My KubeCon Experience

My KubeCon Experience

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Introduction

Hello, I am Tarun Chawla, am currently pursuing my Master's Degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken. My background is in Software Engineering. This is going to be my first-ever blog walking you through my KubeCon Experience. Let's Go!! ๐Ÿ˜

All of this started on 23rd August, when Kunal Kushwaha messaged me saying that, you have won the Travel Scholarship for KubeCon North America 2022. I will be sharing some tips on how to apply for these scholarships towards the end of the blog.

Day 1 - 24th October, 2022

The first day starts with a lot of excitement and great number of co-located events to be a part of. I started by going through a beginner-friendly session on Learning about Kubernetes by KubeCampus

They started KubeCampus last year because they saw that so many people are struggling to get the proper resources to learn about Kubernetes. It started as Learning.Kasten.io then they renamed it as KubeCampus.

Kasten solves three major challenges:

  1. Backup & Restore
  2. Disaster Recovery
  3. Application Mobility

There is a significant increase in the adoption towards Cloud Native Development, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery. There is high demand among people to learn about Kubernetes. They saw over 65% attendees are first-timers for KubeCon EU, and more than 70% attendees are first-timers for KubeCon NA. Which signifies that community is growing at a high rate.

Some of the challenges faced by Kasten are:

  1. Complexity
  2. Cultural Change - From Traditional IT Solutions to DevOps
  3. Lack of Training

Community Resources:

  1. Kubernetes Korner
  2. Kanister
  3. Kubestr

They rolled out two new labs on their website:

  1. Rookie Lab - For Complete Beginners
  2. Pro Lab - For Experienced Professionals

I attended one more co-located event by Amazon which was a Technical deep dive into Serverless Containers with Amazon ECS. Before getting into the topic, for people who are new to DevOps let's discuss what Containers are?

A container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. --Docker

In simple words, suppose you made delicious Spaghetti and you want to share it with your friend who lives in Australia. There is not option, where the Spaghetti can be delivered to his house. But, you can share the recipe with your friend which contains every minute details like you have to boil the Spaghetti at 100ยฐC for 10 mins, use 4 slices of cheddar cheese. With the similar analogy, suppose you completed a Full-Stack application in React, NodeJS. Your friend wants to test this application in his computer. You can share the Container Image which will contain the application code, all the dependencies required to run the application. Container Images have a Dockerfile which is a detailed recipe to run the application.

Let's dive into the event, Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) powers Amazon Web Services (AWS). Whenever AWS gets launched in a new region, first ECS service is launched then AWS launches new services into that region. You can build application in 30 minutes instead of 6 Weeks using Amazon & Fargate. Fargate launch type is used to run the containerized application without the need to provision and manage the backend infrastructure. This provides a Serverless approach, as there is no need for managing, patching, security.

Development-Cycle.png

This is the development operations cycle known as DevOps. Moreover, Amazon ECS has built-in Application Load Balance (ALB) for advanced path routing to a target group within specific launch type, and it has Cluster Auto Scaling (CAS).

For using Amazon ECS you have to know about VPC subnets, load balancers, deployment pipelines, reliable storage. If you are just concerned with deploying your application, then Amazon Copilot is the best option because it handles everything in the background. It is a CLI application where you just have to provide the container, it can even create a deployment pipeline, where it will automatically redeploy the latest version of the application every time you make a new commit to your code repository. You can head over to the following public repo where you can get started with Amazon Copilot.

https://github.com/aws-ia/terraform-aws-ecs-blueprints

I would highly recommend you to check out ecsworkshop.com.

Day 2 - 25th October, 2022

The second day started with a co-located event, Chaos Day where they mentioned the Challenges practical problems faced in the Production like:

  1. Dependency
    • Scarcity
    • Exit Risk
    • Burnout
  2. Business Impacts

Even though some tools resolve the problem, yet the solution was not scalable. Litmus is a famous open source tools used for Chaos Engineering. It is an Automated Chaos Engineering where it handles,

  1. Code Change
  2. Load Simulation
  3. Chaos Playback - Experiments
  4. Observability / Evaluate
  5. Pass / Fail Change Automation

Benefits of using Litmus is, it reduces future incidents to the system or environment faults.

There is another event which I attended by Yugabyte on Distributed SQL. It is an Open Source Organization focuses on Infrastructure Modernization, Application Modernization. The databases present today brings a trade-off of not having relational indexes. Yugabyte is like a regular SQL, but behind the scene storage and relational querying are distributed among clusters. It provides best of both worlds, which makes it truly versatile, and works perfectly with transactional data. Here are two main advantages of using Yugabyte:

  • Resilience & Continuous Availability
  • Horizontal Scaling

This database has close to zero downtime:

  • Provides Sync/Async replication between two clusters between regions/zones.
  • Workloads exist in Massive & Small Tables, Public & Private Cloud, SQL & NoSQL access.
  • Scaling of application is often unpredictable where Horizontal Scaling is utilized.

Yugabyte is an Open-Source software, fully managed Dbaas, you can customize Dbaas according to your needs. It is one of the fastest rising databases in the world.

Here is the anatomy of a Distributed SQL, Distributing data from Horizontal Scaling, where they take care of the sharding from user tables to tablets. The replication is done through Raft Consensus Algorithm which uses leader and follower methodology, which is also used by another popular Distributed SQL database, Cockroach DB. Yugabyte tolerates Node outages, supports Row-level geo-partitioning.

I attended an amazing workshop on Resume Writing from Resume Rescue presented by Angela Buccellato and Allison Whitehead

Angela covered the best practices which we need to apply in our resumes. The bullet should contain the points which are Result-Oriented, make sure to provide results to everything you do. Your skills can be self-taught, can be through courses, certifications, formal and informal training both counts like Coursera, YouTube, LinkedIn, college-level courses, projects, hackathons.

You should never put vague skills they should be detail-oriented, or blatant errors like wrong dates, grammatical mistakes, please avoid these. No bad links, or pictures in the resume.

Put Summary section instead of Objectives, Add Overview, Career Highlights, Condense skills. Stay up-to date on resume trends. Use LinkedIn regularly, make your LinkedIn profile outstanding with a good portfolio previous work experiences. Which can lead you to getting referrals, and keep updating your profile monthly not only when you are actively looking.

Stay away from complicated resume formats when applying because Applicant Tracking Systems are not Robots. Tailor your resume to each position. It's okay to change careers, leave jobs you don't like. To find a Mentor, connect with people on LinkedIn, have an actual conversation and leave a good impression. Most importantly, if you are 60% - 80% fit for the position, Apply.

Day 3 - 26th October, 2022

Day 3 started with empowering Keynotes sessions and Solutions + Showcase where every company had their respective booths showcasing their product/service with few technical engineers to give a live demo and bunch of cool swags.

I met so many amazing people on this day like Marino Wijay, Diana Pham, Kaiwalya Koparkar, Ashwin Kumar, Shivangi Motwani, Sreekaran, Shivay Lamba, Isha Ghodgaonkar, Sandeep

Shoutout to Civo for arranging a great networking session: Staging Things. The experience meeting professionals from different domains, industries was really special.

Screenshot-2022-11-16-at-3-02-12-PM.png

The next Two days, I attended the Keynotes sessions and Networked with a lot of people by visiting every company's booth. Played so many fun games. There was a Coding Challenge from Styra to solve 5 questions about policy. I solved all the questions, and won a Nintendo Switch OLED. That was really cool. Also, Komodor had a quiz containing 5 questions, I got a few correct answers and I won a Lego Set. There were so many networking events in the evenings by CNCF, Komodor, many more. The main highlight of attending KubeCon is, I got to meet James Spurin, Viktor Farcic ๐Ÿ˜.

How to apply for KubeCon Scholarship

For getting the scholarship, you need to answer a few essay questions like Why you want to attend KubeCon? You have to briefly express your genuine interests what will you gain from it. You have to provide details that you are interested in learning more about the technology and another aspect when they want you to submit some relevant work. Your work need not be super complex. When I had to show my proof of work in gaining the scholarship. I was also thinking to myself, I don't have anything to submit. That is a wrong approach to it. I wasted time, waiting to make something amazing to submit. Turned out I was just procrastinating, I learned the lesson. So, I started to look for some good-first-issues and raised few pull requests. Submitted my profile, and before I knew it, I won the scholarship. Sometimes, I regret for not started earlier, but it's good I learned the lesson.

With this my experience has come to an end. But, I am very grateful for the opportunity that I got, and made so many great friends. This is the best picture by far of the event.

IMG-7295.jpg

Resources:

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