Over the past five years, we’ve seen the attendance at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon increase by 25%, showing real growth in the cloud native industry. While there is some worry that this indicates the reduction of community-based initiatives, we want to explain how this heightened exposure can help us to build a stronger cloud native community.

For the third year in a row, Civo appeared at KubeCon, with 2023 being our first time as a Silver sponsor. We set up base in booth S83 and, according to Robusta, brought along some of the best swag at the conference. So, join us as we explore the ups and downs of our week in Amsterdam, the strengthening community, and how we literally ended up all at sea.

How we focused on supporting the community

During the three-day event, Dinesh Majrekar (CTO), Saiyam Pathak (Director of Technical Evangelism), Mark Boost (CEO), and Kunal Kushwaha (Dev Rel Manager), spoke about a range of topics with the focus being on supporting the wider community. However, before we dive into how these talks can help strengthen the wider community, here are some of the other talks we loved during KubeCon:

Notes from the Field: A Discussion with the KubeVirt End Users

As part of a panel discussion hosted by KubeVirt maintainers, CTO Dinesh Majrekar, spoke about the best practices and challenges of running OpenSource in production.

This panel focused on communicating with the audience about how they can adapt their current usage to reflect the learnings found. Despite the different industries being discussed, each panel member was able to provide honest comments surrounding the current limitations of the project (such as RDA - the ability to de-allocate devices).

Chaos Engineering 2023 with Chaos Mesh

In the session from Saiyam Pathak, an introduction was given to Chaos Engineering and the Chaos Mesh project before outlining how they help organizations build resilient systems by proactively identifying and mitigating potential system failures.

Building the Framework of the Future with CNCF Students

Kunal Kushwaha and a virtual Mark Boost spent their talk addressing the CNCF Student initiative, which aims to help newcomers to the cloud-native world find mentors and contribute to open-source projects. As they both outlined the current challenges faced by the initiative, this session allowed them to showcase their mentor-mentee framework to help guide future students.

The hot topics of KubeCon EU 2023

You might've seen at previous KubeCon events that we brought our own rack to allow attendees to launch a cluster in our private KUBECON region. This year, we focused on the developments of Civo TV and showcased our cloud wall to outline some of the hot topics in talks given this year.

Chief Innovation Officer, Josh Mesout, joined us to highlight some of the work that the Civo team is doing and how we are putting machine learning to work:

Another year of Civo TV

Last year, we loved speaking to everyone at KubeCon about their experience and getting more insight into the hot topics from industry leaders. With videos on community and diversity, business value, and dev experience, you can catch up on some of the latest releases through our Civo TV playlist here.

The Civo team go to sea

It may not be possible to outline our KubeCon journey without mentioning the team that came along with us. Other than those that gave talks during the conference, Sophia McKee (Strategic Account Manager), Ricky Law (Marketing Manager), Bradley Forsdick (Customer Success Manager), Keiran O'Brien (PPC Marketing Executive), Harsh Thakur (Developer), and myself joined for a week of late nights at the after parties and several attempts at Fullstaq’s VR booth.

A lot of our team is based in the UK, making it a quick 45-minute plane ride to Amsterdam, allowing us to have high hopes for a successful trip back home. However, with a 7 pm flight booked out of Schiphol airport on Friday night, we didn’t expect to be sat on the runway at 9 pm being told that our flight had been canceled.

Given that we were already rushing out of Amsterdam that weekend along with 10,000 KubeCon attendees, we also had competition against Amsterdam's national holiday. This left us with few options for getting a flight back home that same weekend and instead left us with the option of jumping on a 7-hour ferry.

Wrapping up another KubeCon + CloudNativeCon

We look forward to seeing many of you again at KubeCon Chicago later this year. In the meantime, let us know your favorite moments from KubeCon Amsterdam on Twitter at @CivoCloud.

Join us at Civo Navigate Europe 2023

At our upcoming event, Civo Navigate, we hope to continue these conversations and create a space where people can learn how to leverage cloud native technologies. If you want to learn more about Civo Navigate and how to get involved, click here.