This is a guest post from the Track Lead of Cloud Containers and Infrastructure, Ana-Maria Mihalceanu, in discussion with team members Kate Stanley and Luke Whiting.
Do you have your head in the cloud, or maybe it’s located on premise? We want to hear from you! In order to inspire you, some of the Program Team members of the Cloud, Containers and Infrastructure Track shared their thoughts on the kind of submissions they’re looking for.
What range of talks do you want to see in the CCI track?
We’re looking for a good spread: not too much focus on one provider technology or on one cloud. A large majority of companies still have significant amounts of owned hardware and those should not be left out. Also, it would be great to see some talks that look at applications spanning both cloud based and on premise infrastructure, together with the challenges around such a strategy.
More and more developers are using dev tools via containers rather than installing them on their laptop, thus separating the operational concerns from their development concerns. It would also be interesting to see some submissions around using containers during the development and local test environments.
Speaking of testing: some talks focused on testing options/strategies in the cloud, containers, infrastructure are more than welcome.
Anything in particular that you would love to hear more about?
We would love to hear more about:
- How people are managing the instability that can come with running on top of Kubernetes or a cloud based infrastructure.
- How teams are determining what resources to provision for test systems versus production.
- Lessons that we learn the hard way and stories around failures using a certain technology
- Something on virtual-kubelets, case studies on maintaining K8S clusters on owned hardware rather than the cloud
- Making use of the non traditional hardware now available in clouds like Amazons ARM based EC2 instances, IBM OpenCAPI, Google TPUs, GPUs, FPGAs etc.
- Also we’d love to see submissions around usage of Rancher2, Rio, K3S etc.
What topics deserve more time as a conference talk?
We are looking for realism: less “Here’s a great concept and it will solve all your problems. Look at this example and how cool it is!” and more “We have been running this for x years now. Here’s what it does well, here’s the limitations, here’s how we worked round them”. Of course, we still wish to see submissions that spark new ideas to solve a certain problem, yet each project has its own complex reality and Devoxx UK is the place where we search for new approaches to tackle these.
Testing software has become a default practice if you want to ease your future work and we are also keen to know more on how to test your Dockerfiles, Kubernetes yaml or helm yaml etc without having to deploy everything all the time.
Another fundamental question that we seek answers to is how to balance the work of your team between new infrastructure development versus new application features.
What would be less interesting as a conference talk?
Introductory talks to Kubernetes, Docker or using a certain wide adopted technnology. We can easily find information around writing a Kubernetes service yaml, running a docker container and deploying a trivial lambda now.
What are your predictions for 2020?
We expect that this year we will see containers as the default choice for companies of all sizes rather than the fringe alternative. And as any wide adopted technology/practice testing containers will raise more interest. 2020 will focus on what happens on top of Kubernetes and other orchestrators, we expect a growing interest into operators or service meshes.
Now that we shared what we would like to learn about in the year that comes, will you submit to the CFP and teach us?