Putting on a KubeCon, with Colleen Mickey

A small army of community volunteers is necessary to host a KubeCon, but behind them is a professional events team. Colleen Mickey is Director of Event Services at the Linux Foundation and is responsible for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, as well as other events like Hyperledger Global Forum and cdCon. She talks to us about hosting, feeding and watering 10,000 people, as well as the change to virtual events.

We also bring the round-up of the KubeCon news, including our famous Lightning Round.

Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:

• web: kubernetespodcast.com
• mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
• twitter: @kubernetespod

Chatter of the week

• Episode 29, with Janet Kuo
• Looking back at KubeCon Shanghai 2018

News of the week

• New Relic and Pixie Labs blogs on Pixie being open sourced
  • New Relic joins CNCF as a Platinum Member
• Red Hat launches the Stackrox community at stackrox.io
  • OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines
• Snyk’s State of Cloud Native Application Security report announcement and results
• OCI Distribution Specification reaches 1.0
• Prometheus to launch conformance program
• New CNCF sandbox projects:
  • Vineyard, an in-memory immutable data manager
  • WasmEdge Runtime, a WebAssembly Virtual Machine for cloud, AI, and blockchain applications
  • ChaosBlade, an open-source version of Alibaba’s chaos tools
  • Fluid, a data and storage abstraction for AI and cloud-native applications
  • Submariner, a cross-cluster overlay of overlay networks
  • Antrea, a Kubernetes CNI plugin
    • Episode 128, with Antonin Bas
• CNCF Edge survey results and free Kubernetes on Edge Training
  • Episode 116, with Alex Ellis
• Inclusive Naming Initiative receives Honorable Mention at Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards
  • ‘Master,’ ‘Slave’ and the Fight Over Offensive Terms in Computing by Kate Conger of the New York Times
  • Episode 130, with Stephen Augustus
• Spotify wins CNCF Top End User Award
  • Episode 50, with David Xia
  • Episode 136, with Lee Mills and Matt Clarke.

Lightning round

• Accuknox secured $4.6m in seed funding
• Accurics announced Terrascan integrates with Argo CD
• Ambassador introduced a Developer Control Plane
• Armory introduced mini-Spinnaker installation Minnaker, built on k3s
• Arrikto announced MiniKF 1.3 and Eenterprise Kubeflow for Azure
• Avesha launched Smart Application Cloud Framework
• Bridgecrew published security trends from analyzing Helm charts
• CAST AI announced Amazon EKS cost optimizer
• Civo launched K3s-as-a service to early adopters
• Cloudical introduced version 1.8 of VanillaStack
• DataStax announced that k8ssandra supports all distributions
• Dynatrace added the ability to ingest OpenTelemetry traces
• HAProxy launched version 1.6 Kubernetes ingress controller
• Kasten added ransomware protection with v4.0 of K10
• Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform 2.17
• Kubernative says that KubeOps is now a full-fledged Managed Kubernetes Framework
• Netdata has added Kubernetes monitoring features to their Cloud service
• Nirmata announced Nirmata Policy Manager, based on Kyverno
• OpenNebula released a new K3s Virtual Appliance for running Edge Clouds
• Portainer raised $6M in a Series A round to Accelerate their global expansion
• Portworx pre-announced PX-Backup 2.0 with support for external auth services
• Rancher launched a new Rancher Desktop tool in Alpha for Windows and Mac
• Rafay launched new features to its Kubernetes Management Cloud
• Splunk announced their Observability Cloud is Generally Available
• StackPulse announced a Kubernetes-centric operations center
• StorageOS version 2.4 brings encryption at rest and rapid application recovery
• StormForge introduced automatic scanning of in-cluster resources
• StreamNative open sourced Function Mesh for running Apache Pulsar functions
• Sysdig added runtime detection and response for AWS Fargate
• Tigera released Calico Enterprise 3.5 with Dynamic Service Graph and eBPF data plane
• Timescale raised $40m Series B for Postgres-based TSDB and Prometheus cloud
• Trilio announced Kubernetes Backup Monitoring for Velero users
• Vitess launched version 10, with support for the Ruby on Rails framework
• Wanclouds launched multi-cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service
• Weaveworks launched Weave Kubernetes Platform 2.5 with multi cluster observability platform
• Zebrium now automatically perform Root Cause Analysis with integration into Opsgenie

Links from the interview

• The first KubeCon in 2015
• KubeCon donated to the CNCF
• CNCF presents CloudNativeCon and hosts future KubeCon events (2016)
• Dreamforce brings in cruise ships
• KubeCon NA 2017 in Austin, TX
• Linux Foundation Climate Finance Foundation
• Diamond sponsor lottery
• Diversity and inclusion at KubeCon EU
• Sponsorship open for KubeCon NA 2021
• Event platforms:
  • Intrado
  • MeetingPlay
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021
• GopherCon EU 2018 in Iceland
• Colleen Mickey on LinkedIn