Sessions You Shouldn’t Miss at KubeCon EU 2023

Are you ready for the 8th KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2023? They have some amazing speakers lined up this year in Amsterdam, including some you definitely don’t want to miss out on!

To celebrate the 8th anniversary of our favorite cloud-native event, we’ve chosen to highlight eight sessions for developers and eight for DevOps professionals. On top of that, we threw in a few extra bonus tidbits for the community.

Here’s a rundown of our top picks, including their times and date – There’s something in there for everybody. Let’s go!

Devs Track

1. In “Choose Your Own Adventure: The Treacherous Trek to Development,” Whitney Lee and Viktor Farcic will take attendees on a journey to guide a source code to production. Attendees will vote for which path has the best chance of getting to the fabled land of development in time while avoiding CNCF’s pitfalls and dead ends. Join Whitney and Viktor on April 19 from 2:30-3:05 p.m. for a fun interactive session.
   
2. “Kubernetes, Resistance Is Futile” is a talk by Adnan Hodzic on ING’s migration of its MLP (machine learning platform) to Kubernetes. Adnan will discuss the problems and limitations they encountered with their VM platform setup and why they decided to migrate to Kubernetes. Hear about the steps they took to start the realization of their migration plan, as well as the resistance they encountered. Be there on April 19 from 4:30-5:05 p.m. to find out how the 2+ year journey to Kubernetes ultimately turned out. 
   
3. “Continuous Profiling Your Production Kubernetes Deployments Running at Scale” will feature Vijay Samuel and Nick Pordash from eBay. They’ll discuss what a profile is, plus what continuous profiling is and the open-source options available to do it. Learn about the setup inside of eBay’s observability platform, real-life examples of how eBay significantly improved its system’s efficiency, and the benefits and promise of continuous profiling going forward. Join Vijay and Nick on April 20 from 4:30-5:05 p.m. to discover what continuous profiling can do for you!
   
4. In “Build Your Own Path in the Cloud Native Ecosystem”, Rich Burroughs (Loft Labs) and Kaslin Fields (Google) will share lessons from leaders in the industry including Kelsey Hightower, Liz Rice, Brad Geesaman, and Joe Beda. Find out how to navigate and operate within the cloud-native ecosystem. They’ll be offering up some Kubernetes history and fun facts, advice for cloud users and contributors, and the value of working in the cloud. Stop by on April 21 from 11:55 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., to find your own path in the cloud-native world.
   
5. “Tutorial: Measure Twice, Cut Once,” with Jason Skrzypek and Marino Wijay, will explore cloud-native networking, which is crucial for performance, security, and efficiency in microservices and containerization. The workshop will cover network protocols, traffic flow, DNS, and service mesh, preparing attendees for the adoption of networking technologies. Participants will grasp the Linux networking stack and network communication tracking by focusing on CoreDNS, Envoy, Istio, CNI, Cilium, and other tools. Don’t miss this cloud-native networking tutorial on April 19, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
   
6. In “It Is More Than Just Correlation – A Debug Journey,” Simon Pasuqier and Vanessa Martini (Red Hat) will address debugging Kubernetes workloads. With numerous observability signals, deciphering them can be overwhelming. They’ll introduce korrel8, an open-source tool that correlates signals, making debugging easy. Attendees will learn about the significance of correlating signals to diagnose and fix Kubernetes workload issues. Join the session on April 19, 11:00-11:35 a.m., for tools and techniques that can enable effective debugging in a cloud-native environment.
   
7. “Customizing Your Buildpacks Build – Yes You Can!” by VMware’s Natalie Arellano and Bloomberg’s Aidan Delaney will discuss buildpacks extension points for custom workflows. Cloud-native buildpacks simplify container image building, but devs often need customization. They’ll introduce inline buildpacks, build time environment variables for developers, and base image extension with Dockerfiles for platform operators—all while ensuring security requirements. Don’t miss the talk on April 19, 4:30-5:05 p.m. if you’re already using or considering using buildpacks.
   
8. In “Tales from on-Call: Fun with Operating etcd at Scale,” Geeta Gharpure and Chao Chen, both from Amazon, will talk about the challenges and solutions in operating etcd, the backbone of Kubernetes clusters. They’ll cover topics like dealing with etcd out-of-memory conditions, managing size quotas, and detecting and recovering from revision divergence. The EKS etcd team will share their experiences, making this session on April 19, 4:30-5:05 p.m. perfect for those wanting to compare on-call notes or learn about etcd operations.

Our very own resident CNCF Ambassador, Guy Menahem (AKA The Good Guy), has some recommendations of his own. Check them out:

DevOps Track

1. In “Sponsored Keynote: Achieving Kubernetes Nirvana with Platforms, People & Processes,” Denise Schannon, Senior Director of Engineering at Rancher by SUSE, will explore how the Kubernetes ecosystem enables agile application deployment and delivery. As enterprises scale, policy governance, security, and productivity become challenging. Denise will give insights from the Rancher team on how the cloud-native open-source community, technology, and processes can help move your team toward Kubernetes nirvana. The keynote will take place on April 21, 9:25-9:30 a.m.
   
2. In “Show Me the Metrics: How a Huge Bank Does Observability with Multi-Tenancy Prometheus and Thanos,” Rodrigo Serra Inacio and Willian Saavedra Moreira Costa, SREs at Itaú, will showcase how the bank’s teams adopted a fully open-source multi-tenancy platform, CloudMetrics, to boost observability with Prometheus, Kubernetes, and Thanos. The session on April 21, 4:00-4:35 p.m., will provide a detailed walk-through of the case, including its implementation and architecture, as well as some positive and negative insights.
   
3. In “The Day We Delete(d) Production,” How can you not be intrigued by a prod incident in the world’s largest particle collider? Ricardo Rocha and Spyros Trigazis (CERN) will talk all about recovering from a rogue tool that deleted a third of CERN’s production capacity. They share their high-availability architecture, blast radius reduction options, “clusters as cattle” concept, and extensive GitOps use. The session will cover lessons learned, cyclic dependencies, and stateful workloads in multi-cluster scheduling. There will even be a demo showcasing CERN services recovering from major incidents, illustrating the positive impact of years of work. Be there, April 20, 3:25-4:00 p.m.
   
4. In “Surviving Day 2 – How to Troubleshoot Kubernetes Networking,” Isovalent’s Thomas Graf will demonstrate essential tools for troubleshooting networking in a live Kubernetes cluster. Graf will provide insights on resolving DNS errors, as well as debugging services and Ingress. You’ll learn about locating networking errors, troubleshooting network policy drops, and setting up metrics dashboards and alerting. No one can afford not to learn new troubleshooting skills. Don’t miss the talk on April 21, 11:55 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
   
5. In “Cloud-Native Quantum: Running Quantum Serverless Workloads on Kubernetes”, Michael Maximilien and Paul Schweigert, both from IBM, will discuss quantum computing’s cloud-native integration. They’ll demonstrate Kubernetes and Knative’s roles in managing and running serverless quantum workloads using the open-source Qiskit toolkit. Attendees will learn how quantum computing offers faster algorithms and new solutions, potentially disrupting modern web cryptography. The session will showcase quantum serverless as a crucial part of future cloud computing, with the Kubernetes ecosystem allowing access to this emerging tech. Join the session on April 20, 11:00-11:35 a.m., to get a taste of the real bleeding edge of Kubernetes innovation.
   
6. “Is Kubernetes Delivering on its Promise?” will be a keynote speech by Aparna Subramanian, co-lead of CNCF Developer Experience SIG and Director of Production Engineering at Shopify. Aparna will talk all about K8s end users’ experiences, whether Kubernetes delivers on its promise, and tactics users can implement to unlock the full potential of this ubiquitous technology, including some helpful CNCF resources. Friday, April 21, 9:50-10:05 a.m.
   
7. In “Building a Platform Engineering Fabric with the Kube API at Autodesk”, Greg Haynes and Jesse Sanford will showcase Autodesk’s deployment platform evolution using the operator pattern and Kube API extensibility. They’ll detail the Crossplane and KubeVela collaboration, enabling platform teams to build value efficiently while promoting compliance through admission control, strong separation of concerns, and Kubernetes RBAC. Make sure to show up on April 19, 3:25-4:00 p.m., to explore Autodesk’s platform journey.
   
8. For “How We Securely Scaled Multi-Tenancy with VCluster, Crossplane, and Argo CD”, Codefresh’s Dev Advocate, Kostis Kapelonis, and Ilia Medvedev, a DevOps engineer, will talk about achieving multi-tenancy, scalability, and security via a GitOps methodology. They’ll discuss using vCluster, Crossplane, and Argo CD, and how they solved the challenge of multi-tenancy for public access by creating virtual clusters with enhanced isolation. To learn more about scaling multi-tenancy with these tools, join Kostis and Ilia on Wednesday, April 19, 11:55 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

Before we finish off with some bonus activities, Guy has a few other tips to share, that’ll help you get the best KubeCon experience, especially if it’s your first time:

Bonus session:

“Community Leaders Tell All: Everything You Wanted to Know and Were Too Afraid to Ask” will be a must-attend panel discussion featuring Lisa-Marie Namphy from Cockroach Labs, Kim McMahon from Cisco, and Komodor’s loyal friends, Bart Farrell and Sharone Zitzman. The panel will discuss the importance of community building, visibility, and marketing for the growth and sustainability of open-source projects. The speakers will also share their top advice for building inclusive, healthy, and sustainable communities. You’ll learn all about inclusivity, empathy, positive intent, metrics that matter, and the importance of personal connections. Join this panel on April 20, 2:30 p.m. to 3:05 p.m., to kickstart your open-source community or optimize and grow your existing one. 

After Party:

After absorbing all the knowledge and networking you can get, you’ll want to rock your socks off at one (or more) of the after-parties organized by the sponsors.

We’re obviously biased, but based on our last party at KubeCon Detroit 2022, you can count on Komodor to give you the best time! Since this is Amsterdam, we thought it would be fitting to hold our party on the night of 4/20, at a bowling alley just across from the conference venue. What’s in store? Free food & drink, live music, disco bowling, and all the awesome people in the K8s community.

We hope you’re as excited as we are for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2023! 

Be sure to check out the full descriptions for each session via the links provided, and remember to visit Komodor at booth #S2 to learn more about our dev-first Kubernetes Operations & Troubleshooting Platform, grab some awesome swag inspired by Guardians of the Galaxy, and just geek out with us! See you soon 🤗