Guest post by Saim Safdar
We are excited to announce that we have successfully executed Kubernetes Community Days Pakistan. We had appearances from the first certified CKA women in Pakistan, speakers from Spain, New Zealand, India, Peru, USA, UK covering almost all the continent. This was the first full fledged event with focus on introducing local kubernetes power, providing a collaborative bridge for the international community to work with the local community for further advancement in kubernetes and cloud-native in this region. Thank you Priyanka Sharma (via KCD Amsterdam keynote) for the huge shout-out to KCD Pakistan with Bart Farell and Salman Iqbal and myself.
While KCD’s around the globe are doing amazing work providing educational hub for learning, collaborating, networking and to further advancement in Open Source, this KCD Pakistan event was unique with more focus on student participation to help them understand where the Industry is heading or those of whom are traveling for MS graduation abroad, they learned KCD’s are not just local but global, if you can participate locally, why not globally? These students were able to meet and recognize some of the most respected community members from local and international communities. Here’s what students like about most in #kcdpak Faraya Baig Meshal Cheema Fahad Baig Mashaf Zaman
What’s next? Brining more individuals, and companies under one umbrella combining new ideas, knowledge and supercharge brainstorming of what can be done better with collective efforts to empower local companies and communities to build better open source projects for the future. Organizers are working hard to have this show running with full glory in future and the possibility to run two times a year, as to align with KubeCon Europe and North America helping local communities become more visible at KubeCon in the near future.
Kubernetes Community Days were originally designed as local, community-organized, in-person events that gather adopters and technologists from open source and cloud native communities to learn, collaborate, and network to further the adoption and improvement of the cloud native community and ecosystem. Learn more what steps to take to have this show running in your community with this short video from Audra Montenegro.
Each event brought its own unique local flair, culture, diversity, and authenticity (and its own logo and t-shirts, of course!). Thanks to CNCF we have given away 10 CKA to organizers and some students who deserve appreciation for their efforts in putting together this show. Big thanks F.A.S.T Islamabad for providing essentials to this event.
Going virtual! The first ever KCD Pakistan event was hybrid. While in-person events are vital for building community, they also decrease the accessibility and reach for your events. Hybrid is the preferred format (when possible). Organizers of KCD Pakistan are looking at ways to improve the in-person and virtual experience of attendees so you will see more hybrid events coming soon.
On Feb 20th #kcdpak began with an opening keynote by Haseeb Budhani CEO and cofounder of Rafay, Introduction to Kubernetes Platform, why organizations should build a platform team for Kubernetes and how this team’s responsibilities can contribute to the business’s success. Followed by Salman Iqbal who gave a demo on Operating High Traffic Websites on Kubernetes which was highly appreciated by the crowd. This showed us how Prometheus can be used to collect metrics from workloads.
Brad Mccoy and Courtney Nickerson shed light on of the hottest and latest open-source tools within CNCF. Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals. Following was Platform Automation with Kyverno by Chip Zoller. Chip shared insights on how platform teams can leverage Kyverno for more than validation to get real work done. Next was Orchestrating and Observing GitOps Deployments with Keptn by Andreas Grabner who shared how Keptn project can be leveraged as automatically providing End 2 End Observability through OpenTelemetry, as well as introducing an application deployment lifecycle events, enabling pre and post-deployment checks natively on Kubernetes. Another talk that was highly appreciated was from Edith Puclla called From unemployed to Technology Evangelist in the Open Source world. Edith talked about her journey through different open-source projects and how attending KubeCon opened many doors to opportunities in her professional life. Lastly, a #kcdpak here, Ayesha Siddiqa certified CK{A, AD} woman from Pakistan talked about how to tackle the CKA exam, and what needed to be improved to empower more women in upcoming KCDs.
You can enjoy all this content from via the KCD Pakistan YouTube channel.
This inaugural event brought the best of diversity and inclusion and gathered local and international organizers, most recognized local and international speakers, and stories of people using CNCF-powered open source technologies. As well as successes, and failures through in-depth technical talks, demonstrations of open source projects, and workshops.
Here you can enjoy the recording from the livestream of Saim Safdar, Katie Greenley, Bart Farell FUTURE PLANS FOR KCD PAKISTAN and Future of Kubernetes Communities.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation supports every KCD by providing the platform, guidance, and tools, covering all the aspects of holding a successful event. We are excited to work with our community to build a diverse and engaged community around the world. Local event organizers handle their own sponsorships, registration, and all other logistic, as these are community-driven events.
To learn more about hosting your own KCD check out the KCD website and GitHub. If you have any questions about the program, please reach out to kcd@cncf.io.