This has been a long time coming, I have been in the cloud-native world for around 2 years since having more of a focus on cloud-native technologies and Kasten by Veeam which was acquired by Veeam in October 2020.

At that time my first KubeCon was virtual for everyone, this was in early 2021 when we had virtual booths, sessions and activities. Then things finally got back to in-person and this was out in LA later in 2021 when there were still restrictions on some countries entering the US so I could not make this one either. Fast forward to May 2022 when KubeCon EU took place in Valencia the same week was VeeamON in Las Vegas which is where I had to be.

Cheesy car-related titles ahead!

Detroit – KubeCon NA 2022

As I write this blog I am on the flight from the UK over to Detroit, I seem to have been lucky enough to find the direct flight from London to Detroit, everyone else is having to go via other US cities for the trip. Flying with Delta for the first time and have to say things are pretty good. Anyway, it is not a flight review or a travel channel.

I am arriving a little later than I would have liked, On Sunday there is an event called Cloud Native Rejekts and this community event is a great warm-up for the KubeCon show. Presentations submitted for KubeCon may end up here. Personally, I have seen more success amongst my peers here than KubeCon itself. Next year I have a goal to attend and hopefully speak.

Monday – Start the engines

Monday starts to see some of the co-located events kicking off, as Kasten, we have our very own learning day where we will be unveiling the rebrand of our learning initiative that we started a year ago in LA. Learning.Kasten.io will now be known as KubeCampus and you can expect to see some wider topics being covered here throughout the next year and beyond to help people ramp up in style with some theory but most importantly some hands-on. This learning day is also for that, we will walk everyone through two labs, one known as the rookie lab and the other a pro lab. It is a bring-your-own laptop kind of afternoon so people can walk along with us, earn badges and hopefully learn something new.

Tuesday – settle into the qualifying

Tuesday, the colocated events continue and again we are heavily involved in the Cloud Native Data Management day, where I have been lucky enough to call in some community friends to talk about storage, data and everything in between. We are starting things a little later in the afternoon because from the event we will be heading into the palace to see the Detroit Red Wings play some Ice Hockey. There will be some tickets raffled off during the event. Really looking forward to this event before heading out for a team dinner.

Wednesday – on the grid

On Wednesday I think this is the first day of KubeCon officially, obviously we have already had 2-3 days of community, learning and sharing our experiences but this is when we start the hunt for the best swag and continue that path of learning about what is new and tales from the field. I did not get accepted for any sessions on the KubeCon agenda, it is a very hard process and I am not sure what the magic formula is, to be honest. I will however be speaking at the Kasten booth about our integrations and ability to integrate Kasten K10 into your GitOps pipeline in particular using ArgoCD to achieve this. This session is repeated throughout the week.

Also, on Wednesday we have the Kasten party which I am sure will be lots of fun! Having been at Veeam for well over 7 years there is no party like a Veeam party so I am sure the Kasten by Veeam party will be just as legit.

Thursday – the drive

More breakouts and booth time. I have also been invited into a CNCF roundtable to talk about the future of cloud-native which for me is a big topic, I feel like Education has been big for several years and we are now hopefully getting into that adoption curve where people will see cloud-native and the surrounding projects as the main stay and adopt some technologies and practice. I also think we have seen a good amount of talk about security and observability which should and will continue, we have also seen a lot of investment around storage in Kubernetes and I think this will be a big part of the next 12 months, along with running stateful workloads not only in Kubernetes but also outside of the applications, I think the progression and requirement will be around Data Protection but so much more than just backup and recovery, I think mobility of data will be huge.

We will also see the event party on Thursday night, a great time to meet up with the community members you have not had a chance to yet. I expect to see lots of selfies from this party!

Friday – The finish line

We made it this far, Friday for me is home time. At least it is for me. But I don’t travel till super late so we have another full day of breakouts and community mingling before heading out. I will also at points during the week be talking about the #90DaysOfDevOps project I started this year and just talking about that learning journey from my perspective.

The podium

I think above all else this week for me is going to be about the community and conversations, meeting people that I have only interacted with for the most part over Twitter and having conversations with the people that are immersed into this technology wave on a day to day basis or those looking to break into it and looking for the plan to learn and get involved.

My biggest ask or asks

come and say hi

come and get a 90DaysOfDevOps sticker, for the majority of the week I will be hovering around the Kasten booth.