KubeCon Detroit 2022 - Akuity Team Recap

This year North America's "motor city", Detroit, hosted KubeCon. It wasn’t our first KubeCon as individuals, but it was our first KubeCon as a team.

Our First Time on Stage During a KubeCon Keynote talk

A couple of days before KubeCon we’ve found out that our colleague Yuan Tang has been invited to share the stage with Priyanka Sharma during the Day 3 keynote speech! Imagine our excitement and Yuan’s stage fright 😅

Yuan and Heba Elayoty (Software Engineer at Microsoft) joined the CNCF Executive Director to deliver a quick fireside chat on the challenges of contributing to open source and how we as a cloud native community can support and enable each other.

If you want to learn more about the everyday life of both Heba and Yuan make sure you check their profiles on CNCFs Humans of Cloud Native Blog.

Our First Time at GitOpsCon

GitOpsCon is a KubeCon co-located event designed to foster collaboration, discussion, and knowledge sharing on GitOps. Knowing that Argo and GitOps go hand-in-hand we wanted to get involved in the talks. Our Akuity colleagues Nikita Kutselev and Daniel Hoang delivered a talk on the best practices of storing secrets when using GitOps. It was their first time delivering a talk on stage, so it was a great opportunity for them to leave their comfort zone and share some knowledge with the community.

After the talk the audience still had many questions, so whoever is still interested in handling secrets with Argo CD make sure to check the blog post co-written by the duo entitled “How to manage Kubernetes secrets with GitOps?”

Our KubeCon Talks Recap

How To Build Production Grade DevOps Platform Using Argo

One of Argo’s creators and Akuity’s Chief Architect, Alexander Matyushentsev, shared the stage with Leonardo Luz Almeida, his colleague from Intuit, to talk about building a first-class production grade DevOps platform that’s ready for scaling up and serving a team of 100+ developers.

This talk was all about taming the complexity and versatility of the Argo Project and integrating it with various other systems in order to have a production-grade Argo-based DevOps platform for Kubernetes.

Like Peas And Carrots: Argo CD And Crossplane For Infrastructure Management

Another presentation from our staff was the talk by our CTO Jesse Suen and Viktor Farcic, Developer Advocate at Upbound and a YouTube star. The aim of the talk was to look closely at how Argo CD and Crossplane work great together.

The Crossplane project extends Kubernetes to enable the provisioning of cloud infrastructure. Combined with Argo CD, they become a powerful infrastructure management dashboard. The duo focused on delivering best practices recommended directly from the project maintainers.

Our First Booth at KubeCon

What also brought us a lot of excitement was the fact that it was our first time with a proper company booth at KubeCon. The part of the team that was present in Detroit got together and thanks to this we were able to talk to many of you about the Akuity Platform and the Argo Project in general.

It was our pleasure to wander between our booth and the Argo Project stand to learn about the various use cases and challenges that platform and DevOps teams are addressing with Argo.

Although three days at the booth are exhausting, the feeling we got after KubeCon in Detroit is that Argo is here to stay as the default open source solution for executing and managing GitOps workflows.

We’ve already registered for both KubeCon EU and KubeCon NA in 2023. Hope to see you there as well and learn more about your experience with Argo.