Container Days – 2022 – The Cloud Report | News, articles, interviews and tests

The Container Days have become a permanent fixture in the event calendars of all container enthusiasts. Alongside KubeCons, they are the largest international event on Kubernetes and container technology. In 2021, the focus of the participants was more on the virtual event, because only 300 participants were allowed on site due to the Corona regulations. In 2022 it was the other way round, with around 800 open source enthusiasts coming to Hamburg. The joy of seeing each other again was huge and the thirst for knowledge enormous.

The event was a mixture of community meeting, conference and family reunion. And there was something for everyone in the exhibition as well as in the sessions: I met two employees of the company Firedrill, for example, who offer virtual fire protection exercises and run their services in a self-hosted Kubernetes clusters.(1) They were there to learn more, to be able to ask questions and to meet the real experts – because they don’t have access to the communities (yet). And
they were thrilled, along with me, that there were introductory sessions at such an established event as a matter of course. There were overview sessions, but also first steps and best practice sessions. But there were also advanced sessions for the “real experts”, where even they could learn something new, for example the guys from Cloudpunks who use the Container Days to learn about the container landscape in Germany but also to introduce themself to the community (2). It is precisely this mixture that makes the event relevant for the entire container open source community. Of course, the communities are about the further development of the projects, but it must also always be about inspiring new contributors and being confronted with difficulties or ambiguities through questions from users. That’s why the broad offer to learn, but also to use the time for beer and exchange is so important!

In the meantime, Kubernetes has matured so much that many of the sessions dealt with concrete use cases or challenges such as edge computing or multi-clusters. A major focus was on security at all levels from infrastructure to supply chain, certificates to multi-cloud. Another focus was on operations, especially GitOps and monitoring. Fittingly, there was also a lot of talks about cloud-native development.

Especially in the area of git, I learned something new and great: There is a real alternative to GitHub and GitLab: Gitea! Check it out, try it and become part of the community – this is part of the path to sovereign open source projects. (3)

Even though many participants were in Hamburg, the event remained hybrid, all sessions were streamed and recorded and are all available online now too via the Container Days YouTube channel! (4) Here are my personal recommendations (please bear in mind that I am not a real expert):

About Monitoring and Observability: Michael Friedrich: From Monitoring to Observability (5) and Matthias Haeussler: What´s going on in my cluster? (6)
About GitOps: Jimmi Dyson: Kubernetes as a Service with GitOps (7) and Lian Li: GitOps for the people (8)
About Cloud Security: Mike Milner: Cloud Security from Scratch (9) and Viktor Gamov: Zero Trust Security with Service Mesh (10)
About cloud-native Development: Jim Sheldon: Container-native pipelines with Drone CI (11) and Lukonda Mwila: How To Make Your Application Developers Fall In Love with Kubernetes and Cloud Native Applications (12)

This year the event took place in a new location: Kampnagel in Hamburg – theatre, ballet and event location (13). But with a clear message: No Racism, no war – inclusion, openness, sustainability. For me this so fitting for an open source community event where these topics are important or should be important! For me personally, the catering was also great, everything vegan or vegetarian and 100% fresh – very fitting, very tasty.

All in all, I only can say: Come to Hamburg and experience this community for yourself. Get involved and make container technology come alive with everything that goes with it!

Friederike Zelke

Editor in Chief the cloud report

friederike.zelke@cloudical.io