Last week, several members of the Ebury Technology team had the chance to attend KubeCon 2023 in Amsterdam. KubeCon is the main conference for Kubernetes users and developers in Europe and one of the most exciting tech conferences all year long.
We’ve had a chat with some of the Eburians that attended this year and we’d like to share some of their favourite moments and learnings in this year’s edition.
General impressions
It was the first KubeCon for all the people in the conversation, except for Luis Piedra, Solutions Architect. Compared to last year’s edition, he thinks it was slightly better organised than last year’s edition. ‘There was a bigger audience, more simultaneous tracks, and more talks. However, I feel the level of the talks was more basic than last year’s. Maybe I was unlucky in the ones I attended’.
For one of the first-time attendees, Team Lead Iker Gonzalez, ‘it was a very nice first experience in KubeCon, including the talks, even if some of them weren’t exactly what I was expecting, we had a great opportunity to meet and discuss trending topics at companies’ booths.’
Reasons for attending KubeCon
‘At Ebury, we are trying to move towards having Kubernetes embedded into all our services and applications.’, says Iker. ‘In this conference, the new trends are described and discussed. We get ideas on how to solve some of the problems that we currently have, as well as new views on some of the applications that we’re currently doing. Overall it gives us a good insight.’
‘Everyone that has anything to say about Kubernetes either goes to this conference or to the one that takes place in America.’, adds Luis. ‘All the actors in the Kubernetes scene were there and we could make contact with them. We could get graphs on the trends but we could also get in contact with providers, being the ones that are already our partners or future ones.’
‘One of the main reasons for attending the event is to meet with current and prospective providers. We met in person with some of them, this helps to build better relationships. We went over different technical topics and possibilities. We also got to know other companies and tools that probably will help us in the future.’ adds Ulises Merlan, Senior Team Lead at Ebury.
Main topics and top talks
‘I would say Gateway API was one of the hottest topics.’, says Iker, and the rest of them agree. Ulises adds ‘There were also lots of talks and discussions about network policies and tools to manage them.’ Horia Alungulesei, Senior Engineer, also mentions the ‘Kubernetes multi-cluster architecture was trendy, as well as eBPF – extended Berkeley Packet Filter -’.
As for their preferred talk, the team mentions ‘Tips from the Trenches: GitOps at Adobe’, by Larisa Andreea Danaila & Ionut-Maxim Margelatu. ‘They mentioned a lot of issues we’ve also encountered in our journey, so it was kind of a comforting talk’, jokes Horia. Luis agrees: ‘Yes, it was reassuring for us, to know that we are doing something that somebody else is doing and it’s working for them. Their path closely follows what we intend to do in terms of continuous deployment at Ebury’.
‘I got invited to a Wipro/Kong event, which was not part of the KubeCon, but kind of satellite event hosted one day before, and I really enjoyed it. The meeting was about service mesh with Kong and also about profitable growth with APIs (Wipro)’, adds Ulises.
Final thoughts
‘I’d like to highlight that, since we work remotely, it was a pleasure to gather with the team in person during and after the conference. It was a great team building experience’, highlights Ulises, and the rest of the team immediately agrees.
‘During three days, we have been thinking non-stop about how to improve our platform and the new tools we could implement, interchanging opinions about all these topics… This event is an incomparable opportunity for us to rethink processes and tools and focus in new ideas for the future, without interferences.’, concludes Luis.
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Thanks to the organization of KubeCon for yet another great edition! We’ll see you next year.