dbi services and KubeCon EU met in Paris, and it was intense!

Feel free to read my colleague Arnaud; he also gave his opinions on this blog post. If you missed my feedback on our first day at KubeCon, please jump here!

The last two days were again pretty intense. Two days, shared between going through almost each booth, we tried to visit all of our partners and contacts at SUSE, Nutanix, JFrog, EDB, mend.io, OVHCloud, Upbound, and more. We also attended morning keynotes, and sessions on topics we were more interested in.

While on Tuesday morning, we noticed quite a lot of people entering the event, Wednesday was at a totally different scale. We were queueing to enter the Paris Convention Center; we were queueing to enter the sessions; lunch breaks were compact.

Keynotes

The first keynote speaker was Priyanka Sharma. Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, she welcomed the audience and mentioned the number of attendees. 12’000 people were registered and there for the event.

Quickly focused on AI/ML, this keynote was marked by a demo, using Mistral and Ollama. These two tools were used to showcase the power of machine learning in real-time data analysis: from a picture of the audience taken at the beginning, a quite long descriptive text was generated by the AI stack. By the way, I think it’s quite brave from Priyanka to perform a demo in front of such a crowd!

Solutions showcase

We then decided to visit the solutions showcase floor. It was filled with lots of vendors and technologies. After a few steps, we ended up at the booth of Datacore, the vendor of OpenEBS. OpenEBS is a cloud-native storage solution that provides container-attached storage to Kubernetes clusters. Good discussions with the team, they were very keen to provide support and further information later on! That’s also the pro of such events: meeting people, sharing issues, but more importantly, providing gratitude for their work!

In late 2023, Sequotech organized, for the second time, the Data Community Conference in Bern. This happened in November, and we were honored to receive both Aurelie Vache from OVHCloud and Viktor Farcic from Upbound. We knew that both were at the KubeCon, so we were excited to meet them again at their respective booths. Aurelie had organized a book signing session. Her book? Understanding Kubernetes in a visual way, describing pods as poke balls.

Viktor was on his side, signing his latest book, talking about Crossplane Compositions.

Sessions and talks

During the third day, in parallel with other solutions showcase activities, I took the time to assist to sessions and talks. Two of them were very interesting.

The first presentation was made by none other than Jérome Petazzoni himself. Former Docker employee from the early days, he was presenting with Alexandre Buisine, both from Enix. “We Tested and Compared 6 Database Operators. The Results are In!” goal was to give an overview of various Kubernetes database operators, from PostgreSQL to MySQL, as well as MariaDB. It covered various aspects of the database lifecycle. Results were impressive, as, as you probably know, dbi services have strong expertise in databases in Switzerland.

The second one was “Kubernetes SIG Storage: Intro & Deep Dive” from Xing Yang, VMware and Jan Šafránek, Red Hat. This talk was quite impressive. It was the first time I had the chance to hear from people who are working on our daily tool stack. They were involved in the storage core components of Kubernetes and discussing the latest release, up coming features, and issues they were working on! Amazing!

This was my first KubeCon, and it was awesome. Having so many people, talks, chats, and all those kinds of things confirmed one thing. I definitely fall in love with the cloud-native world😍