Guest post by Feynman Zhou, Kubesphere
Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) was initiated by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is jointly organized by local CNCF ambassadors, CNCF employees, and CNCF members across the world. KCDs are currently being actively organized worldwide, gathering end users, contributors, and technical experts from the open source community in the cloud native field. This series of localized activities will help grow the Kubernetes Community and spread cloud native technology more widely among end-users in different industries.
Cloud native technologies and Kubernetes have become more and more popular in China. According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, China’s contribution to the Kubernetes community ranks second in the world, next only to the United States. In the “CNCF China Cloud Native Survey 2020”, it is also mentioned that the proportion of Chinese companies using Kubernetes in the production environment has reached as high as 82%, and there are 15 CNCF sandbox projects contributed by Chinese companies so far.
Event organizers and preparation
Collaborating with 5 CNCF ambassadors from PingCAP, DaoCloud, Huawei Cloud, KubeSphere, and Tetrate, the KCD China team hosted the first-ever Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) China in Beijing and Shanghai respectively, focusing on open source projects and best practices around the cloud native ecosystem.
KCD China planning was started in June and the CFP was opened in September. We received 24 proposals for the conference on various topics like Kubernetes, CI/CD, Service Mesh, serverless, multi-cluster management, and many more. The CNCF ambassador China team reviewed the CFPs and selected 10 of them for the conference.
Before this event, Bill Mulligan recorded a video as the event opening by representing the CNCF and expressed his acknowledgment to the KCD China team. Bart Farrell also created a Rap specifically for KCD China.
KCD Beijing event at a glance
KCD Beijing had 4 keynote speeches, 4 lightning talks, and 1 panel discussion, in which CTOs and architects from many well-known companies such as Microsoft Azure, NGINX Community, Tencent, DaoCloud, VMware, Xinglan Technology, VIPKID, and maintainers of the open source projects brought a lot of inspiring ideas.
KCD Beijing was held on Oct 16, nearly 300 people signed up, and more than 150 people participated in the Microsoft Beijing office. Six online platforms provided real-time live broadcasts with more than 5,000 people engaged virtually.
KCD Shanghai event at a glance
KCD Shanghai was started after the KCD Beijing finished, it was also set up with a similar schedule to KCD Beijing, in which speakers from Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft Azure, NGINX, KubeSphere, Vesoft, Tencent, DaoCloud, Dmall, and Jibu Data shared their insights and open source projects.
It was held on Nov 6, nearly 250 people signed up, and more than 120 people participated in the Microsoft Shanghai office. Six online platforms provided real-time live broadcasts with more than 4,000 people engaged virtually.
Kubernetes adoption and community engagement
We also took a user survey of Kubernetes adoption and community engagement from the registrants of KCD China. We are glad to see that most of the registrants are using Kubernetes in production or providing services to customers. However, only 18% have experience in contributing to Kubernetes and its ecosystem projects, while the other 80% have only used these projects without engaging the upstream community. We had 2 panel discussions in each city to talk about the benefits of contributing to open source projects for personal career development and we hope these will help encourage more people to participate.
All the decks shared by speakers have been uploaded to CNCF/Presentations. Feel free to download or comment!
We are thankful to the CNCF, our sponsors, the CFP reviews team, and the whole KCD China team for making this event happen.