Last week concluded an event that was to originally take place in Boston prior to the pandemic. However, while still being at home, the feel was fairly similar to a conference as far as the number of talks. In fact, the talk portion of the day had a feel of a conference. Some were live streamed with more Q&A done during the session. Others were pre-recorded with the presenter hopping on at the end for the last few minutes to address some questions.
Sadly, there is still no replacement for a physical conference with the spontaneous conversations that would crop up with the person seated next to you, or the after conference mixers. There was some attempts to help with this by using Zoom’s breakout feature during the AMA sessions, some of the games done at the end of the day, or a continuous zoom session during the middle of the day where you could hop on or off of at will. Of course, the CNCF slack workspace, helped provide a central point of communication.
As to the sessions, the talks I watched during the week focused more on the
service mesh where quite a few focused on the new trend of companies running in a multi-cloud environment using components like linkerd and Kuma.
Another thing I found surprising was the couple of talks that looked into a new feature of linkerd: webassembly plugins to provide a common runtime environment for linkerd plugins without needing to modify the linkerd proxy using C++. Also, that serverless was mentioned in a more commodity fashion indicating that it has now entered a level of core infrastructure.
Luckily with this being a virtual conference, one can catch all of the talks that they missed, and can follow-up later. The CNCF has mentioned that the talks will be released on Dec 6 in case you wanted to attend the conference live, or want to catch up on what happened.