KubeCon Europe 2017: A Kubernetes Community Meeting
That’s a wrap, KubeCon Europe 2017Another successful CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe is in the books, and we want to extend a huge thanks to everyone who visited our booth and attended our talks. We love getting the chance to chat with...
That’s a wrap, KubeCon Europe 2017
Another successful CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe is in the books, and we want to extend a huge thanks to everyone who visited our booth and attended our talks. We love getting the chance to chat with open source and cloud native users in the Kubernetes community, along with those who are using Weave. Your feedback helps us improve Weave Cloud so you can create innovative software even faster.
In case you missed it, here are a few highlights from our trip to Berlin:
Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition
We kicked off the conference announcing the availability of Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition, marking a new chapter for Weaveworks. Introducing new deployment capabilities and enhanced levels of service, this new version enables enterprise deployments in the cloud, and on-site use of Weaveworks open source projects. You can try Weave Cloud free for 60 days.
Talks & Demos – Prometheus monitoring and cloud-native apps
To start day two, Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson delivered a keynote presentation about why cloud-native architectures are the future of containers. The short answer: speed, trust, and freedom. Read Diginomica’s summary of key takeaways.
David Kaltschmidt, Director of Software Engineering, UI/UX, discussed DIY user interfaces for Prometheus to a standing-room-only crowd. If you didn’t get to hear it live, you can view the slides from David’s presentation, Grafana is Not Enough.
@PrometheusIO room at #kubecon to small to hold the crowd for @davkals upcoming talk... /cc @weaveworks pic.twitter.com/PVK9r17T3o
— Tom Wilkie (@tom_wilkie) March 29, 2017
Tom Wilkie, Director of Software Engineering, discussed Prometheus monitoring on the client side. Check out the slides from his presentation here. But the Prometheus fun didn’t end with David and Tom’s presentations.
We used Weave Cortex to monitor the conference Wi-Fi
During CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe, we got to show off the power of Weave Cortex, our Prometheus service that is part of Weave Cloud. While the conference organizers were struggling to figure out how to get the monitoring data out from behind the venue’s firewall, Weave Cortex was an easy solution that took “twenty seconds” to set up. As high fidelity monitoring is the first step towards engineering reliability, we were happy to play our small part in enabling reliable Wi-Fi all conference long.
The data was scraped from the Cisco Wi-Fi equipment via Prometheus SNMP exporter using a Raspberry Pi. Since the device was behind the venue’s firewall, it was difficult to access from the internet to show people the finer details of the Wi-Fi usage. They would have had to add a special rule to the firewall. Because they used Cortex, they didn’t need this, as the Raspberry Pi could push the data (securely) to Weave Cloud, where we were able to show people all conference long on our monitor.
As you can see from the screenshot to the left, the naming scheme for Access Points included the floors of the conference venue. It was interesting to observe people on floor B going upstairs to floor C to hear closing keynotes, bringing their devices and still utilizing conference Wi-Fi.
Cubienetes
We’re just a little obsessed with Kubernetes on ARM and Raspberry Pi, and we’re not afraid to let it show. In fact, Tom Wilkie set up and deployed Docker to Cubieboard2s as a weekend project.Visit his Cubienetes GitHub to build your own.
Lucky for us, he brought it to KubeCon. Devices like this open up an entirely new set of possibilities for microservices. Read more about the advantages of setting up Weave Net on ARM here.
We love your feedback and questions
The best part about any conference is answering users’ question on the spot–not to mention getting honest, immediate feedback. No, it’s not just about the swag (though we think our t-shirts are pretty cool). Here, we want to spotlight some of the best questions and comments we received about Weaveworks during the show.
“Does Weave Cloud require that I use the Weave Network?”
No, it doesn’t. Weave Cloud allows you to work with your favorite networking tool. We’re not offended if it’s not us. But we do hope to change your mind.
“I really like the notebook for Prometheus idea, it’s a great way to document your monitoring incidents.”
We’re really proud of the strides we’ve made toward a horizontally scalable Prometheus. To get started on monitoring with Weave, check out our getting started guide.
“The tab-completion for promql is a life-saver, I can never remember the right labels.”
Neither can we. We seek to simplify first and foremost.
“Scope is just wonderful, you just drop the container in, and it shows you the whole system, it just works.”
That’s #BecauseWeaveWorks.
Thank you for reading our blog. We build Weave Cloud, which is a hosted add-on to your clusters. It helps you iterate faster on microservices with continuous delivery, visualization & debugging, and Prometheus monitoring to improve observability.
Try it out, join our online user group for free talks & trainings, and come and hang out with us on Slack.
