KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is the best conference in the cloud native ecosystem. With the number of submissions that go in, the selection process and then the amazing schedule, everything is great!

With KubeCon 2022 EU just around the corner, it's time we start building the schedule. many amazing talks as always but in the end, you can only attend a few whether in person or virtual. I will be attending KubeCon virtually this year, and below are the talks that I am personally looking forward to.

Day1

• First would obviously be the keynotes (9 - 10:20am CEST)

Always looking forward to what Priyanka has in store for the cloud native community. Also, would be interesting to hear the key learnings from Mercedes from their 7 years Kubernetes journey followed by other keynote sessions on energy efficiency for cloud native infra, community and deep learning for satellite.

• 10:30 am CEST I will grab a cup of coffee and also listen to the WASM project office hours. I am interested to know what has evolved and where the ecosystem is moving ahead wrt cloud native.

• 11:00 CEST The session I am looking forward to is Volcano intro and deep dive. Volcano.sh is a cloud native batch scheduling system for compute-intensive workloads, especially the ML and DL workloads. I want to get started and learn more about this project.

• 11:30 am CEST It's again a virtual office hours session, I might take a break to recharge myself for the next set of sessions and I will put on the Kubevirt office hours. KubeVirt is a great piece of tech helping you run VM workloads sided by side container workloads and use the power of Kubernetes for VM's so would be interesting to see what is coming next in KubeVirt.

• 11:55 am CEST I want to attend a couple of sessions during this time, so I will mark one for later, but the one I will watch is debugging with ephemeral containers. I recently posted a Tweet as well wherein I did mention it and I want to know more troubleshooting and debugging techniques using ephemeral containers.

• 12:30 to 14:30 CEST It's a lunch break plus virtual office hours. It depends on how much energy I still have and if I can take another office hour. I will either go for Crossplane as I am really interested to see where they are going next or Pixie.

• 14:30 CEST I would be interested to see how a container-as-a-service platform can be built on top of Kubernetes using Knative. Knative is an amazing piece of tech, so I would be excited to see how to build something similar to cloud run!

• 15:25 CEST Kubernetes autoscale - HPA/VPA and even the cluster autoscalers are great. It becomes important to define the right size for your application and how to setup the HPA/VPA for your workloads. Looking forward to learning it in a practical way in this talk.

• 16:30 CEST I am interested in attending two talks here: Cold starts and autoscaling are the two major issues of a serverless platform, so I would like to understand how people are trying to fix this issue in this talk.
  The watch later one is From Kubernetes to PaaS to … Err, What’s Next?

• 17:25 CEST Building a Nodeless Kubernetes Platform - this talk will be interesting as this will give an insight into how GKE autopilot was built, and what were the tradeoffs. It will also explain what really the nodeless Kubernetes means, is it just that the principles remain the same and the rest of the game is changed? looking forward to this talk.

Day 2

• 9 CEST

Starting the day with keynotes, Kubernetes project updates that will tell the direction where it is headed in the future, software supply chain and how to make platforms more accessible to developers.

• 11 CEST Fun with Continuous Compliance - I would like to see how we can implement continuous compliance in our existing DevSecOps pipelines using tools like Falco and Voucher.

• 11:30 CEST I would either be on a break or just attend the helm office hours.

• 11:55 CEST I am interested in Two sessions here -Cert manager one to see its advantages, implementation and usage with LetsEncrypt and Vault; adding events to kubectl commands. Since I can only watch 1 at a time, so I would go for the cert-manager one!

• 14:30 CEST After the lunch break, I would like to go for building your own Cluster API provider, I think this would be fun to learn, and I would like to try it as well.

• 15:25 CEST Alerting in the Prometheus ecosystem - Alerting is a major component when it comes to monitoring Kubernetes, I would like to understand the current cortex alert management system and how it is being used as a baseline to improve the Prometheus alert manager.

• 16:30 CEST After a coffee break, the talk that I would be watching is definitely on supply chain security. This term gain a lot of hype and importance in the past few months, so it would be great to understand how to implement SLSA in current pipelines.

• 17:25 CEST I am a fan of Chaos engineering and I will be attending the talk Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering with LitmusChaos. I would like to understand cloud native chaos engineering, principles and how LitmusChaos has evolved to tackle the cloud native chaos engineering problems. I Will try to attend the happy hour after that if possible.

Day 3

• 9 am CEST Another day and another set of Keynotes to understand the project strategy in the CNCF ecosystem, and best practices for securing CI/CD pipelines. Canary clusters would be interesting to understand how the whole platform can be built so that it can be recreated with ease in a minimum time and automated way.

• 11 am CEST Interesting sessions during this time, but I would like to attend the Kubernetes networking 101 session, as I want to learn more about how communications work in detail within Kubernetes.

• 11:55 CEST Show Me Your Labels and I’ll Tell You Who You Are - Would attend this one to take a look at the power of Labels in the observability space.

• 14:00 CEST I told you I am a chaos engineering fan, so I would want to have a look at this new chaos engineering tool Konrade which is an open source Security Chaos Engineering (SCE) Tool for K8s in the talk - Komrade: an Open-Source Security Chaos Engineering (SCE) Tool for K8s

• 14:55 CEST The CNI plugin debugging talk sounds looks interesting, so I will be going for it, It wil be a huge plus to get to know how to debug CNI in production and even the best practices around it.

• 16:00 CEST Never miss a talk from Liz Rice!! Yes that is true, she will be giving a guided tour of cilium service mesh which is sidecarless eBPF enabled! I am sure it will be a treat to watch.

• 16:55 CEST Last but not the least, I will attend this panel session - Navigating the CNCF landscape, the right way. I would be interested to know the thought process while navigating the huge landscape when you are finding something to solve a specific problem.

Well, They are the Core KubeCon days, but there are many Co-Located events as well that will happen on the 16th and 17th of May. It requires additional registration and fees(if in person, for virtual it's included in registration) but they will be epic. I have not yet planned, but I am more oriented towards the WASM day and Knative on the 17th.

There are great options to choose from!!

So those are the session that I am looking forward to this KubeCon-CloudNativeCon EU 2022. What are your favourite session that you are looking forward to attending? Put them in the comments.

Saloni Narang

Twitter - @I_saloni92