After more than two years, the tech conferences in Europe and elsewhere are back. Some of them still have some kind of Corona-related restrictions based on the rules and regulations in the country in which they take place. Others don’t put so many restrictions in place and welcome everyone. Time to take a look at some of the most popular conferences which are organized in the coming period. Identify trends and compelling new tools and technologies as well as cultural aspects for a variety of topics. Cloud-native technology, containers, security, DevSecOps, and other disciplines are screaming for attention. Tech conferences are back – what’s in it for you?
Kubecon & CloudNativeCon
One of the most popular conferences for Kubernetes and Cloud-native technologies is back in Spain. In the past, it was held in Barcelona, now it’s organized in Valencia. Great news for Kubernetes fans, since nearly everything that has to do with Kubernetes, is covered in the schedule. A number of talks: Service meshes in combination with your SD-WAN, Securing Muti User HPC jobs in Kubernetes with Kyverno, Kubernetes AI day, Serverless workflow projects and talks about DAPr as well as Chaos Engineering at a fintech company. Plenty of valuable talks which focus on the latest trends and technologies. Some tracks require a separate registration and/or fee.
Project meetings
One of the differentiators of this combined conference is the so-called “project meetings”. It’s possible to attend one or more project meetings that focus on specific tools or problem areas. Think of Argo, Flux or LitmusChaos. This presents a great opportunity for individuals who want to gain a deeper understanding of these technologies. Since these sessions are rather lengthy, there is plenty of time to ask questions or to get your hands dirty. A perfect way to explore tools in a convenient setting without a steep learning curve.
Live streams
Besides the project meetings, there are a huge number of live streams you can watch from your own private location. If you only want to gain specific knowledge in a limited amount of time, these are suited for you.
DoKday
Something that sparked my mind is DoKday. This stands for “Data on Kubernetes” and it is a “sidecar event” attached to Kubecon & CloudNativeCon. It focuses on operating databases within the perspective of Kubernetes. This event covers tracks like “why run Postgres in Kubernetes”, “How to work with declarative management of datasets in Kubernetes” and “How to run Apache Cassandra in Kubernetes”.
DevOpsDays in various countries
It is no surprise that the DevOps disciplines also got their own conferences. This year, several conferences in different European countries are organized from May until October. Pick the city of your choice such as Berlin, Amsterdam, Prague, Zurich, or Tel Aviv. DevOsDays are all about DevOps-related challenges that keep different organizations busy.
Business perspective
The talks do not only cover the technological aspects but also have a focus on the business side of things. For example: “Think you’re buying DevOps, Think again”, “How DevOps metrics will transform your business” or what about “Moving from Project to Product: It’s time we stopped failing the business”. And don’t miss out: “The SBB BizDevOps Transformation“.
If you’re interested in the history of DevOps, be sure to check out “DevOps before there was DevOps, 20yr old style”. These are some of the most compelling stories of DevOpsDays in Prague.
Open Source Summit Europe
The Linux foundation organizes the Open Source Summit from September 13-16 in Dublin. It’s one of the many other conferences / Summit they organize. Among them are Linuxcon, SupplyChainSecurityCon, Cloudopen, Containercon, and many others. What makes these summits great? The focus is on a specific topic of interest. The speakers and workshops present deep technical information/insights into topics around Linux in automative, Rust, Virtualization, Checkpoint, and Programming Languages plus toolchains. Developers, as well as System operators, get inspiration for their next projects.
Kick-starter for your developer career
Those who are just starting with open source Software can attend one or more sessions of the Open Source on-ramp. All of the topics presented here have the beginner in mind. It is a great opportunity to kick-start your career as a developer or cloud (native) specialist.
Why is this Summit interesting to you? Because there is a big movement from commercial software to open-source tools. Many cloud-native features are like a wrapper around popular and high-quality open-source software. As of today a lot of companies are phasing out expensive database systems like Oracle and shifting to PostgreSQL instead. You can still register to attend it or submit a paper to get a time slot for your own talk.
TechEx 2022
End-users as well as other professionals who are involved in enterprise-grade technological solutions should definitively not miss TechEx 2022. This is a series of technology exhibitions and conferences which are held at 7 colocations. These include IoT tech expo, Cybersecurity, and cloud expo, and the digital transformation week. Besides the many open source initiatives, it’s particularly important to understand which technology trends are driving the IT industry. Get answers to the impact of AI & Big Data, Blockchain, IoT, and other topics on transport, supply chain, financial services, healthcare, and other industries.
Digital transformation
Being part of TechEx 2022, the digital transformation week also takes place in September. This is another great conference for business-minded people who held strategic senior roles at well-known companies. All speakers earned their credits at well-known companies such as Volvo, Cloudplane, Axa, and the World Health Organization. It’s not a tech-only event, it’s more suited for Heads of IT, CISOs, Information Security Managers as well as business consultants and CTOs. This year, the event will take place in the RAI in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
DockerCon
Nearly every developer has explored containers or is already working with them for several years. Containers are in every phase of the software development lifecycle. Docker is one of the most popular container solutions. Their event is a virtual one and free of cost. The conference took place from May 10 until May 12th. The complete schedule is built around five main tracks: Main-stage, Discover, Learn, Excel, and Blackbelt. Most sessions are 30 minutes and cover topics such as building a pipeline for observability, Docker Desktop, Docker extensions, and Container security tools. When taking a sneak peek at the online videos, I noticed there is quite an active community that discusses the various topics.
DevOps Pro Europe
DevOps Pro is great for DevOps practitioners which want to master new skills and meet and greet peers to share their experiences, learn from others, and get informed about new DevOps-related topics. The event is split into two parts: the conference is held from May 24-26 whereas the workshops are held from May 30 to June 3. This combination is great: learn the theory prior to the practical workshops that follow right after it. There is just enough time between the two events to evaluate what you’ve learned during the talks to select the workshops which best match your interest. Learn how to write Helm templates the right way or practice with the OpenTelemetry collector for Logs, Metrics, and traces.
More great talks include best practices for Service Meshes which serve multiple clusters, monitoring Kubernetes versus serverless based applications. And the talk about Observability for Serverless asynchronous managed services is also not to be missed. Two talks not to be missed are “What We Learned From Reading 100+ Kubernetes Post-Mortems” and also “Value Stream Thinking – The Next Phase of DevOps”. These give you valuable information both on how you can learn from major Kubernetes related real-world issues that happened at other companies as well as getting some insights into what’s next after DevOps.
Enterprise AI Summit
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Big Data have become a reality in the last couple of years. Compelling new roles such as data scientist, AI experts, and Data Platform analysts appeared. Besides these new roles, several Summits have been organized lately. Upcoming in October is the AI Summit Berlin.
This conference is for data practitioners and senior-level business executives that want to learn from proven AI-based applications to increase their Return on Investment (ROI) as well as utilize AI to run and scale a reliable infrastructure (in the cloud).
It is held in Berlin from 5 – 6 October.
Schedule
The schedule is not completely final yet, but you’ll find topis around how to design, build and use AI platforms. Besides this, you have the chance to adopt various practical considerations for developing MLops at scale. The practical aspect help to avoid pitfalls in your organization or optimize your current solutions. Furthermore, there are talks about the customer experience which can be improved using AI in self-service (portals).
Ethical aspects
Of particular interest are the topics around ethics in AI, democratizing AI as well as considerations around legal and cultural-related challenges which are at stake when it comes to implementing and using AI.
If you want to get a good indication of how well your organization performs on MLOps, be sure to check out the “Assessing MLOps Maturity Levels” track.
Wrap up
Slowly, the coronavirus becomes something of the past. Conferences start to return to physical mode again. Besides this, there are a lot of interesting conferences which can be attended virtually. There are also hybrid conferences to get the best from both worlds. The revival of these conferences leads to a big list of interesting ones to visit in the upcoming period. Think of Kubecon / CloudnativeCon, DevOps Pro Europe, or TechEx 2022. All of these conferences have a specific target group in mind. Explore the schedules of these great conferences and be sure to book your ticket to join them. For sure there is something of interest to you. Enjoy!
