The Shipyard team is gearing up for this year’s KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City! We’re balancing our agendas this week — there are countless sessions that we’re excited for, and we’re hoping to spotlight a few (and some of the other festivities going on).
Cloud Native Rejekts
The premier Cloud Native community-led conference, Rejekts, is happening November 10-11th at Kiln. This is our first Rejekts, and we’ve heard from our networks that this is a can’t-miss event. Tickets are free (courtesy of Microsoft), but Rejekts sold out really quickly this year. You can still secure a spot on the waitlist.
Day 1: Sunday November 10th
Time: 11:45 AM Location: Flex Space
In What Kubernetes Should Learn from Other Orchestrators, Justin Garrison studies the architecture decisions behind other orchestrators, and how these decisions might affect or apply to Kubernetes. He’ll compare Google Borg, Amazon ECS, HashiCorp Nomad, and Meta Twine.
Time: 2 PM Location: Theater
After lunch, Natalie will be co-presenting with Chad Crowell a session titled Debug Like a Pro: Ephemeral Containers and Wolfi Linux in Action. They’ll overview best practices for keeping container images secure, the benefits of distroless images, and using debugging containers in a cluster.
At 6:20 PM, Rejekts is hosting a happy hour. As a conference with such strong community ties, we imagine this will be one of the best opportunities to make connections during KubeCon week.
Day 2: Monday November 11th
Time: 10:05 AM Location: Theater
In Priya Ananthasankar’s session Migrating Distributed Systems Infrastructure to a Serverless Model: Methodology and Insights, she’ll share her experiences designing and implementing a migration from self-managed Kubernetes to serverless at Azure Cloud Shell. She’ll talk about the risks of a migration this scale, especially when it comes to mitigating downtime/outages.
Time: 10:40 AM Location: Flex Space
As an answer to cloud native application start times, Ram Iyengar introduces an alternative in The Untold Story of Unikernels and WASM. When using Unikernals with WASM, users can get lightweight, low-footprint applications with quicker boot times.
Platform Engineering Day
On Tuesday, KubeCon is hosting 16 co-located specialized mini-conferences. This year, we’re especially looking forward to Platform Engineering Day — in fact, you might see us hanging out here all day. These sessions will focus on architecting Internal Developer Platforms, managing Platform teams, and best practices for integrating Platforms into developer workflows.
Time: 12:45 PM Location: Grand Ballroom G
Nathen Harvey, Mallory Haigh, Kirk Hoganson, and Guillaume Caya-Letourneau will be panelists on Measuring the Impact of Platform Engineering, moderated by Heather Joslyn. At Shipyard, we’ve noticed one of Platform’s biggest pain points is that it can be tricky to assess, since it exists to serve an org’s internal developers. Panelists will explain how stakeholders can convert Platform success into concrete metrics, and how to set goals/KPIs.
Time: 4:25 PM Location: Grand Ballroom G
As a rule of thumb, good UI isn’t overly complicated. In Viktor Farcic’s session Developer Platform Consoles Should Be Dumb, he reminds us that we should apply the same logic to developer platforms, designing them around our APIs and not against them.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
This year, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon are expecting over 10,000 onsite attendees. There will be over 250 sessions from which to choose, and with tracks catering to all skill levels, there really is something for everyone.
Day 1: Tuesday November 12th
KubeCon Day 1 boasts all 16 co-located events, as well as CNCF project-related lightning talks (taking place at the Hyatt Regency). Most co-located events will be onsite at the Salt Palace, with the exceptions of Azure Day (Marriott City Center), OpenShift Commons Gathering (Le Meridien), SigstoreCon Supply Chain Day (Hilton Salt Lake City Center), and Kong AI Gateway & Insomnia Workshop (Hilton Salt Lake City Center).
Day 1 tends to be a standout for many attendees, since they can spend all day learning about their subject matter area of choice. After, there will be two major sponsor-hosted events: Harness’ happy hour, and the ever-popular House of Kube.
Day 2: Wednesday November 13th
Time: 2:30 PM Location: 254 B
Cloud native deployments tend to run on the larger size, but their scalability means we can better control and manage their resource usage. In Cloud Native Sustainability Speedrun: Tools from Infrastructure to Application Level, Saiyam Pathak and Saloni Narang will show attendees how they can track and reduce the carbon footprint of their deployments.
Time: 4:30 PM Location: Salt Lake Ballroom C
Spotify’s Backstage has established itself as the Internal Developer Portal of choice for many, and maintainers Ben Lambert and Patrik Oldsberg will share what’s new, and how you can better build plugins and components for your team’s Backstage IDP in How to Expand Your IDP: The New Building Blocks of Backstage.
Day 3: Thursday November 14th
Time: 2:30 PM Location: 251 AD
Solving the Kubernetes Networking API Rubik’s Cube, a session with Doug Smith, Surya Seetharaman, Shane Utt, and Lior Lieberman, is a crash course for those interested in Kubernetes networking. Speakers will also discuss hardware (particularly GPU) requirements for Kubernetes dynamic resource allocation and multi-networking.
Throughout the day on Thursday and Friday, there will be a series of Contribfests at Salt Palace. These are sessions designed to help familiarize new contributors with some CNCF-backed OSS projects. Thursday has sessions on Backstage, WasmCloud, Helm 4, Inspektor Gadget, Meshery, and Tetragon.
And from 4:30 - 6 PM, Sonatype is hosting Pet-a-Pup, during which you can hang out with local therapy dogs.
Day 4: Friday November 15th
Time: 11 AM Location: 355 B
A flaky test suite can be annoying at best, and a risk to your app’s stability at worst. In Achieving and Maintaining a Healthy CI with Zero Test Flakes with Antonio Ojea, Michelle Shepardson, and Benjamin Elder, attendees will learn how the Kubernetes team keeps their CI reliable and predictable.
Time: 4 PM Location: 254 B
Kubernetes application security and compliance are sometimes not directly compatible. In her talk Why Perfect Compliance is the Enemy of Good Kubernetes Security, Michele Chubirka explains why your priority should lie with making your Kubernetes applications stable and secure. Compliance standards can encourage taking too many platform risks that lead to less predictable performance, and these standards might not be reflective of a secure K8s application anyway.
Touring Salt Lake City
KubeCon and its co-located events mean you’ll have a jam-packed week ahead of you. If you’re looking for ways to maximize your downtime, Salt Lake City has a lot to offer. But don’t bank on packing your skis/board just yet…
Tracy Aviary at Liberty Park
Spend some time birdwatching in the country’s oldest aviary! Also accompanied by a botanical garden, Tracy Aviary has over four hundred birds and three hundred plants. Budget some time to explore Liberty Park, as well — it has some gorgeous walking trails.
Sugar House
This is a vibrant neighborhood with some delicious restaurants and cafés. It runs a little quieter than the bustling downtown you’ll encounter during KubeCon. See: Tea Zaanti, Sugar House Coffee, Blind Rabbit Kitchen.
The Gallivan Center
Salt Lake City’s charming downtown offers a public outdoor ice rink. This was a popular gathering place during the 2002 Winter Olympics, and remains a centerpiece attraction of Salt Lake. Plus, there will be food trucks stopping by on Tuesday and Thursday.
See you there?
Keep an out for the Shipyard team — we’re giving out stickers! We’re looking forward to reconnecting with our friends in the Cloud Native community, as well as meeting new ones. Email us at hello@shipyard.build if you’d like to grab a coffee.
