ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Hi, and welcome to the "Kubernetes" podcast from Google. I'm your host Abdel Sghiouar.

KASLIN FIELDS: And I'm Kaslin Fields.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: In this episode, we bring you with us to KubeCon EU 2023. We asked attendees about their impressions of the conference, and this is what they had to say.

KASLIN FIELDS: But first, let's get to the news.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Kubernetes SIG infrastructure announced that they are starting to migrate some CI jobs to AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service. The community received cloud credits from AWS last year and spent a couple of months extensively testing Prow, the Kubernetes CI/CD tool on EKS. The team is confident that the system is production-ready, and work is underway to move some jobs over to Amazon Web Services.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Kubernetes 1.26 is now generally available on GKE. GKE customers can now take advantage of the many new features in this exciting release. This release continues Google Cloud's goal of making Kubernetes releases available to Google customers within 30 days of the Kubernetes oasis release.

KASLIN FIELDS: Craig McLuckie, one of the co-creators of Kubernetes, and Luke Hinds, the founder of the sigstore project raised $17.5 million for their new startup Stacklock. The company aims to build tools and services that focus on software supply chain security.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Kubernetes SIG testing updated their end-to-end testing best practices. Patrick Ohly from Intel gave an interesting talk about the new challenges in the testing framework at KubeCon EU 2023. The link to the talk is in the show notes.

KASLIN FIELDS: Knative, the open source solution for building serverless and event-driven applications in Kubernetes environments, announced the release of version 1.10. The release brings a number of improvements to the core Knative serving and eventing components and several improvements to specific plugins. A link to more information is in the show notes.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: KubeDay Israel published the agenda for the conference. The event will take place this year on June 19 in Tel Aviv. This is the second KubeDay organized by the CNCF after Japan in 2022.

KubeDays, not to be confused with Kubernetes Community Days, which are typically run by local communities, are a new event series hosted by the CNCF and targeted towards specific geographical regions experiencing community expansion and interests.

KASLIN FIELDS: And that's the news.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the "Kubernetes" podcast by Google. I am your host, Abdel Sghiouar, live from KubeCon EU 2023. And I am here with--

ADNAN HODZIC: Adnan Hodzic or Hodzic. First of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Of course.

ADNAN HODZIC: I work as a lead side liability at ING as part of public cloud team as part of our data analytics platform here in Amsterdam.

ANISOARA-IONELA: Anisoara, and I'm a DevOps engineer.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Dominique Top, I'm a solutions architect at Gitlab-- a long time friend.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes, yes. I remember I gave you a T-shirt a few years back.

DOMINIQUE TOP: You did give me a T-shirt a few years back.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Do you still have it?

DOMINIQUE TOP: I do, but I don't fit in it anymore, because post-COVID, I've got a little bit of a--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: We all did.

DOMINIQUE TOP: A couple of COVID kilos to get rid of.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: We'll have to get you a bigger T-shirt.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right, cool. Sounds good.

DOMINIQUE TOP: If you have a bigger one, that would be helpful.

IXCHEL RUIZ: Ixchel Ruiz.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: What do you, Ixchel?

IXCHEL RUIZ: A developer advocate and senior software developer at JFrog.

LIAN LI: Hi, I'm Lian. I'm a developer advocate with Loft Labs, and we provide building blocks for platform engineers.

LIVIA-MARIA CIOBANU: I'm Livia, and I'm from XXXLdigital, which is a furniture company. I work in Barcelona, but my company is originally from Austria.

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: Marga Manterola, director of engineering at Isovalent.

MARK MANDEL: Mark Mandel, tech lead for developer relations for gaming at Google Cloud.

PETER O'NEILL: Peter O'Neill, from Styra.

WHITNEY LEE: Whitney Lee, I'm a developer advocate at VMware.

ZOE STEINKAMP: Zoe Steinkamp.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: What do you do, Zoe?

ZOE STEINKAMP: I'm a developer advocate at InfluxData.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: What I'm hoping to get out of this conference?

ADNAN HODZIC: I was getting to get a lot of answers, not only for us, what we could build as a platform, but what the whole ING could benefit either from Kubernetes, or using other solutions. And I got all my answers so far. So I really have a whole big to-do list that I want to talk to other teams, not just what I brought for my team, but also for other teams, so we can collaborate more, and that we can be more effective.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome.

ANISOARA-IONELA: To find out more about a Kubernetes-like ecosystem and the CNCF projects.

DOMINIQUE TOP: So first and foremost, I'm here on holiday.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh!

DOMINIQUE TOP: Me, and my partner, and one of my best friends, we always go to KubeCon just for the conference.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: For fun?

DOMINIQUE TOP: So yeah, the companies I have worked for usually have a booth, but I'm just here to enjoy the talks, see some friends, the people that are across the world I haven't seen in ages, learn new things, see what's going on, like all the new things that have been released in the CNCF landscape, and Kubernetes, and all that kind of good stuff.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Nice, nice.

IXCHEL RUIZ: OK. So, so many things. First of all, our foremost is networking, because after so long without having face-to-face activities, being in this huge conference, because the sheer amount of people that are here, it's amazing. So networking, go back to talk to people, listen to interesting conversations, be inspired, try new things, like review what is happening, and you see a lot of collaborations and new things between different projects.

LIAN LI: Meeting people, mainly, like really hanging out with all the lovely folks, like Abdel.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Thanks.

LIAN LI: Yeah, learning about new technologies, especially the open source project, or what's going on with the community.

LIVIA-MARIA CIOBANU: I was actually hoping to understand more of this cloud world, because, in fact, my position is a product manager, product owner, and I haven't been doing this cloud thing up until now. I was just a product person with feature-related teams. And now my team is called the cloud engineering team. And I really want to understand them better because I need to help them in a way.

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: Oh, I didn't have very high hopes, because I'm not like a huge fan of KubeCon. I find like it's like too big of an event for me. But yeah, I was mostly looking forward to having some interesting conversations. And I also had a presentation. So I was looking forward for my talk going well.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: How did it go?

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: It went fine, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome! So do you prefer Cloud Native Rejekts?

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: I do! I do actually prefer Cloud Native Rejekts because it's a smaller event--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome.

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: Where you have more of a chance to talk to people.

MARK MANDEL: I want to learn about new stuff that I don't normally have the time to look at. So I've been hanging out a lot at some WASM stuff, as well as a bunch of eBPF stuff.

PETER O'NEILL: I was hoping to reconnect with a lot of the people that I've met at previous KubeCons and try to deepen those relationships with them.

WHITNEY LEE: I had a very ambitious talk with Viktor Farcic. And honestly, what I was hoping for was to not crash and burn.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right.

WHITNEY LEE: Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: How did it go?

WHITNEY LEE: Actually, it was amazing. I guess with big risk comes big reward.

ZOE STEINKAMP: What I'm hoping to get out of this conference is I'm hoping to meet people who are looking not only for time series solutions for my company, but I also want to hear about some of the new things that are coming out in the Kubernetes, not only ecosystem, but sphere in general. And I just love learning about the new technologies that people are presenting here.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: What big trends are you seeing so far?

ADNAN HODZIC: AI, for sure.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK.

ADNAN HODZIC: So AI is a big thing. So that's what I noticed. I also think Kubernetes is gaining traction. I think cloud is also now becoming more prevalent. All the everything is happening with-- it's a weird market. Let's put it that way. Things are weird. Things are happening in the world. Because I was talking about this recently at internal events, and, for example, how AI and cloud go very hand in hand. So if we were evaluating some of those options that we should probably go the cloud way.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome.

ANISOARA-IONELA: A lot of CERN people.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: A lot of CERN people? Interesting.

ANISOARA-IONELA: Yes, yes. Like, I was looking at the schedule, and there were four presentations for keynotes or something, and they're like CERN, CERN, CERN, CERN. Yeah, it's a lot.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: It's interesting. It's interesting that Kubernetes is coming in the academic space, actually.

ANISOARA-IONELA: Yeah, it is.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK, cool.

ANISOARA-IONELA: Yeah. I was also at the presentation for the Blue Brain Project. It was interesting, but also, yes, academics.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK, cool.

DOMINIQUE TOP: That's a very good question. I mean, everybody is talking about ChatGPT. Almost everyone has even mentioned it, or wanting to-- but it has been a massive buzzword. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. I have opinions about AI.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Of course, everybody does.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Everybody. Let's not just make it into a ChatGPT talk. But AI is definitely emerging. Every single time I'm here, there's a lot of focus on security automation, I feel like, and also on the networking side of things. I saw a really good talk from Matt and Francesco earlier about the cloud native incident response.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK. Interesting.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Rather than having the security incident response, like they're proposing something a bit more from a cloud native perspective that was quite cool.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah?

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah. Again, like lots of, lots of shift left stuff.

IXCHEL RUIZ: Well, security, I see a lot of people asking questions about security, and not only that, they are vendors' projects are taking security more into account. Before, it was something that you thought like, let's review if what we have or where we are producing is acceptable. Now, it's like, no. Even before we start creating things, we need to know that we are doing the best practices, or we even certify, or check that our building blocks are OK.

LIAN LI: Definitely platform engineering. I feel like that's the hot topic for this Q1, specifically. There's a lot of buzz around eBPF, service mesh, so that's super exciting. And yeah, I saw like two ChatGPT startups around here as well.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Because why not?

LIAN LI: I think I've never seen a technology get adopted so quickly, like ChatGPT or chat bots. So I am very intrigued about all the use cases that we're trying to find. I will give it a couple of months maybe to see what actually makes it across the chasm.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Nice.

LIVIA-MARIA CIOBANU: Trends, like I noticed that there are so many platforms trying to help startups. Some of them more vocal, some of them less vocal. And I noticed, like just a joke, everyone has now socks instead of T-shirts. There are so many socks in the conference. I've already had like three pairs myself.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I mean, conference socks are the best.

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: I guess I did notice a lot of people talking about simplifying stuff. Yeah, I think I already noticed that last year. But maybe this year, it's even more pressing. When you look at the sponsors, most of the messaging that the sponsors give are around making things simple. And I agree that we should make things simple, but perhaps we should make them simple at the core, rather than relying on vendors to make them simple for us.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Interesting. OK. So I can assume you're not a big fan of platform engineering as a concept.

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: Oh, well, I mean, sure, no, I wouldn't say that. But I would like the work that platform engineers do to be simple, and let them have time to do more interesting work, and not busywork.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: That's a very interesting discussion. I've been having a conversation with Kelsey Hightower yesterday about this, about the fact that we want people to spend time on high value work--

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: Yes, exactly.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: --rather than complex work.

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: Exactly, exactly.

MARK MANDEL: There's a lot of different trends. I think it depends on what you're looking for. I am definitely seeing a lot of eBPF stuff. But I'm also looking for a lot of eBPF stuff, especially around the continuous profiling aspect and that's something I'm getting really excited about.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Nice. Is that part of the work you're doing with Agones and the gaming stuff?

MARK MANDEL: Yes. I mean, I think it's more broadly generally usable, but also, yes. With the gaming stuff, I've seen some stuff where people are doing continuous profiling of their game server workloads, which are usually highly compute-like optimized, and very compute heavy. Being able to do that in production, live, constantly with low overhead is super useful.

PETER O'NEILL: This year, I saw a lot of trends where people are trying to introduce policy into the tools that they're using. So they're trying to integrate tools like Open Policy Agent into their tool so they can add more granularity into their authorization.

WHITNEY LEE: Here's my story is that I'm a pretty new learner. So I'm maybe still getting my feel for the landscape period as opposed to like being in touch with trends. And I'm also really feeling like meeting people, and kindness, and building community is where my focus is as opposed to tech trends. So of course, the platform thing everyone's talking about.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Of course.

WHITNEY LEE: Of course. I hear a lot of eBPF, even though I don't know what it is yet. Although, I learned a little bit in Catherine's talk today.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I don't think no one knows what it is.

[LAUGHTER]

WHITNEY LEE: That makes me feel better.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I still don't know what it is.

WHITNEY LEE: It's funny. As a new person, you feel like-- you kind of assume that everyone knows everything that you don't know, and then once you get in a little bit, you realize, oh, yeah, most people don't know most things.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Exactly, exactly.

ZOE STEINKAMP: I'm seeing a lot of trends about monitoring. A lot of people are starting to really ask the questions about, how do I monitor appropriately? I have all this data. I have all these random people telling me all these random things I need to watch. But they really just want a straightforward path. They just want a straightforward answer. And they just want to make sure that they're doing the best not only for their jobs and themselves, but their companies.

People are tired of the fire hailstorm that happens when things go wrong. And they just want things to be more calm at their companies in general. No SRE team wants to have an on call every single fire, every single day, you know?

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Of course.

What is your favorite thing you have learned so far?

ADNAN HODZIC: Well, I learned-- it was on a pre-KubeCon event at the Google office. I learned some cool things, for example, that were happening with Anthos. So that was a big finding for me. But it's the third day. So I need to recompile--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: You're still processing.

ADNAN HODZIC: Yeah, I need to process everything that happened. But there's a lot of things that I learned. So I need to process it.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome.

ANISOARA-IONELA: So I learned there was this workshop kind of training that was choose your own adventure. And it was like find out more about what projects you can use for different purposes. And I loved that. It was an introduction to all the stuff that you can use at different steps, and I loved that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Usually, the pre-fun is always like the hype. So where am I going to go to? Which parties am I going to attend? Who am I going to see? Like, trying to meet up with people.

I've been saying this to a bunch of people, but the talk from Joe Irving, who works at Playstation, that was really cool. That was one of my favorite talks so far. It's like running a real-time game server using that tool Ogolar--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Agones?

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah, yes!

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, yeah, that's a Google project.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah, yeah. So he was-- yes. So he was talking about that, and how that kind of works. I thought that was massively interesting, mostly because when you're playing a video game and trying to load into the same game with a bunch of people, and then--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, the matchmaking thing.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah, like knowing the technology behind it and how it's being improved using a Kubernetes-based game server software was just kind of like, OK, this is kind of cool.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Especially if you're a gamer, right?

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah. I have a lot more respect for the devs now. It's like every time I've been kicked out of the server, it's like, ah, damn it!

[LAUGHTER]

A bit of hangups for the engineers on the back side.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. I've seen a lot of people with Agones T-shirts, and there are actually a lot of gaming focused talks at this conference. It's one of the new things, I think, this year that I haven't seen before at KubeCon.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. There's another talk from Ubisoft, I think.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, yeah.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah, yeah. So that's a--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Cool.

DOMINIQUE TOP: I think that's an interesting development.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, yeah. I mean, every year there is always a trend.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah, there is.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So last year, it was eBPF.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And at some point, it was like some sort of fin ops was a big one, I think, years ago. So I think maybe this year it's probably gaming, WASM, and the security stuff.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yes, exactly. That WASM has been a trend for a while now. There's always like a little niche corner going like, WASM, this and that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Everybody wants to do WASM these days.

IXCHEL RUIZ: Favorite thing so far-- oh my god, let me see. I like the exhibition hall because it's actually a really good place where you can talk to people, see what the vendors are doing. The sessions at the meeting rooms have also been really interesting. There's different things happening. Even in the exhibition hall, you have like panels. You have interviews. So you can go and walk and still listen to the speakers having a different kind of conversations with the attendees. So a lot of things are happening here.

LIAN LI: I learned a lot about GitOps because I've been working with the TAG App Delivery, and I've been hanging out in their booth a lot. And they had a couple of lightning talks about app delivery, and how to manage the life cycle. So that was super cool. But I'm going to be honest, I have seen like two lightning talks so far, because--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: They're going to be on YouTube.

LIAN LI: It's just busy. And I'm not here for the talks mainly. I'm really here just to hang out with people and to learn from them, and conversation.

LIVIA-MARIA CIOBANU: Actually, I learned that it's not that complicated, because I attended a lot of the talks. Today less, but in the previous two days, a lot of them. And it's opened my taste to actually go myself online and understand even more. So it's been like an eye-opener or a stomach opener. I don't know how to say it.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: An eye-opening experience.

LIVIA-MARIA CIOBANU: Exactly, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome, awesome.

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: Yeah, it's neither cloud native nor Kubernetes-specific. I would say that the most valuable resource that we have is our time, and then choosing how and with whom we spend our time is the most important choice in our life.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: That's very wise.

[LAUGHTER]

MARK MANDEL: The coolest thing I've learned so far is the talk that was given by Playstation talking about how they're using Agones, because I work on Agones.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And you thought that was cool?

MARK MANDEL: PlayStation is using it, and that is cool. So I can't complain.

PETER O'NEILL: My favorite thing-- oh, man, that's such an interesting question. And I think probably my favorite thing is just like how much the community is expanding, like even in the short time that I've been in the CNCF, it's just gotten so big.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah.

WHITNEY LEE: So I did a lot. I did some booth duty yesterday. And I actually worked the Buildpacks booth. And so they're maintainers at the Buildpack's booth. And I know Buildpacks at a 101 level. I talk about them a little bit in my talk. But I don't really get in deep with them. I know some things about containers and not a ton. And coming back to you, you kind of assume everyone knows everything that you don't know.

So going into booth duty at the Buildpacks booth, I was feeling very afraid, like I wouldn't be adequate. But at least I knew there'd be maintainers next to me. And then after like a little bit of time, at first, I was kind of shy, hanging in the back. And then after a little time, I was like, yeah, OK, I know this stuff. And then by the end, I was like power posing in the front, like, come on!

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: You were an expert.

WHITNEY LEE: Yeah! Talk to me about Buildpacks. Let's do this!

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome.

WHITNEY LEE: Yeah, I was having so much fun.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome.

ZOE STEINKAMP: So as somebody who's working the booth here, it's been a lot of fun in that a lot of people have come by to tell me their favorite booth swag and their favorite LEGO sets that they can win here. I swear people are going shopping for LEGO sets here.

There's a few booths right now who are running-- what's the word? Not quite a bet, but a gamble on what is going to be the most popular LEGO set that gets the most amount of people in front of it. It's just a fun thing to talk about when you're at this event, which, obviously, it's serious. We're talking about Kubernetes. We're talking about this fun tech stuff. But it's hilarious to talk about the LEGO sets everywhere.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I love LEGO. I mean swag is a part of why you go for a conference.

ZOE STEINKAMP: It's definitely a thing, where like people love the swag here. They want the socks. They want the LEGOs. And as a booth person, you kind of have to take it in stride, and you're like, yeah, I'm somewhat here to give away stickers and socks. But also, like let's talk about the LEGOs, guys, because there's some ridiculously expensive, nice ones here. So that's also why we're talking about it.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. There are a lot of companies willing to spend money on this stuff.

[LAUGHTER]

What would you like to see at a future KubeCon?

ADNAN HODZIC: I would like to see more attendees. For example, so I had a problem where, for my talk, not everybody could even get into the talk, which I found out about later, because, initially, I was like, everyone was there. But then I was trying to get in. So that would be good, because I think it's a growing community. So I think more and more people want to get involved. I would just like to see more people get engaged.

And also, how we, as participants-- what I did last night, I was standing in line for a beer, and while I'm waiting with some random person, I said, while we're waiting, why don't we just meet each other, right?

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah.

ADNAN HODZIC: And we started talking. And you get to meet a person. And it's a whole new thing.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ADNAN HODZIC: So I think that would be nice, that I would like to see, just for KubeCon to keep growing, which it will. It's inevitable, right?

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Of course, yeah.

ADNAN HODZIC: But just so more people get to experience it.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Well, they have announced that Paris, they are expecting it to be bigger than Amsterdam.

ADNAN HODZIC: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: This is the biggest edition in Europe so far.

ADNAN HODZIC: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So I'm looking forward to next year.

ADNAN HODZIC: I'm also definitely looking forward to Paris.

ANISOARA-IONELA: You know, there's more swag diversity. There's too many T-shirts. Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: You want to see less T-shirts?

ANISOARA-IONELA: Yeah, like more swag diversity, like-- I don't know-- something else besides T-shirts. It's too many T-shirts.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK, something else besides T-shirts.

DOMINIQUE TOP: So my usual response would be a dedicated Kuberoke event, or like a karaoke event.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh!

DOMINIQUE TOP: But there was one this year organized, by Lian and a bunch of other people.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes!

DOMINIQUE TOP: However, and this is something that I've been very bummed out about, I love singing, and I love karaoke. And usually, whenever I go to a conference, I'm mostly the chief instigator when it comes to finding a karaoke place. So usually, my response would be like an actual community organized, proper karaoke thing.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK.

DOMINIQUE TOP: But I was so-- like my timings and my schedule last night didn't work the way it was planned, so I didn't actually make it, and I'm so upset about that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: You're upset.

DOMINIQUE TOP: So in that sense, I think the conference itself is always great. I feel like the talks are really interesting. I did actually struggle getting into some of them because there wasn't enough space. And yeah, I don't know. I think in a sense, I feel like Kubernetes, or like the KubeCons have been gradually improving. I feel like the sponsor area is always very considerate or intentional. Whereas other sort of trade shows, you get to conferences, you see like loads of companies like, "Why are you here?" But I feel-- yeah.

Like, I didn't expect this company to even feel like they needed to have a booth somewhere at a conference. But yeah, I feel like all of the stuff that I've seen so far from a sponsor perspective has been very interesting. I've seen a couple of demos where it's was like, OK, this is--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Nice.

DOMINIQUE TOP: --actually interesting to see if I can get my hands on that. And other stuff that I would like to see is-- yeah, I have probably even more of a focus on more like the underrepresented groups sessions. There was like a diversity lunch, I think, or an inclusivity lunch. But where was I for this? I think it was DockerCon, or something.

There are very, very specific inclusivity groups that will meet up that they might have. I've not been invited to any of them this year. So if they are there, there may be a bit more promotion for it. But yeah, it's always good to see or try to hang out with people who look like me.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah.

DOMINIQUE TOP: So it's always one of those things where I feel like that's always one of the things I'd like to see more of, basically.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So last year at KubeCon Detroit, we were interviewing people at the show. And we had somebody-- I forgot the name-- somebody saying, there's always too much alcohol. It would be nice if we have boba tea. And the joke at the time--

DOMINIQUE TOP: Sig boba.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: --was sig boba.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah!

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: That actually started at the show, at the "Kubernetes" podcast show. And it happened this year. There was like one on Tuesday. They did a boba tea party, right?

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah, I saw that on Twitter!

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So maybe this will be the beginning of sig karaoke next year.

DOMINIQUE TOP: Yeah, maybe. Sig karaoke, I think I can probably wrangle some people.

[LAUGHTER]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Now, we want to have a history of kicking off efforts. That's what I'm trying to get--

DOMINIQUE TOP: All right! You heard it here first, folks.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right, it sounds good.

IXCHEL RUIZ: I don't know. Probably-- and what we are missing is we have a lot of the projects, open source projects here. Yes, part of the CNCF, et cetera, et cetera. And you can see that people are talking about them, but not actually coding on them--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh, I see.

IXCHEL RUIZ: --around here. And you have the project leaders here.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I see. So more hands-on stuff?

IXCHEL RUIZ: Yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh! Well, they had the workshop yesterday, but I don't know how much the projects are covered.

IXCHEL RUIZ: No, no, no! But imagine that they have this like--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Like hands-on lab type thing?

IXCHEL RUIZ: Live coding.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh, yeah.

IXCHEL RUIZ: Like, can you imagine they have this huge screen with the code, and suddenly like keyboards, and then you decide how we should do this. And having people like, yes, we should do this.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, that would be awesome.

IXCHEL RUIZ: Imagine that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, that would be great.

IXCHEL RUIZ: I would like scream.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: If somebody from the CNCF is listening to this, this is good--

IXCHEL RUIZ: Yes! Like, honestly, going through the entire workflow, checker PR, like open issue, select an open issue.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: What contributor they are.

IXCHEL RUIZ: Yes!

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, I love that. Awesome.

IXCHEL RUIZ: And they can totally plan one for this event.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. We were talking with Kathleen a few days ago about the-- they stopped doing the workshops at the contributor summit. That's what they used to do actually before, which, during the contributor summit, they would do a workshop where they would invite people to select their first issue and submit their first PR. But now it's an online training.

IXCHEL RUIZ: But it's-- you're losing the here--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Engagement.

IXCHEL RUIZ: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like let's show code on a very big screen

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right, that sounds good. I think we should probably tell the CNCF to do it next time.

IXCHEL RUIZ: Yes! Like, imagine you have a cube of televisions, big televisions, around with two stations. You have two keyboards in each station. And you have-- yeah, yeah, yeah.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: That would be awesome.

IXCHEL RUIZ: And then the project lead walking around--

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: That would be awesome.

IXCHEL RUIZ: --and answering questions.

LIAN LI: What I would really love is-- and this is something we discussed, actually-- to do like a walking tour of the city where we just eat little snacks everywhere, just like because I love food, and I love to discover restaurants, and those hidden gems.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes.

LIAN LI: So I think that would be super cool, if we just had like food stands and we just like walked from one to the other. I don't know if that works for NA, though, because in Europe, everything is super walkable, usually.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes.

LIAN LI: But yeah, North American cities, not that much.

LIVIA-MARIA CIOBANU: More companies from my country.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK. Which is?

LIVIA-MARIA CIOBANU: Which is Romania.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right.

LIVIA-MARIA CIOBANU: I'm taking so many pictures and sending them home to my friends, because they are really cloud enthusiasts. I would love them to be able to join next time. Not in the one in the States, but the one in Paris next year, maybe.

MARGARITA MANTEROLA: I guess can say what I would like to see more is more community-driven work, not so much sponsor-driven work. I mean, we rely on our sponsors to pay our salaries and to have money to do stuff. But I think it's really important that we foster the community, and that we let the community lead, rather than the vendors lead.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome.

MARK MANDEL: More people. I always like to see more people. But I can't complain. What are we? 10,000 odd people here. Yeah, exactly. It's amazing to see the community that forms around open source communities. And always more people is generally better, and so having more people involved. Although, if people are interested, if we wanted to do an Agones meetup at a KubeCon one year, people who came, drop me a line, and let me know. Maybe that's something we could do one year.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right, we have a history in this podcast. We talk about things, and they just happen.

MARK MANDEL: OK!

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Last year we talked about boba tea, and there was a sig boba tea this year.

MARK MANDEL: That makes sense.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And then we talked earlier about karaoke.

MARK MANDEL: Oh!

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And we mentioned maybe there will be a sig karaoke.

MARK MANDEL: Yes!

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So maybe now we're looking at sig--

MARK MANDEL: Karaoke-- the sig Agones. I would also be down for like scones and jam and tea, like if somebody wants to do that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh, that's so British of you.

MARK MANDEL: Yes! Growing up with British parents, like if we wanted to do that, I would definitely be down for that as well. So all of these things sound fantastic, as far as I'm concerned.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: All right, sounds good. We'll see how it goes.

PETER O'NEILL: I would love to see more interactive ways for contributors to get kind of hands on with the individual tools here. I feel like there's a lot of things we kind of explain and teach, but I wish that they had more things that you get physically hands on with.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK, awesome.

WHITNEY LEE: Here's another thing I have to say about me. This is my fourth KubeCon ever.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK.

WHITNEY LEE: Yeah, so I'm brand new. So I can say one thing that I loved about this KubeCon is the natural light in the expo hall.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh, yeah.

WHITNEY LEE: Like, I could be here all day.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: The expo hall is awesome.

WHITNEY LEE: Yes. And really enjoy it, because I felt more like I was outside or something. When it's super dark for a long time, I get pretty tweaked out by the end.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah.

ZOE STEINKAMP: I feel like KubeCon is doing a really good job. I don't have a ton of complaints about the way the conference is set up. I saw a lot of interesting talks that were going, not only about Kubernetes, funnily enough, but a few other technologies as well. And I think, in general, I'd like to see more-- what's the word-- lightning type talks.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Uh-huh.

ZOE STEINKAMP: Yeah. I feel like there's not a good spot for that here. Some of the booths have a space where they do lightning talks. But I would love it if there was a more open space where you could do lightning talks from not just people who are sponsoring, but also non-sponsors as well, kind of like a-- I've seen it at other conferences, where it's like an open platform, an open hour almost, where random-- I don't want to say random, but attendees and sponsors can come up for like 5 or 10 minutes and talk.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And talk about about something else.

ZOE STEINKAMP: And it's not necessarily prerecorded. It's not written down. But it's just kind of like a free for all almost. I've seen it a lot at the DevOps days. They don't call it unconference, but they do call it like a free conference, or like they try to call it community conference almost. And it allows people who are working more on like open source projects or mini projects to kind of come up and be like, look at my mini project that I've done.

Or a company can be like, look at this very specific tool we built that's awesome, but it wasn't something that we wanted to talk about for 30 minutes. It's not even something that's demoable sometimes at a booth, but it's fun to talk about regardless.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Awesome! All right, well, thank you very much for being with us.

ZOE STEINKAMP: Of course, it was a very, very fun interview.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Thank you.

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