Cloud Native London, September 2022

Great CNCF event on Wednesday evening hosted by Esynergy in London.

Was disappointed by the lack of non-alcoholic cask ales provided, but the lineup of the speakers made up for it.

The first talk was given remotely from the US. It’s the first time I’ve been to an event where the speaker is remote and the audience is present and not the other way around. Viktor Gamov(@gAmUssA) handled it very well and there were no issues with tech. It was a vendor presentation from https://konghq.com/ with examples of the advanced use of Kong as an ingress controller.

Nothing mind-blowing was revealed (besides the author’s obsession with the movie’s quotes 🙂 ). Several use-cases of rate-limiting in ingress using Kong. The same things could be done with Haproxy, Envoy or Nginx itself which is at the core of Kong.

Kong comes with Kubernetes native implementation of these features which makes it more accessible and organic. Overall, Kong seems to be getting more popular in the Enterprise sector, so there must be more driving it than simple convenience of configuration.

The highlight of the demo was the REST client called “Insomnia” used by the presenter which was quite neat and will find its place on my laptop.

The second speaker Dimitris Finas(@dfinas101) was representing Lightstep. The talk was about the OpenTelemetry framework which was co-created by Lightstep founders jointly with Google.

This was quite an engaging talk and resonated with my interest in observability and the use of OpenTelemetry in SkyWalking.

Technically, there were no revelations for someone who has worked with OpenTelemetry, SkyWalking, or Jaeger, but once again it has demonstrated how little adoption of this revolutionary tech has happened across the industry. There were a handful of hands in the audience from people who already use tracing in their infrastructure.

After a break for more sugar-free Coca-Cola the third speaker Jaap Brasser from Harness very briefly covered LitmusChaos – one of the latest additions to the CNCF incubator and recently acquired by Harness.

The concept of Chaos Engineering is not new and the speaker covered some history and background of its creation. There were no juicy technical details or unsuccessful Demo so thankfully, the presentation was brief and everyone could go to the pub.

Overall got a positive vibe from being in a tech community in person again and looking forward to more great events with interesting topics.