KubeCon 2019 Recap - That's a Wrap!

Kiril Shivachev

Archive article - published on November 25 2019

Keynotes & Talks

It's the final Kubecon 2019 Recap and the last day of the event did not disappoint! Once again, the day started off with some great Keynote Sessions! Bryan Liles graced the stage for his keynote, In Search of the Kubernetes “Rails.” A lot of people focus on the issues Rails had scaling with Twitter, but these issues were design as much as Ruby. Rails made developers think outside of the box and focus more on productivity.

“Ruby has always held a special place in my heart because I have dealt with classic Java Web Application with Spring before it was 1.0 and without Spring. It was Rails that taught me a ‘good’ framework should focus on Developer productivity and happiness!” - Braden Wright, RLT Staff Cloud Architect

The first couple of days at KubeCon had some great talks and the last day was no different. Braden was able to attend Walk-through: Debugging an RBAC Problem in ISTIO (But Without the Swearing) by Matt Turner. This talk was really cool because it was pretty much all demo-based. We would highly recommend watching this talk if you are running Istio! You can get a basic overview of different tools and how to debug a live Istio service mesh.  

“Matt’s talk was funny and, contrary to the title, there was swearing...just not angry swearing!” - Braden Wright

Matt showed Istio Dashboard ControlZ, which lets you change things like log levels via the Web 2.0 page. You were also able to see how to easily get the logs out of Envoy. In addition, they showed Ksniff, a really cool tool that gets TCPDumps from Envoy and sends them to Wireshark running on your local desktop / machine.

But Wait...There's More!

KubeCon has been a great place for us to hang out with some of our Partners! Braden had the privilege to attend Chris Kim’s (Rancher Labs) talk about Solving Multi-Cluster Network Connectivity With Submariner.  

“Anyone looking for multi-cluster communication without all the complexity of a Service Mesh should watch this talk!” - Braden Wright

Submariner uses IPSEC Tunnels to create secure multi-cluster communication b/t pods. It consists of two basic components, Broker and Gateway nodes. The Broker gets installed on a K8s cluster with the API reachable by all members of the cluster, and it gathers metadata about Pods and services in the clusters. Gateway nodes setup IPSEC tunnels, the failover via leader election.

“It seems like there’s been a lot of improvements and overall polishing to this project. The demo, the install, and running Submariner looks super clean and easy.” - Braden Wright

Inclusion & Mental Health

This year’s KubeCon really concentrated on diversity and inclusion.

“Education and collaboration are vital to the future of the CNCF ecosystem and it is imperative to us that everyone in the community that wants to participate feels welcome to do so regardless of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, race, ethnicity, age, religion or economic status.” - Linux Foundation

The conference also focused on mental health this year with a talk by Dr. Jennifer Akullian, Mental Health in Tech. There was a booth set up where you could go and speak to counselors and they even brought in therapy dogs at the Puppy Pawlooza!

Summary

If you did not get to attend this year’s KubeCon, we highly recommend you try and make it next year. In case you missed them, check out our previous two blogs for KubeCon 2019: KubeCon Day 1 and KubeCon Day 2.

This is a great experience to join others in the community to learn and grow from each other, and we are looking forward to the next one!

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Kiril Shivachev
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