KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Shanghai

A female-friendly tech-conference in a thriving city

Usually, when attending a tech-conference, the picture of the audience is dominated by male attendants. The same is true for keynote speakers and speakers in general. However, there are women in the tech-world, and I found some of them.

The very first KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Shanghai, China, was also my very first KubeCon. Shanghai was a location well chosen: 23 Million people in the greater area make it one of the largest cities in the world and a leading economic region in China. And also in the educational sector, the city is flourishing. In 2013, for example, Shanghai Tech University was founded. It aims to become a national and international first-class research university in the technical fields. Thus, Shanghai was the perfect host for a tech-conference on a thriving topic as Kubernetes.

The first KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Shanghai attracted 2.500 people to attend the conference – an enormous number. The event was sold out. Great too, that there were many women in the audience and a special women´s lunch was held to talk and network by traditional Chinese food. But also on the speakers lists, the organizers of KubeCon tried to get more women involved, and succeeded: There were 14 % female speakers on the stages during the three days of presentations.

One of them, Janet Kuo, co-chair of the conference, opened the KubeCon with a marvellous speech and the overall top quote: “Kubernetes is boring. But boring is good. It means, that a lot of people are using it, because it works”. She told the audience, that Kubernetes became very important in China also and that 58 % of companies are already running on it.

There were talks about a KubeGene Project, where Kubernetes is speeding up an out of the box gene sequencing process, sessions and discussions on Kubernetes AI with data scientists, engineers and architects from the leading industrial companies and a lot of other great keynotes, presentations, deep dives etc. on various projects on and around Kubernetes.

Cloudibility got hold of Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNFC) and Janet Kuo, Co-Chair, and asked them for some statements to KubeCon China:

Cloudical: How was the conference for CNFC and you personally?

DK: I am thrilled, it was a great conference. It was a big challenging process to host it in China, but it went all very well in the end. I am optimistic that the market is growing here. For western companies it was also an important step to come here to Shanghai, especially if they want to operate in China. It was important to CNCF to have a mix with Chinese and Western talks to get China´s companies involved to.

The conference went so well, that we decided to move it to another conference center next time, so that we can host up to 3.000 participants then.

JK: One of the main differences is, that the main audience here was from Asia. We had more intro sessions due to the fact, that the audience in China is more new to KubeCon than in other countries we held the conference be- fore. The audience in general differs: It is more conservative and the language use had to use less slang, for example.

Overall, I was surprised by the adoptions and different usage of Kubernetes in the Chinese markets. There is a lot going on here!

Cloudical: How and where will the conference and Kubernetes in general be in 10 years? How will the community change?

DK: All technologies have a lifecycle and reach a plateau after a certain time. At some day, we might go down again, but at the moment, the com- munity and Kubernetes is growing very fast. I hope, that there is some growth left and a long decline ahead, when we reach the plateau.

JK: There will evolve a greater open source involvement from Chinese users, I think. A lot of enterprises and traditional companies are adopting Kubernetes right now. There will emerge more different approaches, more e-learning and new technologies, too.

After attending KubeCon in Shanghai I am even more certain: Conferences are a good way for personal and working development also: Growing in studying the new technologies, gaining knowledge and increasing the personal knowledge will help attendees to develop new learning opportunities for their companies as well as for themselves.

Thus, Cloudical is happy to be part of the next KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 in Barcelona, May 20-23 also. So: Meet us there, we are looking forward to it!

 

Julia Hahn / Cloudical Deutschland GmbH