Gdańsk Kubernetes Meetup #6

One of the best meetups I have attended!

Kubernetes and DevOps theme are very close to my interests, so it’s not a surprise that I wanted to attend Kubernetes Meetup for a long while. Unfortunately, due to my studies and busy schedule, I were unable to do so 😢. As soon as I have heared that there is going to be one and I realised that I have that evening free, I knew that I had to attend it!

A grain of salt

One tiny thing that I found weird and didn’t really enjoy, was the fact that the number of attendees was quite limited. In comparison to other meetups organised in Dynatrace’s DevHub, the number of slots was limited to 85 which filled up quite quickly. Unfortunately, not everyone that I knew wanted to attend, were able to do so. Personally I think it would be better, if it was possible to extend the number of slots but I understand that not every decision is up to the organisers.

Presentations

During meetup there were 3 presentations given:

• I’ll teach you Kubernetes by reading Go. And I’ll teach you Go by reading Kubernetes by Aleksander Wielgórski
• Lighting Talk: The Myth of Two Pizzas. Scaling up Kubernetes Team by Tomasz Gajger and Tomasz Puchaczewski (Dynatrace)
• Fun with Flags: Bringing the Fun Back into Feature Flagging with OpenFeature CNCF project by Simon Schrottner (Dynatrace)

First one was about reading Go language from the perspective of Kubernetes operator and how easy it is to jump straight into it. The presentation was one of the best I have ever seen, when it comes to the way of presenting the topic and humour. Despite being quite lengthy, the presenter made sure that everyone was listening closly due to his charisma and great jokes. The topic was not very technical, but it gave an interesting perspective to reading open-source code and offered (me) quite a lot of motivation when it comes to expanding one’s knowledge and reaching for more difficult sources of knowledge. It showed that despite the first hurdles, it is quite possible to read and even understand Kubernetes’es source code and that you can gain quite a lot of knowledge, about it’s architecture and distributed app design process, while doing so. For me it was one of the best presentations I have ever seen and I hope to see the next presentations given by the same host!

Second talk was focused on Meetup host’s, their team in Dynatrace and how they work. Despite how much it seemed like an advertisment for the company, the talk was also very interesting and gave a lot of knowledge how working in a bigger company might look like. Overall despite a lack of any new technical knowledge I think the presentation was quite nice and the hosts were a very good speakers.

Last talk was just OK. There were some technical difficulties with connection to the remote speaker but despite that the presentation was quite good. The topic was quite interesting but, for me, there was too little DevOps focus on the discussed technology. The presentation was given from the backend developer perspective (which I am) and the technology (OpenFeature) seemed interesting but in comparison to the previous talks it just wasn’t as interesting. Overall I think that the presentation suffered from the success of 2 other talks and technical issues. Additionally being the last presentation before pizza, always make it harder to focus 😆.

Summary

Overall, I really enjoyed the meetup. I regret not integrating more with people who I didn’t know before the meetup, but it’s something to focus on during the next meetups! The presentations were interesting, the pizza and beverages were really good and overall climat was excellent. If you like Kubernetes and/or DevOps, I strongly suggest going and checking it out yourself!