I got to visit KubeCon & CloudNativeCon EU 2024, in Paris! I was attending the conference area on Wednesday and Thursday. I had flights on Tuesday and Friday, so the trip was 4 days in total for me. It was my first bigger event/conference, so the entire experience was new for me.
Short outline
The trip was really fun all around! I watched the keynotes, some intresting talks I picked out in advance and toured the conference floor to get free swag and talk to the companies there. I had especially great talk at the Splunk -stand. They had a great looking demo of Splunk Observability , which looks like a great way of monitoring a Kubernetes cluster. Another good talk I had was at the Depot -stand. They have a nice concept for speeding up docker builds, although it being a remote container build service requires some thought before making the switch.
I also met nicolevdh at the Grafana stand. I’ve really liked some of her videos for setting up my Obsidian vault, although that is still very much work-in-progress for me.
One of the main takeaways I got from the event was that the community is growing at a pretty rapid pace. Last year, there were supposedly 10 000 attendees. This year that grew by +20%, totaling around 12 000. I’m not sure how accurate those numbers are, but regardless I think it’s safe to say the community is growing fast.
The talks I attended weren’t all that advanced. Since I’m still a beginnier in Kubernetes, I mostly looked forward to the “10 Years of Kubernetes Patterns Evolution ”. I also tried to attend more soft-skill talks, like givin professional feedback and I still have this documentation talk .
Picture of the keynote stage. I really didn’t take that many pictures. I did my best to keep my phone away during the event.
Wandering around Paris
On Tuesday evening, there was a House of Kube -event. Our group was looking forward to raving it out there, but unfortunately the queue there was a bit too long for everyone else in my group. When they went to eat, I stuck it out and got in after 30min of waiting. It was a bit too crowded for my taste.
House of Kube
After the leaving that party though I really enjoyed just walking around the smaller streets. The little streets which don’t adhere to the grid plan were somehow really atmospheric in my opinion.
During the evenings on Wednesday and Thursday, we went sightseeing a bit more. My favorite spots are below.
A mandatory picture of the Eiffel-tower Notre Dame being rebuilt
My takeaways
Despite my experience in this field, I haven’t used Kubernetes much yet. It’s something I’ve wanted to use and learn for almost as long as I’ve been a developer. It’s already a well-established standard in my opinion, so now I just need to learn it. I’ve got Kubernetes patterns and Kubernetes Best Practices on my reading list. I’m looking to buy some old PC to function as a “server” in my homelab (well, to be my homelab). I’ve got a Raspberry Pi that I have a VPN and ntfy running on, but I’d like to get something a bit more for Kubernetes.