KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020

As an employee, it can be difficult to strike the right balance between the needs of the company and the needs of the open source Kubernetes project. This can create friction and put significant pressure on employees who participate in Kubernetes on behalf of their company when the needs of the individual, the company, and the community are not aligned. This talk will focus on ways to create this alignment between individuals, companies, and the community required to be successful participants in Kubernetes.

The talk contains three major sections:
* How collaboration happens within the Kubernetes project.
* How to build a strategy for participation that will benefit your company, your employees, and the Kubernetes community.
* Tips for being a good corporate citizen as you contribute to Kubernetes.

Good product teams care deeply about their users and the experience they provide to them, yet many Product Managers shy away from conversations about Kubernetes, believing that it’s something for their engineering counterparts to think about. But this is a critical mistake; many of the benefits Kubernetes brings can be harnessed to deliver better products, faster.

The Kubernetes.io tagline is ‘Production-Grade Container Orchestration’, so it’s easy to see why Product Managers tend to leave it aside as an engineering concern. But much of the innovative work happening in the ecosystem can be used to ship software faster and deliver great user experiences. This talk will cover how Product Managers building different types of software can utilise features in Kubernetes to build extensible, scalable and cloud-agnostic products that drive better customer outcomes.

Kubernetes is an open source project with a high velocity of PRs and releases. While the activity and interest in the project is awesome, communicating these changes to end users becomes difficult. For a long time, each release would generate a new release notes markdown document that required manual cleanup and curation. In recent months the format has been reconsidered and completely restructured. The majority of content in the previous markdown has become a widely used website!

Generating and publishing release notes for open source projects can be a pain point, especially as a project grows. Imagine if there was a solution usable with many different projects? This talk will go over the history of Kubernetes release notes, the current state of relnotes.k8s.io, and future plans for automated publishing of release notes and notifications.

As the adoption of Cloud Native increases, the need for local communities increases. End users are looking for others in similar situations to share experiences and learn from each other. CNCF helps and supports local organizers through the meetup and ambassador program. In this session, the panelists will share their experiences in building and scaling local communities around the Cloud Native ecosystem. How can you get started? Where do you find speakers and venues? How to keep the momentum? These are just a few of the questions the panelists will try to answer.

The Kubernetes Python client allows users to programmatically interact with clusters using the Python language. With Python being one of the most popular programming languages, the Python client provides a way for those unfamiliar with Golang to still reap the benefits of a code interface to Kubernetes. This session will cover the repositories and resources that are used to generate the Python client and dive into examples of how the client is used.

This talk will also cover how to get involved as a contributor to the Python client by covering processes and resources.

Note: Brendan Burns gave a talk titled "!go, Interacting with and Extending Kubernetes in a Polyglot World" but it covered Kubernetes clients generally while this talk is specifically about the Kubernetes Python client and dives deeper into the nuances of the client and how to get involved as a contributor.

As Kubernetes adoption proliferates across different continents, we want to present the state of enterprises’ and startups’ adoption of Kubernetes in African countries. We will highlight the unique set of challenges that they face during migration to Kubernetes. These enterprises are looking for ways to improve and optimize infrastructure, and adopt cloud-native technologies. Startups want to build innovations on cloud-native architecture for rapid prototyping of their products, quick scalability as their businesses grow, and cost-saving on infrastructure.

In this talk, we will share the factors enabling and hindering the adoption of Kubernetes, community presence and its growth in Africa. We will share how people are contributing to Kubernetes and highlight some of the challenges they face in their journey.

Working in security can be intimidating and the shortage of people in the space makes hiring difficult. But especially in cloud native environments, security is something everyone must own. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “what does it take to work in security in a cloud native environment? How can you move into security from a dev or an ops position? Where should you start and what should you learn about?” then this talk is for you.

Justin Cormack, Security Lead at Docker and member of CNCF SIG Security will share his personal experience gradually moving from ops to dev to security, the reasons for his transitions, and what he learned along the way. He will break down why security really is one of the most interesting and different areas to specialize in and why working in security might be for you.

Kubernetes has a steep learning curve, but many teams need to learn Kubernetes – quickly. This talk will cover strategies for onboarding developers to Kubernetes, taken from DigitalOcean's Developer Education team – the producers of DO's Community tutorials – and the Community Platform team, which develops the Community application. It will include 1. Core concepts and insights from DO's new Kubernetes for Full-Stack Developers curriculum; 2. An on-the-ground perspective taken from the Community Platform team's migration from a traditional VM environment to Kubernetes.

Key concepts the talk will cover:
1. How to onboard teams successfully by establishing knowledge baselines and effectively organizing, structuring, and delivering Kubernetes concepts.
2. How to situate Kubernetes in a larger arc of application development and integrate it into an existing development workflow.

According to a 2018 report from Tech Nation, 83% of the tech community in the UK believe their biggest challenge is accessing skilled workers. Too many talented people are going unnoticed by recruiters. As a result, there’s been much focus on attracting talent of all ethnicities and genders, but there’s a growing view emerging that more needs to be done in the area of neurodiversity.

Many cloud native companies are answering this issue by creating initiatives to hire neurodivergent people. Often, an entire division of recruiting/HR is dedicated to sourcing these individuals. There’s just one problem: They don't actually know what to do next. This panel will go into those next steps, in particular, focusing on on-boarding, retaining, and creating a welcoming work environment for neurodivergent individuals in today’s Kubernetes-based, cloud-native landscape.

Expanding on her Kubecon 2019 talks on ‘Mental Health in Tech,’ Jennifer (psychologist and founder of GCI) will deep dive into the impact of industry stress and burnout. Research suggests the prevalence of diagnosed mental health conditions in tech professionals ranges between 20-50%. While this is notably high, mental health is further exacerbated by stress, a condition nearly all professionals in technology grapple with. Attendees are encouraged to view one of Jennifer’s 2019 Kubecon talks prior to attending “Stress and Mental Health in Technology.” In her follow-up, time will be dedicated to the impact of stress on productivity and effectiveness, and will include ways in which its aversive effects can be managed. 
Why are so many professionals in tech burning out? Why are so many diagnosed with mental health conditions? Why is working in technology so stressful? Why is stress minimized and accepted as part of the job? Why aren't we giving this more attention considering the impact work-related stress has on nearly every area of our lives, including overall functioning, health and well-being? What can we do about this? Come learn more about this pertinent topic and be part of the discussion with dedicated time for Q&A.

The goal of this panel is to share with a broad audience that it does not require a singular path or skill-set to arrive into this space. Additionally, everyone sitting on this panel has access and privilege that must be acknowledged, so we will also dive into what they are doing personally, with this access, to effect positive change within their sphere of influence and how others can do the same.

Panelists will engage in an honest discussion framed by the following questions:

Discuss your career journey, how did you get where you are?
Where do you think you got help in getting where you are?
What personal steps are you taking to ensure open source, and particularly Kubernetes, is a community that has opportunities for a broader audience (read: those outside of dominant culture)?
What’s one key piece of information you want the audience to take away from this talk?

Her first commit to Kubernetes was made under a name she no longer uses, by a person who no longer exists. Until now she has done her best to keep this information a secret, and lives full time as a well known transgender engineer.

In this talk she publicly reveals the commit log for the first time, and tells her unique story about her personal journey with cloud native technologies. The fact that she has experienced cloud native from both sides of the gender spectrum gives her unique insight into the tooling, and more importantly the processes in place for contributing.

She draws striking parallels with her personal epiphanies in her career, with the maturity of the cloud native ecosystem by using three simple words: shame, adoption, victory.

The talk explores the three lessons in detail from the perspective of a veteran cloud native engineer. She hopes to inspire all.

With dozens of companies and countries, with thousands of people contributing to a single open source project, the community is bound to face some growing pains. On the rise there are more and more people every day hoping to contribute their new feature whether it actually fits in the project or not. For a while there are more resources than community knows what to do with, but eventually, a new project will come along and hopefully they can learn from the challenges that the projects before them faced. In this talk, attendees will learn about one open source community's rise in popularity and the transition to stable, mature project. Attendees will learn from the struggles of the OpenStack community and will be able to take the lessons we learned back to the Kubernetes and other CNCF communities.

The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud-native community. The CNCF will host a public TOC meeting, inviting the community to discuss various agenda items along with holding an open Q&A for the community with TOC members.