Posted on December 14, 2018 by Natasha Woods

CNCF projects highlighted in this post

Envoy logo ko logo Kubernetes logo Prometheus logo

With KubeCon Seattle now behind us, here’s a snapshot of all the cloud native goodness at our most jam-packed show to date. The sold-out KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 had the largest attendance and waiting list of any past CNCF event with more than 8,000 contributors, end users, vendors and developers from around the world gathering for over three days in Seattle, Washington to further the education and adoption of cloud native computing, and share insights around this fast growing ecosystem.

With 8,000 attendees in-person and another 2,000 on the waitlist experiencing major FOMO as they watched the live stream keynotes and read their Twitter feed, KubeCon Seattle attendance was a 83% increase from last year’s KubeCon event in Austin. And while the attendee numbers grew, the great “developer conference” experience remained the same!

It’s truly exciting to see how fast this community is growing. And in case you missed the massive job board at the show – the market is hiring!

The women of KubeCon Seattle

During the three days of keynotes, women were front and center as we heard from KubeCon Co-Chair Liz Rice who gave a CNCF community update, alongside a number of our project maintainers — including a Helm update from Michelle Noorali of Microsoft; an Envoy update from Matt Klein of Lyft; and an overview of Kubernetes growth from Aparna Sinha of Google.

With 40% of all keynotes coming from women, the ladies of cloud native were running the stage! KubeCon Co-Chair Janet Kuo of Google explained by Kubernetes being “boring” was a good thing and Liz Rice put her Aqua Security role hat on for another keynote emphasizing the importance of security, saying, “CNCF is not here to throw glitzy events, but to help us coordinate as a community and ensure we have proper governance in place and make it harder to hand privileges to some random dude, and that is important as more and more companies rely on open source technologies. Good governance is how as a community we can save ourselves from a security attack.” To cap off all the keynotes, Kelsey Hightower gave a shout out to the amazing real women of hidden figures, his mom and the queen of Motown Diana Ross in his Serverless keynote.

End user keynotes and sessions

Amazing women in technology leadership roles were also seen in important “How do you make this work in the enterprise” keynotes and sessions. Airbnb software engineer Melanie Cebula identified key problems that make out-of-the-box Kubernetes less friendly to developers. She also laid out 10 strategies for addressing these issues based on Airbnb’s experience empowering one thousand engineers to develop hundreds of Kubernetes services at scale.

Uber’s Celina Ward and Matt Schallert, who shared their experience creating an operator for a unique stateful workload. They discussed the major shift in thought and provided the audience with a framework for expressing their stateful workloads using Kubernetes primitives, and advice for navigating the difficult process of codifying innovative abstract ideas without over-engineering solutions.

And Capital One announced their increased commitment to the community by leveling up and becoming a CNCF Gold End User Member!

Other end user breakout sessions and booth exhibits included: Home Depot, Nordstrom, Lyft, Buffer, University of Michigan, Nokia, T-Mobile, Samsung SDS, Yahoo Japan Corporation, BlackRock, AT&T, USA Today Network, Two Sigma, and many more!

Building a strong and diverse community!

While having so many women speakers at KubeCon Seattle was a giant step forward, there were a number of activities that brought together the diversity of the cloud native community; including speed networking and mentoring, diversity lunch, sessions on building a community through Meetups and KubeCon attendee scholarships.

CNCF’s diversity program offered scholarships to 147 recipients, from traditionally underrepresented and/or marginalized groups, to attend KubeCon Seattle! The $300,000 investment for Seattle — the most ever invested by a conference for diversity — was donated in majority by CNCF, along with contributions from scholarship sponsors Aspen Mesh, MongoDB, Twistlock, Two Sigma and VMware. Including Seattle, CNCF has offered more than 485 diversity scholarships to attend KubeCons in the past 2 years.

CNCF also collaborates with the Kubernetes mentoring program to offer networking opportunities for mentees at KubeCons. 66 mentors and 180+ mentees participating in this program during KubeCon Seattle.

Awarding hard work and dedication:

For the third year in a row, the CNCF Community Awards, sponsored by VMware, highlighted the most active ambassador and top contributor across all CNCF projects.

CNCF Community Awards

  1. Top Cloud Native Committer – an individual with the incredible technical skills and notable technical achievements in one or multiple CNCF projects. The 2018 recipient was Jordan Liggitt.
  2. Top Cloud Native Ambassador – an individual with the incredible community-oriented skills, focused on spreading the word and sharing the knowledge with the entire Cloud Native community or within a specific project. The 2018 recipient was Michael Hausenblas.

With any open source project, it is impossible to overlook those giving countless hours of their time to complete often mundane tasks. That is why Chris Aniszczyk brought back the Chop Wood/Carry Water awards. This year’s awards recognize the tireless efforts of Davanum Srinivas, Dianne Mueller, Christoph Blecker, Nikhita Raghunath, Paris Pittman, Richard Hartmann, Tim Pepper, April Kyle Nassi, Jorge Castro, Babak “Bobby” Salamat, Reinhard Nagele, Zach Arnold, Kris Nova, and Stephen Augustus.

Co-located events

27 co-located events occured on Day 0 (December 10th) of the conference. There were a number of great technical and community building sessions; including Linkerd in production 101, Kubernetes contributor summit and the first ever EnvoyCon!

CNCF projects present and accounted for

A number of CNCF projects had announcements, great breakout sessions, quick lightning talks, community building meet the maintainer opportunities, and technical deep dives.

Phippy joined the CNCF family!

In 2016, Deis (now part of Microsoft) platform architect Matt Butcher was looking for a way to explain Kubernetes to technical and non-technical people alike. Inspired by his daughter’s prolific stuffed animal collection, he came up with the idea of “The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes.” Thus Phippy, the yellow giraffe and PHP application, along with her friends, were born.

On the keynote stage during Day 1 of the conference, Matt and co-author Karen Chu announced Microsoft’s donation of Phippy to CNCF and presented the official sequel to the Children’s Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes in their live reading of “Phippy Goes to the Zoo: A Kubernetes Story”.

As part of Microsoft’s donation of both books and the characters, CNCF has licensed all of this material under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which means that you can remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Happy 3rd birthday CNCF

It may be hard to believe with all of our expansive growth – CNCF membership increased 110% this year, adding 169 new members – but CNCF is still young in years. We celebrated our third birthday this week with the cloud native community!

CNCF 3rd year birthday cake

All attendee party at MoPOP, Chihuly Gardens and Space Needle

At the all attendee party, conference goers experienced the intrigue of the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP), the beauty of the Chihuly Garden and Glass and the views from the top of the Space Needle.

Keynote and session recordings now available

All presentations and videos are available to watch. Here is how to find all the great content from the show:

Thank you all!

Save the dates!Register

now for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019, scheduled for May 20-23 at the Fira Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. CFPs are open and close January 18, 2019.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China 2019, scheduled for June 25-26 at the Shanghai Convention & Exhibition Center of International Sourcing, Shanghai, China. CFPs will open later this month and close February 1, 2019.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, scheduled for November 19-21 at the San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, California. CFPs will open May 6, 2019 and close July 12, 2019.