Reflections on Kubernetes Community Day France 2023

Reflections on Kubernetes Community Day France 2023 Scale • Daniel Maher • 31/03/23 • 9 min read

If you’ve spent more than five minutes with anybody from Scaleway, you know how much we’re into Kubernetes—so when we found out that France’s first-ever Kubernetes Community Days was being planned, we knew we had to be there! KCD France 2023 was held on 7 March and a bunch of the Scaleway team were there as speakers, sponsors, and active participants in this vibrant and dynamic community. Now, after a few weeks of contemplation and digestion, I’d like to share some of our thoughts, reflections, and observations on what was an early contender for top local tech event of the year.

The event was held at the fabulous Centre Pompidou , a world-renowned contemporary art museum in the heart of Paris. This made for a unique atmosphere and some interesting challenges in terms of space and organisation. Notably, there wasn’t a single theatre space large enough to accommodate all of the nearly one thousand attendees during the plenary sessions, so instead, three different theatre spaces were used. These rooms were named “Bleu”, “Blanc”, and “Rouge” after the colours of the French flag, which was the first indication that this was a proudly Made in France event. The plenary itself was split into three parts, with each part being presented live and simulcast to big screens in the other two rooms.

Starting at the start

KCD was the place to be! For somebody who is always curious, like me, this was a great opportunity to broaden my understanding of Kubernetes.

– Robert JOSEPH , IT System Engineer

So what did we learn that morning? Hana Khelifa , Content Marketing Lead here at Scaleway, had some great insights to share:

The day started strongly right from the opening keynote, as moderated by the wonderful Jérôme Petazzoni . The first speaker was Solomon Hykes , who presented their new DevOps platform called Dagger—what it is, how it works, and that they want it to be as revolutionary as Docker.

So what is Dagger? If you believe the marketing material, it aspires to be a “devops operating system”. The idea is straightforward: a programmable CI/CD engine that runs pipelines in standard OCI containers . Notably, it uses GraphQL to build and parse directed acyclic graphs, or “DAGs”, which was a word that Solomon said a lot. In fact, the concept is so fundamental to the platform that they literally named their product after it. 😆 Hana continues…

Did you know that the National Education system of France uses Scaleway infrastructure? And Kubernetes too. This is especially important during the annual baccalaureate period when they need to deal with the equivalent of a millions pages of tests, texts, and treatises per day! Auto-scaling is the obvious killer feature here, but they also benefit from having year-round reliability to run not only their applications, but their MongoDB and PostgreSQL databases as well. It was a pleasant surprise to see how on-point they are in this area.

After that interesting presentation, I had an opportunity to get on stage myself! Instead of a standard-issue sponsor pitch, I thought I’d do something a little different—something more entertaining! And what better way to get the audience talking than to drive right at the most pressing issue of our era: how do you pronounce kubectl ? (The answers may surprise you. 😉)

Following that, Hana and I both attended Alexandre Mechain ’s talk on Observability, and why it costs so much:

I liked this talk about Observability because there was concrete advice on how to make it less expensive:

Don’t pay to collect the data

Don’t ship any data that you don’t really need

The open source telemetry ecosystem is very mature now

Optimise how your data is stored; for example, SSDs vs block storage vs cold storage

Don’t store every info-level log message—you only need errors and warnings. The rest can be turned into metrics

To that I’ll add that protocols, projects, platforms, and tools such as StatsD, Open Telemetry, Prometheus, Logstash, and so forth are powerful and well-understood by our industry. Rolling your own solution isn’t always the way to go, but whether you choose to lock into a vendor or not, Alexandre’s advice is sound.

Let’s all go the lobby

KCD was a high-quality event. It was a good place to meet the French Kubernetes community, talk to people with very different use-cases, and exchange with other Kubernetes service providers.

– Alexandre GESTAT , Product Marketing Manager

After a great morning of presentations it was time to hit the floor and visit with all of the great sponsors, without whom the conference would never have been possible! I’ll let Thibault Genaitay , our Kubernetes Product Manager, fill you in on some of his highlights.

The stands were organised into two groups, with the French and European companies towards the front, and the other sponsors towards the back. Another sign that we were at KCD France, specifically! It was good to see international companies though, with representation from the likes of JFrog, Lacework, and Palo Alto Networks. Thinking more locally, I was glad to see ENIX, as well as our partner in crime, WeScale.

We have more in common with WeScale than just the name. They helped us build our inaugural Scaleway Certification course , and we do all sorts of things like webinars and other activities with them as well.

More talks!

I met plenty of people with strong skills and a high-level knowledge of Kubernetes.

– Louis PORTAY , DevOps Engineer

After lunch it was back to more talks! Thibault resumes…

First stop: a talk about GitOps by Madou Coulibaly of Gitlab, wherein we compared the lifecycle of an application within the DevOps framework to that of infrastructure—within the GitOps framework. So what is GitOps? It starts with codification, which involves concepts such as Infrastructure-as-Code, configuration policies, and so forth. The next layer is collaboration, where stakeholders use git tooling to review and manage changes (i.e. pull requests, etc). Then there’s automation, where those changes are deployed and via pre-built pipelines using CI/CD principles.

According to Madou, when it comes to actually implementing GitOps in practice, there are two major strategies: pushing and pulling.

In a push-based model, the pipeline sends (pushes) the changes to the target. In a pull-based model, an agent analyses the desired state, compares it to the current state, and then…