KubeCon North America - leaving 2018 with a bang!

By Sonja Schweigert
December 20, 2018

It’s the most wonderful time of the year - at least for us here at Weaveworks! KubeCon North America is usually the last event of the year for us and again it didn’t disappoint. With a massive attendance of 8,000 attendees, KubeCon has...

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year - at least for us here at Weaveworks!

KubeCon North America is usually the last event of the year for us and again it didn’t disappoint. With a massive attendance of 8,000 attendees, KubeCon has doubled numbers from 2017 in Austin; It clearly demonstrates the exponential growth and interest in Kubernetes and its ecosystem.

At this point it is probably safe to say that Kubernetes is officially leaping over the chasm and we are excited to share and educate teams on modern best practices on operating Kubernetes. One set of best practices is GitOp, a concept we introduced in 2017 and has since found many adopters. A total of 7 talks describing and working with the concept “operations by pull request”, made it on the agenda.

But back to a quick recap on what happened in Seattle last week.

Workshops - practical & hands on

Monday was dedicated to hands on training, labs and workshops. In our hands-on workshop “Path to production ready Kubernetes” we shared our expertise as users and contributors of Kubernetes and Prometheus, as well as followers of GitOps (operations by pull request). Our customer success engineers Craig and Brice spent time on topics such as developing and operating microservices at scale, DevOps best practices and building and operating with Kubernetes in production. A few topics that were discussed in detail were: implementing CI/CD best practices, monitoring tools and automated alerts, upgrading and managing Kubernetes as well as incident response.

Our guest speaker this time was Jeremy Adams from Twistlock who focused on security best practices with Kubernetes.

If you or your team are interested in joining us for a workshop or have specific training needs for Kubernetes, Prometheus and related cloud native applications to build your stack, contact us for dates.

We continued focusing on hands on work with a 1.5 hour session “Hands-on GitOps”. Brice walked the audience through setting up and using a Gitops pipeline to manage a Kubernetes cluster, which included setting up monitoring and metric visualization as well as managing the monitoring configuration using Gitops.

View the full recording on youtube: Tutorial: Hands-on GitOps.

Chick-fil-A Uses Kubernetes and GitOps at the Edge

Sean Drucker from Chick-fil-A and Alexis Richardson, CEO of WeaveWorks, gave a joint talk on “Managing fleets of Kubernetes Clusters with GitOps”. The session focused on examples from both companies and their production experience of running thousands of Kubernetes clusters.

"This is part of DevOps, this is about developers being put in control of operations. We're in a world of automation and description of systems, and we can use those descriptions to power automation in the form of Kubernetes orchestrators." Alexis Richardson

Watch the full talk on youtube.

Actionable Monitoring with Prometheus

Elena gave an overview of common caveats of using labels in alerts and demonstrate some technics how to get concise and easy to understand notifications. Watch the video recording here or read Elena's blog post.

Bryan provides an overview of Cortex, a CNCF Sandbox project, which takes metrics from multiple Prometheus instances and stores them in a NoSQL database. Watch the recording Cortex - Infinitely Scalable Prometheus.

And that’s a wrap - see you next time!

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