My KubeCon EU 2025 experience

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025 in London was my 4th time attending KubeCon. My first time was last year's KubeCon EU in Paris. After this I got to speak at both KubeCon China and KubeCon India 2024. I had got a talk selected for the maintainer summit this time.

Friday 28th March

Started traveling from Kochi. I had a flight from Kochi to Mumbai and then from Mumbai to London after a couple of hours. The flight from Mumbai was delayed a bit and because of this I was to reached London around 7-8pm at night. I had got a window seat. The middle seat was empty and there was a septuagenarian lady in the aisle seat. She was a good conversationist. Before landing I was able to see the Tower Bridge and the Eye of London from the sky. It was evening and everything had lit up. After landing in London, I reached the hotel at around 11PM BST.

Saturday 29th March

Woke up in the morning, went out for a walk and found it pretty cold. I spent some time in the morning working on the docs PRs for my KEPs in the v1.33 release. The deadline was right after KubeCon and folks who would review it would be busy during the KubeCon week. Once I finished my work and went out, I got in the metro and went to the St. Paul's station and walked around St. Paul's cathedral. There was some movie filming going on around it and they were only letting people in who had pre-registered online tickets. I walked through a bridge, went to the London Eye and the Big Ben. There was a book fair happening under a bridge near the London Eye which I randomly walked into. It's always fun when you don't really have any plans and walk into something nice. I spent some time exploring the books. From there, I walked to Trafalgar Square and tried to find tomorrow's venue for Cloud Native Rejekts. It was somewhere in the Pall Mall street. I wasn't able to find the venue, but I was tired after all the walking and went back to my room. I had found a nice bookshop near Trafalgar Square from where I got the Paddington Bear novel.

Sunday 30th March

Day 1 of Cloud Native Rejekts

Today was the day the conferences start and it was the first day of Cloud Native Rejekts. I was speaking and volunteering at the conference so I was ready to go to the venue early in the morning, at around 7AM. I randomly met with Imma in the hotel lobby. I had first met her at Cloud Native Rejekts EU 2024 and we were volunteering together there too. Although I had recognised her, us wearing the same tshirt from last year's conference helped us identify each other. We went to the venue together and met with Benazir, who showed us the Pall Mall venue. It was amazing. Once I was there, I did some setup for the registration desk, set up the standees and started organizing the badges before folks started coming in. Around 9AM, people started coming in and I met a bunch of familiar faces during the registration, like Jorge, Maciej and familiar folks who I'm meeting for the first time, such as Wendy and ChengHao. The best thing about helping with registrations is that you get to meet every single person who's attending the conference. It's an efficient way to do a lot of networking really fast.

In the afternoon session I gave my talk about the future of Kubernetes with CEL and met with a folk who was interested in CEL because they had a requirement for which they were using kubectl plugin instead. The talk went well and I found it to be good practice for the talk at the maintainer summit the next day.

After the talk was done, I met more folks - Matteo, Oluwafemi, Edith, Divya. I also met and spoke to Aya, who was giving a talk at KubeCon about Pod restarts and was mentioning my container stop signals KEP in her talk. It was nice catching up with everyone. If you're attending KubeCon, make sure to attend Cloud Native Rejekts on the days before without fail. It's a really good conference to get you in the conference mood without being too overwhelming. The size of the crowd is just right to not feel overwhelmed and you get to meet a lot of folks in the open source community who will be there at KubeCon too (You may or may not see them again at KubeCon :P)

Monday 31st March

Maintainer Summit

Today was the day of the maintainer summit and I had skipped day 2 of Cloud Native Rejekts. I had woken up early in the morning and reached the venue around 8:30AM. Went to the hallway area where the summit was happening and saw a lot of folks - met with Lenka, Jorge, Josh, Marly, dims, Tetsuya, Maciej, Eddie. I met and spoke to Mike about the container stop signals work briefly. After the keynote, I met with Priyanka and Jason. I also met with Kohei, Arnaud, Grace, Antonio.

Priyank and me started preparing for our talk afterwards. We met and spoke to a bunch of folks during this time - I met Tim Bannister, Ryota, Surya, Debabrata, Khanh, Richa, Micah and Lucas, Angelos. After the lunch, we had our talk in the second slot. I walked around and met more folks before the talk started. Peter, Tim Hockin, Dan Winship, Ana. I spoke to Peter about contributing more to SIG Node.

The talk went really good. All the different rehearsals before the maintainer summit (DigitalOcean engineering demo hour, Rejekts etc) made me get really comfortable with the material. People like Lucas, Joe Betz, James Munnelly, Tim Bannister, Nina, Grace, Richa, Yongrui, Rob Scott, Surya, Wendy, Tetsuya, Dipesh and many more showed up. It was nice. After the talk, we got to speak to folks from SIG API Machinery about CEL and all the benchmarking we need to do to compare the performance of CEL with the existing JSONPath.

Met more folks. Attended Antonio's talk on testing limits of Kubernetes with kind. Met with the folks from SIG Security and talked to them about the recent CVEs and how their lives has been with everything. I wish I got to spend more time with them, they're wonderful friendly folks who made me feel included during my first KubeCon in Paris. I mentioned this to them and was remembering the maintainer summit in KubeCon Paris together. Talked to Tetsuya and Khanh, Kohei and Yuki about KubeCon Japan and how I'm learning Japanese for my talk there. Spoke to Khanh about the community work he's doing in Vietnam. In the evening, during the reception, all the release team folks met together and took pictures.

I went to dinner with Lucas and folks from SIG Auth. This reminded me of the time I went to dinner with Lucas and SIG CLI folks last time! We spoke Kubernetes and had a nice dinner. It was fun. If you're attending KubeCon, you should definitely meet new people who you didn't know before and do something together, like go for dinner. Its a good way to get to know a lot of new people.

Overall the maintainer summit was really good and I got to talk to a lot of people. I knew more people compared to last year and I actually had things to talk about. I feel like I've grown and reached the goals I had set for myself when I was attending the maintainer summit last year. I'm proud of that and I want to do more work.

Tuesday 1st April

Day of the colocated events

I skipped the conference today and went out to see London. Went to Buckingham palace, saw the King's Guard. Went to the Big Ben and London Eye and to the Tower Bridge. There was a cable car near the KubeCon venue where they had a discount for KubeCon attendees. Went for a round trip in the cable car. It was nice, it reminded me of the cable car I had gone in Hong Kong and I was able to see the entire KubeCon venue from the sky. Had Chinese food for dinner. I also came across the Flipper Zero office/hackerspace. I learnt that they were headquartered in London. Really cool!

Wednesday 2nd April

First Day of KubeCon

I reached the venue in time for the keynotes. I had got a seat in the front row, but it wasn't in the middle section and I wasn't able to meet many folks at the keynote stage. The keynotes had two talks which I really liked. One was by Rob Koch about building a sign language interpreter with machine learning. Another was from a Linux Kernel maintainer (Greg Kroah-Hartman, who I had met at Hong Kong) about using Rust in the Linux Kernel.

At the booths I had met with more folks. I talked to Dawn about my contributions to SIG Node and what I could do more. She helped me and gave me a good idea of work that is left in the Pod lifecycle area. Met Bart, Aakansha. Met with Lucas in the afternoon and I asked him a bunch of questions about deserialization in the Kubernetes API and how things are converted to their respective stored version before they're stored into etcd. It was really insightful and I took a bunch of notes.

In the afternoon I went to the LGBTQIA+ community meetup. I had to leave early though since half of it was conflicting with the SIG Node maintainer track, which I attended. I spoke to Sergey and Mike after about the container stop signals. I was able to learn a lot from Mike and got a much better understanding of the entire scope of the KEP.

After this I went to Priyanka and Jason's talk about learning Kubernetes with metrics. After the talk, I got dinner from KubeCrawl and also got some time to grab some swags :P

Thursday 3rd April

Second Day of KubeCon

Today was the day of the SIG Meet and Greet, for which I was volunteering, and also the day I had my headshot. I had dressed up for both these. I was a bit late to head to the venue, but I ran into Priyanka and Jason in the bus I was traveling in, which was funny.

Helped setup the SIG Meet and Greet venue with all the pins and the stands. I loved volunteering for the SIG Meet and Greet since this let me meet a lot of people from the whole of the Kubernetes contributor community. Once the initial rush was over, I was able to sit down and have lunch and speak with Joe Betz and Joel Speed with Priyanka about our KEP adding CEL to CRD additionalPrinterColumns. We were able to talk about how we implemented CEL compilation to happen twice - once when you create the custom resource definition and once again when you create a custom resource, and Joe confirmed that this is the way to go since in an HA scenario where there are multiple kube-apiserver Pods, the CRD creation request might go to one kube-apiserver Pod and the request for querying the CRs might go to an entirely different Pod which doesn't know the CEL expression or its result.

After the meet and greet, I got my headshot taken, attended the Kubernetes Family Feud session which was fun and also got to sit down with Tim Bannister and we went through my docs PRs for v1.33. Thanks a lot Tim!

Friday 4th April

Last Day of KubeCon

Today was the last day of KubeCon and my agenda was mostly to meet with folks who I didn't get to talk to so far. First thing after the keynotes sessions, I went to Ben and Antonio's session on KinD. I went to the wrong room at first, and had to run to the correct room on the other side of the convention center. After the talk I talked to Antonio a bit about kind build node-image and how we can apply changes to the apiserver alone with the tarball. He mentioned that I can run make-release for a specific component alone, say if I'm making changes to the kube-apiserver alone, then I can build just the api-server and get a tarball and use kind load image to load the new image into the cluster and update the manifest file of the kube-apiserver's static pod to point to the new pod so that just the kube-apiserver will be restarted. He said that this is much faster than running kind build node image when we are only working with the apiserver.

As the conference was winding up, I walked around the solutions showcase and caught up with more people who I had missed in the first few days. After the conference we went to the National History Museum. We saw the skeleton of a real whale, an awesome Charles Darwin sculpture, a herbarium, which looked like the one in Harry Potter, a cross section of a giant Sequoia tree, a whole room for dinosaurs and rooms with models of bison, koala, plants, wheat, bats, butterflies etc.

Saturday 5th April

Today was my birthday. This is the first year where I'm outside India on my birthday. I got breakfast from Beehive, the non-profit cafe right next to my hotel. After this I got on the tube and got down at St. John's Wood station and had a coffee from the Beatles coffee shop right outside of the station. Then I went to Abbey road and took pictures! It was like a small conference of Beatles fans on the street. Later I went to the Abbey Road Studios shop, bought records and a bunch of souvenirs. Spent around an hour in the store looking at everything and taking things slow. After this I went to 221B Baker Street and went to the Sherlock Holmes museum, got a guided tour of the museum. Walked through the Sherlock Holmes museum store and bought two books. For lunch I went to a Palestinian restaurant which was teeming with people and had Shakshouka, which was really tasty. In the afternoon, I walked around, went to the Oxford Circus station and went to two record shops, Reckless records and Sister Ray opposite to it. Browsed the records but didn't buy any. I also went to Muji and bought stationery, notebooks and most importantly more JAPANESE INCENSE!!! Went back to my room by the evening, had pizza for dinner from a pizzeria right next to my hotel and slept.

Sunday 6th April

I was traveling back to India today. I had woken up early, around 3AM and packed my bags. I checked out of hotel later in the morning after having breakfast. Got on the tube to go to the airport, but had to get off at the Liverpool City station since the line was closed off due to a casualty. I booked an Uber for the rest of the trip. My Uber driver was a nice Nigerian man with whom I spoke and learned about Nigerian culture and the different dialects of the Nigerian language. It was nice talking to him! I reached the airport around 10:30AM. Because of the long lines at the baggage checkin, it was around 12:05 when I finished everything and only had time to walk to my gate after everything.

On my flight back I took out my laptop and wrote all of this down! I should be doing more of this. Last year at KubeCon EU I went too long without writing things down and eventually forgot much of the details. This was a good exercise in writing as well for me.