I had a great time visiting Chicago and attending KubeCon NA 2023. This was my first in-person KubeCon .. I very nearly attended the 2nd KubeCon NA in Austin back in 2017 (when it snowed in Texas!), but work kept me in San Antonio for the duration of the trip.
With this trip, I also had the chance to participate in the co-located CiliumCon NA, which was a full day of presentations related to Cilium CNI topics, and really kicked things off and got me into a k8s state of mind for the rest of the conference.
There were quite a few interesting presentations, which will take some review to process. In the end, I started jotting keywords to search for review later :lol: I enjoyed Tim Hockins keynote on how far Kubernetes has come.
A fun event during the week was getting to watch the premier of the eBPF Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_vD3XZYOA with several of the key players in attendance! Immediately after, I attended the Cilium Hive Mind Mingle, which was a celebration of all things Cilium, eBPF and Isovalent.
I think this conference may replace my VMworld / Explore yearly attendance of the past decade, both because of my job focus and the very different vibe of the 2 conferences: Explore has refocused on client stories (rather than technical deep dives), but is still a commercial focus; KubeCon has that OSS energy, with constant inovation and an impossible number of things to investigate.