KubeCon NA 2020 talks to watch, part 1

Pandemic situation forced most of the conferences to go on-line. On the one hand, it's not the same experience as in-person attendance. On the other hand - I can participate in events I wouldn't be able to travel to. Therefore I took part in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 last November. Moving to online format reduced price from $1000+ to just $75, which made it easier to justify 😊. It was a bit unusual to be at work in the morning, then move to couch and stay at the conference past midnight.

The online setup was quite good. There were virtual "booths" one would expect at expo – with demos, links to more materials and exhibitor's crew available for chat. There were additional number of channels on CNCF Slack. I followed the announcement one, sponsors one (heaps of interesting information there!) and some run by specific companies.

During the Conference there were some "meet the maintainer" events and accompanying gatherings. Those mainly had a form of Zoom (the owners of Keybase) video meetings where one could chat with the developers. I liked these!

The main course of conference are talks. There were plenty. Sometimes there were a dozen or so parallel tracks, so I did not have a chance to watch everything. I'm slowly working through backlog of things I missed. The talks itself were pre-recorded, but after the talk there was a live Q&A session with the speaker. Sadly, the Q&A is not available in recordings below. I guess this was one of the exclusive perks for attendees.

Below you'll find part 1 of my selection of most interesting talks. Second part will be coming later, but you can find all descriptions and links to the videos at https://kccncna20.sched.com/.

• PKI the Wrong Way: Simple TLS Mistakes and Surprising Consequences - Tabitha Sable, Datadog

• The Quest for the Ultimate Kubernetes Homelab - Dan Garfield, Codefresh

• Stop Writing Operators - Joe Thompson, HashiCorp

• Clean Up Your Room! What Does It Mean to Delete Something in K8s - Aaron Alpar, Kasten

• How to Multiply the Power of Argo Projects By Using Them Together - Hong Wang

• Stress and Mental Health in Technology - Dr. Jennifer Akullian, Growth Coaching Institute

• The Open Source Revolution: How Kubernetes is Changing the Games Industry - Dominic Green

• Admission Control, We Have a Problem - Ryan Jarvinen, Red Hat

• High Performance KubeVirt in Action - Huamin Chen, Red Hat & Marcin Franczyk, Kubermatic

• This one is from last year, but interesting: How the Department of Defense Moved to Kubernetes and Istio - Nicolas Chaillan

An observation: as for virtual conference, this one had a hefty carbon footprint! Imagine how many planes were flown to deliver these: