Day zero for KubeCon North America 2024 in Salt Lake City is in the books, which means that some big announcements were made today, some interesting sessions took place, and there were some pretty good parties to kick off the main event tomorrow.
Now, if you normally come for the main conference only, you are missing out on a lot by not going to the Co-Lo (Co-Located) day. Today Cert Manager was announced as a graduated project, meaning that if you've been buying your certificates directly through AWS, and your company has a policy of only using graduated CNCF projects, this now means you will save costs and be able to afford the good stuff at your holiday party.
But in all seriousness, this was long-awaited and very exciting news. Also, Dapr achieved graduated status as well, and WasmCloud achieved incubating status. Pretty big announcements, which makes me wonder what tomorrow has planned.
I managed to catch a couple of talks; one that stood out to me was the lessons learned from 7 years of Istio. It was a remarkable look back at where the project that coined the phrase “service mesh” came from, and to see where it is now, and it's stumbles and lessons. Although I do not use it, it is admirable to see how it has evolved, especially with its recent announcements of Ambient Mode now in general availability.
SWAG OF THE DAY:
Coder has finger skateboards, they automatically win. That wins swag of the day. Bar None. It was Day Zero, so there was slim pickings on swag, but the real good stuff comes out tomorrow, as today was about the projects and LEARNING.
All the other exhibitors were great to chat with, and still had good giveaways. This was my favorite sticker, courtesy of the folk at Massdriver. It perfectly encapsulates the feelings we all feel during the development process in our roles:
Also, I went to some mixers, and to be honest, they were all good. Shout out to Alma Security, Equinix, Causely, Edera, Suse, Tigera, Gitlab (GO FALCO), Suse and many more. You all know how to wine and dine an engineer. But my personal favorite was one hosted by SUSE. It was at a museum, and I kid you not, there was a guy dressed as a DINOSAUR who almost cleared my head with his tail. It was awesome. Plus I was able to walk around a museum and look at whales, dinosaur bones and native american exhibits with a beer in hand. What was not to love?
So, nobody got a sticker today from me, but I was saving them for the Kubecrawl tomorrow and after anyway. So if you're in town, contact me.
I hope you all tune in to the keynotes, and if you are in the Salt Lake City area and need a ticket, contact me on the platform I refuse to refer to by the most edge-lord letter of the alphabet—I have ONE spare left.
