics in CNCF space. It was great to learn how India has now grown to be the 2nd largest Kubernetes contributor base and the evolution of the contribution journeys. It was very inspiring and motivated many of those who were looking to start their contribution towards open source.

• Followed by a brief talk by Sajith Ainikkal on Turbocharge developer productivity and innovation on how VMware Tanzu is accelerating development, delivery, and operations across multiple clouds.

• After on, I had to choose between the two parallel sessions. I stayed back in the main hall to hear about Backstage Plugin Development: Tales from the Trenches by Debabrata Panigrahi and about the emerging importance of having a developer portal unifying the development experience and best practices to consider for building plugins that meet the unique requirements of different environments.

• Aditya Girigoudar spoke about From Metrics to Mastery: Monitoring vital signs of Kubernetes, taking us through the metrics that are critical for maintaining the health and performance of pod and container systems.

During the break, I visited a few booths, from New Relic and Devtron and briefly understood the details of the product offerings and how they can be best utilized.

• After the break, we had a session on Kubebuilder Intro & Deep Dive by Oshi Gupta. She presented how custom operators can help extend functionality to the application and how the controller logic works with the help of examples and live demo. She also shared about the tools used for creating custom operators - Operator Framework, KubeOps, and Kubebuilder. Kubebuilder has a more simplified experience and is easy to use.

• Harsh Thakur presented his session on Policy Control for Software Supply Chain in a fun and interesting way by correlating the supply software chain with food, where the build system can be considered similar to the chef, dependencies - the ingredients and continuous integration to a restaurant. The importance of security, compliance, SBOM scores were well emphasized.

• Ajeet Murmu and Shefali Pachori took us through the specifics of RBAC beyond the traditional scope and how Open Policy Agent (OPA) can help in combination with custom REGO policies. They showed a demo on how UI filtering was done for Admin/User view/actions with OPA based checks.

It was lunch time! Having listened to the amazing talks so far, it was time to refill 😁
I got a chance to bond with the amazing host of the event, Shabana Jahangeer, loved her energy and grace on the stage. Got to quickly meet Nabarun and Nikitha, and thanked them for such a wonderful keynote address.

• Panel discussion on A Journey of CNCF Maintainers From India was super insightful! We had Madhav Jivrajani, Sayan Chowdhury, Priyanka Saggu, Shubham Sharma, Ashutosh Kumar and Meha Bhalodiya share their learnings, suggestions and experiences during their contribution journeys.
  Key Takeaways:

  • Consistency is the key (Grow in the community, stay longer)

  • Ask the smart questions, use the mentor's time effectively

  • Find your area of interest, learn in-depth and build on

  • Explore technical opportunities and gain exposure. There's no need to rush to make an impact

  • Importance of knowledge and power transfers process, standardized contribution cycles.

• Distributed Tracing with Tempo and TraceQL by Suraj Sidh was very informative, he started with how tracing works, explaining the concepts of content propagation, and ordering information from logs. He justified the need for new query language given there are way too many of them and why TraceQL is worth it.

  • It has type awareness

  • Regex

  • Aggregators

  • Pipelining

  • Structural operators

  • Built-in autocomplete

• Automatic logs, traces and metrics in K8s using OpenTelemetry & SigNoz by Pranay Prateek was interesting. Got to learn about SigNoz, based natively on OpenTelemetry, a vendor-neutral open-source standard for instrumentation. No fear of instrumenting with vendor SDK and getting locked in. The demo on using Opentelemetry Operator in Kubernetes was helpful to understand the working in action. Congratulations to Pranay Prateek on hitting 13k Github likes on SigNoz.

• Event Driven Scaler Using Keda by Tanisha Banik was driven with examples and use cases on how KEDA (Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaling) makes it possible to easily scale based on any metrics from almost any metric provided.

• The focus of Joinal Ahmed and Nikhil Rana's talk, "Building MLOps Platform with Kubeflow on GKE," centered around the utilization of Kubeflow for creating a multi-user environment and managing interactive notebooks, while also employing Ray to efficiently orchestrate distributed computing workloads throughout the entire machine learning lifecycle, encompassing tasks in an orchestrated and standardized manner.

I had to leave early so I missed some of the awesome lightning talks which I hope to get some leads or presentations from KCD Bengaluru Official pages/channels.

Moving on to Day 2 in high spirits passed on from Day 1. It was the ethnic theme, and lovely to see the organizing team and a few attendees in their ethnic wear.

Keynote 2: 9 Lessons from k8s in Enterprise by Vishal Biyani was truly amazing, relatable and insightful.

• Learnings:

  • Community = Innovation

  • Challenges = Leading factor to innovation

  • Technology is great but business value is crucial

  • Technical perfection is good but solving the actual problem is better

  • One-time operational cost < Managed Serverless

  • Learn tech at lower levels of abstraction

  • Minimum viable transformations and align progress over perfection

• Zameer Fouzan gave a brief talk on Observability 101 on K8s, as it is a crucial subject in the world of Kubernetes adoption for scalable and secure infrastructure today with four parts to it - Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces and how New Relic brings all observability in one place.

• Super informative session on Tools for eBPF DevSecOps by Sayandeep Sen. It covered details on how safe and efficient ePBF is and why it is hard to re-use the code owing to the difficulty in finding the relevant code and understanding it. But this space and seen tremendous growth and join the ePBF community by starting small - annotating and learning about the dev tools.

  Anusha on Twitter: "@KCDBengaluru #KCDBengaluru - Tools for eBPF DevSecOps by Sayandeep Sen 9/n https://t.co/20nWmCNbfj" / Twitter

• Tackling Container Networking at Scale by Yash Tandon took us through the benefits of Cilium towards advanced security, and efficiency over native CNI, and how Cilium CLI can help in conducting connectivity tests and checking the status. He shared the QR code for us to find more details:
  Anusha on Twitter: "@KCDBengaluru #KCDBengaluru - Tackling Container Networking at Scale by Yash Tandon 8/n https://t.co/tlD8ZZGfPe" / Twitter

• What is cgroups v2? and how it affects our application by Mahesh was very informative. He took us through the basics of resource allocations and how cgroups play a role and what's changing with cgroups v2. Shared examples provided insights on how operating in older versions of Java lead to higher compute requirements after upgrading to k8s 1.25. Read more details on Maheshk-MSFT/cgroupsv2_in_aksv1.25-kcd-talk-slide-2023: Java apps running on older JDK < 11 moving to K8s 1.25 shows memory issue (github.com)

• Policy-Based Infrastructure as Code with Kyverno by Shivam Tyagi and Kumar Mallikarjuna dived at Why Kyverno, how it solves policy based control use-cases which can be in Audit or Enforce mode, they showed examples on how bucket creation through crossplane was restricted only to us-west-2 in enforce mode and how it was allowed in Audit mode, and how to understand the clusterpolicy report.

• Cloud Native Multi-Cluster/Multicloud Global Load Balancer for Kubernetes by Tamil Vanan Karuppannan was quite interesting as he shared the Architecture and working of k8gb controller in multi-cluster/cloud environment and the involved components.

Post lunch was the power-packed unconference extending on to folks interested in contributing to Open Source, challenges faced and how to tackle a few of them with some tips to navigate them. These interactions helped in seeking mentors and mentee connections.

• I was a little late for Simplifying multi-clusters in Kubernetes using KubeSlice by Yachika Ralhan and Rahul Sawra but found the contents I was looking for on Github | Kubeslice.

• The last and powerful talk of the event - Running distributed stateful system on Kubernetes - Beyond Statefulsets by Babu Srithar stirred up many inquisitive questions about how to deal with databases running on Kubernetes. The evolution of persistent volumes, running stateful systems efficiently on Kubernetes, and tackling the reverse ordinality rolling update with a custom operator helping with faster replication made us more curious and excited.

We had 4 interesting lightning talks:

• How you can save money for your company by Ramdev CM by leveraging fluentbit, fluentd, opensearch and elasticsearch.

• Kubernetes: When DNS Takes a Detour by Rohit explained to us the importance of having FQDN, ndots limited to 1 preferably.

• Victoria Metrics by Raghu Reddy covered how Victoria Metrics has an edge over Prometheus in terms of storage, and the ease with which you could transition to Victoria Metrics.

• In their brief talk on Introduction to Carvel by Anushree and Rohit Aggarwal showed us the composability and package management made easy with ytt and kapp.

What a fabulous time at KCD Bengaluru (In-Person) it was, loved the experience, truly transformational. I will look forward to more KCD events and as the organizers shared - we hope we aren't too far from the day when we'd be having KubeCon in India. To end it with a happy and high note, was the live and vibrant music band performance that made us sway and dance to their tunes!

Congratulations to all the winners of events for the best tweet, best dressed, quizzes, and iPad:

• Kubernetes Community Days Bengaluru on Twitter: "Best tweet award goes to @ashageethar 👏🏻 Thank you for sharing event moments. #Kubernetes #KCDBengaluru #CNCF https://t.co/tlYl8OLwti" / Twitter

• Kubernetes Community Days Bengaluru on Twitter: "Best dressing award goes to @avinash_ukr 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 #Kubernetes #KCDBengaluru #CNCF https://t.co/F863Fvkash" / Twitter

• Kubernetes Community Days Bengaluru on Twitter: "Best traditional female award goes to Shobha M #kubernetes #KCDBengaluru #CNCF https://t.co/yu4Q5wuEgb" / Twitter

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/suresh-k-c-878156160_cncf-booth-booth-activity-7070421990926405632-S8a9

• Zameer Fouzan on Twitter: "And it's a wrap with our 2nd winner on day 2 of #KCDBengaluru. Congratulations 🎊 Great participation. Amazing event, thank you @KCDBengaluru ♥ https://t.co/EbcSd7KX6f" / Twitter

Job Board: Aayush Sharma on Twitter: "Job board from @KCDBengaluru https://t.co/mITIKRnba0" / Twitter

P.S. I must say, what incredible sketch notes for each of the talks summarizing the concepts at large, ICYMI - you can follow on the Twitter thread: #KCDBengaluru #Kubernetes #CNCF #SillyStrokes - Twitter Search / Twitter

KCD Bengaluru 2023 - Talks - YouTube

Share your experience, learnings and takeways from the event in the comments or share it through #KCDBengaluru hashtag and tag @KCDBengaluru on Twitter.

Thank you KCD, Organizers, CNCF, Sponsors and all you lovely people who attended the event!