KubeCon Europe 2023: IT community flourishing in Amsterdam
Keeping a community growing requires perseverance and conviction, especially when it comes to such a particular segment as those interested in information technology and software development. For such specific topics, specialized spaces are needed where not only products and updates are presented, but also to generate conversation and interaction among participants.
The recent KubeCon Europe 2023 in the Netherlands is the perfect example of how to generate dynamics among the IT community so that it continues to flourish. Under the banners with the slogan “Community in Bloom”, in honor of the tulip season, ten thousand people from different regions of the world gathered at the RAI Convention Centre Amsterdam to share innovations in different products and participate in multiple creative activities to learn in depth what each project, both the most popular and small startups, have to offer today.
As for the topics that dominated the agenda, possibly most notable is the trend of looking to simplify interaction with Kubernetes for application developers. There is a recognition in the industry that managing Kubernetes clusters is not trivial, and asking application developers to handle this as well is too much. So the concept of platform engineering continues to gain attention as a strategy for raising the level of abstraction on platforms to improve the developer experience.
As usual, in the days prior to KubeCon, other events focused on specific projects or needs were held. Such was the case of ArgoCon, CiliumCon, Cloud Native Telco Day, Cloud Native Wasm Day, Istio Day, Kubernetes Batch+HPC Day, Kubernetes on Edge Day, Linkerd Day and Observability Day. Of these, we were struck by the momentum and growth of Argo, a project that provides a suite of tools to manage workflows and continuous delivery of cloud native applications. Argo was originally created at Intuit and recently graduated as a CNCF project.
The ecosystem of companies involved in the cloud native world is large and diverse, but among the companies with the strongest participation at KubeCon Europe 2023 were Red Hat, Cisco, Huawei, Microsoft and AWS.
Between games, prizes and stickers, the community that attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 was able to learn, interact and have fun for four consecutive days in an inclusive environment where the presence of more and more women was noted, as some of the main and most anticipated sessions were presented by leaders such as Lin Sun from Solo.io, Dawn Foster from VMware and Naina Singh from Red Hat.
Other inclusion measures for which KubeCon + CloudNativeCon earned the CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software) gold badge included scholarships and discounts for attendance, lactation and prayer rooms, handicapped access, all-gender restrooms, first aid/medical assistance, and communication stickers to indicate pronoun preferences and interaction.
Latin America was also present through Clowder Space, Software Guru and many attendees from Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Colombia. The opportunities are growing and the challenges are greater but the drive to continue building a diverse, creative and inclusive community is latent, so we are already preparing the next events to continue sharing the advances in the world of technology, meanwhile, keynotes and breakout sessions are already available on the CNCF YouTube channel.
See you soon!
Teyza Ponce