What’s Hot at KubeCon EU 2024

Hello readers! Aiven and I will be at KubeCon EU 2024 in Paris, France. This is Aiven's first time at KubeCon, but not mine: in addition to my role as VP of Product Management at Aiven, I'm a longtime contributor to the CNCF ecosystem. Here are the activities I am most looking forward to at Kubecon in Paris, aside from the excellent wine, bread, and pastries which are in my future. Furthermore, I have been hitting the gym hard in preparation.

March 19: The conference before the conference

KubeCon is renowned for its proliferation of co-located events; however, this year there are new entrants! This will be the first time ThanosCon is run, and my esteemed colleague and Thanos maintainer Michael Hoffman, who is a senior SRE at Aiven is one of the organizers.

I’m looking forward to the following sessions at ThanosCon:

• Scaling Thanos at Reddit for a hands-on case study of Thanos at a massive scale
• A talk on multi-threaded Thanos from the folks at Red Hat

In addition to attending ThanosCon, I’ll be jumping around to the following co-located events:

• AppDeveloperCon to learn more about the application developer ecosystem, as this is an area of research and development for us at Aiven in the product management team.
• BackstageCon as we have been conducting discovery on the requirements from customers to build an Aiven plugin. Aiven’s product roadmap is public and you can vote for this idea if you are interested, or get in touch with me directly.
• There are also lightning talks on the 19th scheduled. I will be attending some of these, for example Aiven customer OVO energy's talk on platform engineering.

Where to find Aiveners

The Aiven booth is at J36 in the expo hall, there you’ll find members of Aiven’s developer relations team (Celeste Horgan & Sebastian Blanc), myself, and members of our sales and marketing teams to show you a quick demo or generally talk data!

In the morning after the keynote, I will be bouncing between the Jaeger project booth in the CNCF project pavilion, the OpenSearch booth, and of course, the Aiven booth. Celeste and Sebastian will also be at the booth during the week.

Fellow Aiven cast member Celeste Horgan will be at the Kubernetes Contributor Summit on March 19th running the docs sprint. Say hello and learn how to do open source documentation!

Talks from Aiven cast members

Aiven cast members (including myself) are giving two talks at KubeCon EU 2024:

• On March 20 (Wednesday) 12:20 in Pavilion 7 I’ll be giving a maintainer track talk: Jaeger: Distributed Tracing with Jaeger and OpenTelemetry with Pavol Loffay from Red Hat. We’ll be giving the project updates and what’s new with Jaeger and distributed tracing, so please register and stop by. We already have 200 people registered already, so be sure to register before attending!
• Later that day at 17:25, Aivener and Site Reliability Engineer Micheal Hoffman will be co-presenting with Giedrius Statkevičius, Site Reliability Engineer at Vinted, on Thanos query processing: From UI to Storage: Unraveling the Magic of Thanos Query Processing.

Other talks to watch

KubeCon is a massive conference with multiple tracks, but here are some selections from the Data, AI, observability and related tracks!

Wednesday, March 20:

• The opening keynotes promise to be fantastic this year, as Kubernetes celebrates its 10-year anniversary. In particular. Expect to hear from Kelsey Hightower, who we were fortunate enough to host at Aiven Live NYC in late February. Here at Aiven we’re looking forward to Optimizing Performance and Sustainability for AI, as it dovetails nicely with our commitments to sustainability as a company and, of course, the data and AI angle.
• As mentioned above, my talk on Jaeger and Micheal’s talk on Thanos!

Thursday, March 21:

• March 21st I am eagerly awaiting Taylor Dozeal's keynote on the end user community to hear how the ecosystem is evolving and some new highlights to pay attention to across the community.
• I will then be attending the session on running Flink on Kubernetes at 11:55am by CNRS looking to learn more about some end user challenges with Flink. Our colleagues at Aiven will be at the Kafka summit in the same week as Kubecon, getting a lot of in-depth information on Kafka and Flink.
• At 2:30pm I will attend the session on intelligent observability by Alolita Sharma of Apple, who is one of the people I enjoy working with in CNCF end user projects along with within OpenTelemetry.
• I will also attend the Prometheus maintainer talk at 5:25pm to learn what’s new that we can use to help advise customers on improving observability with our Prometheus compatible services. We will also get some insights to the roadmap and what we can look forward to.
• The ClickHouse team is giving a talk titled Fantastic Ordinals and How to Avoid Them: Auto-Scaling Challenges in a Cloud Database which should prove interesting for those interested in scaling ML/AI workloads.
• Kubernetes maintainer and Googler Bob Killen will also be giving a talk on the business value of open source and how to communicate it which should prove useful for those leading open source product teams!

Friday, March 22nd:

• On Friday, I’m eagerly awaiting Thanos’ Infinity Stones and How You Can Operate Them! From Red Hatters Saswata Mukherjee & Daniel Mohr. This talk promises to teach us some of the more advanced ways to use and optimize Thanos for metrics.
• If you have time, I would check out this Thanos talk on additional use cases in the community or this session on managing large scale AI training off a LakeHouse at LinkedIn.
• I will also be attending the Contribfest for Jaeger where we will work on Jaeger v2 with Jaeger maintainer Pavol Loffay.
• I am always keen to hear what the team working on Fluent Bit are working on and my friend Eduardo Silva will share what is cooking with Fluent Bit v3 in the last session of the week.

One last thing

We’re proud to announce that Aiven is a Silver Tier sponsor at this year’s KubeCon EU 2024. We’re proud to support the cloud native community and keep open source projects vibrant and active.

At Aiven we’re heavy users of open source technologies to drive our observability pipelines, between our use of Thanos, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, Kafka, Flink, and Vector we are constantly looking for new technologies. KubeCon EU 2024 marks Aiven’s first foray on the show floor as a sponsor, but we hope to see you at KubeCon NA 2024, November 12-15 in Salt Lake City, and in the years to come!

Please reach out to me to book time to connect or come by our booth. A reminder that our booth is J36, or book a meeting with our team!