Events Archives - credativ®

On Friday, September 12th, we attended PGDay Lowlands 2025 in Rotterdam and it was definitely a conference to remember. It took place at the Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam, in the Oceanium building. It was an unforgettable experience to discuss databases while surrounded by various fish, sharks, and rays. Our company credativ GmbH, as an enterprise-grade open-source support provider for PostgreSQL, was a sponsor of the event and we had a booth there to meet attendees. Our CTO Alexander Wirt and our PostgreSQL expert Joop Boonen met visitors on our booth and discussed with them many technical aspects of PostgreSQL.

My Talk about Database Corruption

I represented our company also as a speaker, giving a talk titled “Database in Distress: Testing and Repairing Different Types of Database Corruption.” This talk summarized my experiences with database corruption. I’ve seen many corruption issues while repairing live systems. So I built a Python corruption simulator, which surgically damages selected parts of a data block in a testing table, and I used different PostgreSQL extensions to analyze these cases. The talk walked through examples of page-level corruption and discussed strategies for recovery. At the end of my talk, I discussed potential new Postgres features or settings that could make repairs less painful in the future. After the talk, many attendees came to our booth to discuss their experiences with specific corruption cases, which also sparked greater interest in credativ’s services.

Other Talks and Highlights

The whole day was packed with great sessions. A few that stood out to me:
  • Opening remarks – Boriss Mejias, as the organizer and guide, opened the conference by emphasizing the value of the community around PostgreSQL. Personally,
  • Jimmy Angelakos – “How Do We Get Postgres to the Next Level?”
    This talk was inspired by the one given by Simon Riggs in December 2023 in Prague. Jimmy offered different insights to keep improving PostgreSQL by making it more modular, boosting test coverage, creating a team specialized only in performance issues, and adding some new cutting-edge features. In particular, he mentioned goals like 100% regression testing, online major-version upgrades, and optional multi-threading – all part of a roadmap to solidify PostgreSQL’s lead.
  • Gulçin Yıldırım Jelinek – “Anatomy of Table-Level Locks in PostgreSQL”
    This was an intermediate deep dive into DDL locks: explaining Access Share, Exclusive, Access Exclusive locks, and how they queue during ALTER or DROP commands. She showed how to interpret lock waits and deadlocks, and shared practical tips (like using online schema-change tools) to achieve near-zero downtime during migrations.
  • Chris Ellis – “Fun With UUIDs“
    I very much enjoyed this talk. UUIDs have a bad reputation, mostly because randomly allocated UUIDs negatively affect indexes. But UUIDs also give us 16 bytes of space to play with, which can be to our advantage. Chris showed how to use the space of UUIDs to structure and encode data within identifiers to distinguish tenants, shards, or partitions.
  • Johannes Paul – “Actual trees, not b-trees – how I found PostgreSQL through PostGIS”
    Speaker charmed the auditorium with the story of a neighbor’s climate-monitoring project mapping real-life tree data across Germany. Because he needed efficient geographic searches, Johannes switched to using PostGIS on PostgreSQL for his web app.
  • Dirk Krautschick – “Beyond Postgres – Insights about the PostgreSQL Extensibility”
    Dirk emphasized that Postgres is designed to be lightweight yet powerful via extensions. He explained the extension framework and sketched out how to write a new extension for extra functionality.
  • Andreas Scherbaum – “What I learned interviewing the PostgreSQL Community”
    I enormously enjoyed this talk . Andreas has been running the postgresql.life interview series and distilled some fun stats from them. It was a charming “state of the community” talk with interesting charts and quotes.
  • The final debate on “Autotuning in Postgres” was also very interesting. The PRO side (Luigi Nardi, Gianni Ciolli) argued that autotuning tools can save DBAs hours of manual work. But the CON side (Mayuresh S. Bagayatkar, Guy Gyles) countered that blindly auto-changing settings might over-tune and even hurt performance, since machines lack the human context for every deployment and current AI has no concept of truth.

Reflections

PGDay Lowlands 2025 was a fantastic experience. The mix of deep technical content and the relaxed zoo setting made for a friendly, engaging atmosphere. It was great to meet so many users and contributors and to hear about real-world problems, and even pick up new ideas for future work. I’m proud that credativ could play a role in such a great community event. PostgreSQL continues to grow and evolve, with people thinking hard about different issues, from locks and extensions to automatic tuning, and the community’s energy is truly inspiring. We are already looking forward to PGDay Lowlands 2026!



Photos (c) credativ GmbH or PG Day Lowlands organizers

PG Day Austria 2025 in ViennaOn September 4, 2025, the third pgday Austria took place in the Apothecary Wing of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, following the previous events in 2021 and 2022.
153 participants had the opportunity to attend a total of 21 talks and visit 15 different sponsors, discussing all possible topics related to PostgreSQL and the community.

Also present this time was the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which is dedicated to rescuing elephants and rhinos. Attendees could learn about the project, make donations, and participate in a raffle.

The talks ranged from topics such as benchmarking and crash recovery to big data.
Our colleague was also represented with his talk “Postgres with many data: To MAXINT and beyond“.

As a special highlight, at the end of the day, before the networking event, and in addition to the almost obligatory lightning talks, there was a “Celebrity DB Deathmatch” where various community representatives came together for a very entertaining stage performance to find the best database in different disciplines. To everyone’s (admittedly not great) surprise, PostgreSQL was indeed able to excel in every category.

Additionally, our presence with our own booth gave us the opportunity to have many very interesting conversations and discussions with various community members, as well as sponsors and visitors in general.
For the first time, the new managing director of credativ GmbH was also on site after our re-independence and saw things for himself.

All in all, it was a (still) somewhat smaller, but nonetheless, as always, a very instructive and familiar event, and we are already looking forward to the next one and thank the organizers and the entire team on site and behind the scenes.

This weekend, it was time once again for FrOScon 2025. With perfect summer weather – not too hot, not too cold – the event took place at the university in Sankt Augustin, as it does every year. But this year was different: FrOScon celebrated its 20th anniversary. I have a special connection to the conference. Not only is it the largest local open source conference, but I have also been a part of it for many years. I have given countless presentations, organised Debian stands, and run and organised developer tracks. In 2007, I even had the pleasure of being part of the organising team. In a way, FrOScon is like coming home. Everywhere you look, you see familiar faces you've known for many years, former and current colleagues, good friends from the open source scene. The only comparable event is Fosdem in Brussels – which is not surprising, as Fosdem is the great role model for FrOScon.

A journey through time – 20 years of FrOScon

I was already involved in the first FrOScon as an exhibitor for the Debian project, speaker and organiser of the Debian track (together with my colleague Martin Zobel-Helas, who is still involved). I could probably still give the presentation on techniques for combating spam today without changing a word, as the topic has lost none of its relevance. The first FrOScon closed its doors with a very respectable attendance of around 300 visitors. I was so enthusiastic that I got directly involved in the organisation the following year – this was also the year we introduced the famous bouncy castle ;). Over the course of 20 years, FrOScon has developed into one of the largest German OSS community events and now attracts around 1,500 visitors every year. Over the years, the conference has also attracted various prominent keynote speakers, including Andrew Tanenbaum and Richard Stallman, to name but a few. Then as now, I can say that FrOScon is the best conference in the West.

FrOScon 2025


Let's get to the actual content of this blog post – FrOScon 2025. We were represented this year with two presentations and several colleagues as visitors. My colleague Patrick Lauer dedicated one of the rooms to the topic of "Postgres with many data". Thanks to c3voc, the presentation is also available as a stream for anyone who was unable to attend, so everyone can fill this knowledge gap at a later date.

I also gave a presentation again this year. The topic was Proxmox VE and external block devices. I talked about the different types of block devices, such as ISCSI, Fibre Channel and NVMEoF, and how to use them. This presentation is also available in the c3voc video archive.

Conclusion

This FrOScon was once again a successful event for community members and interested professionals. It's a bit like a class reunion: you see lots of familiar faces and are excited to find out what everyone has been up to since you last met. Even if I'm hopefully retired by then, I would be delighted to give a presentation at FrOScon #40 ;).

From July 14 to 19, 2025, this year’s Debian Conference (DebConf25) is taking place in Brest, Western France, with over 450 participants – the central meeting of the global Debian community. The DebConf annually brings together developers, maintainers, contributors, and enthusiasts to collaboratively work on the free Linux distribution Debian and exchange ideas on current developments.

credativ is once again participating as a sponsor this year – and is also represented on-site by several employees.

A Week Dedicated to Free Software

DebConf25 offers a diverse program with over 130 sessions: technical presentations, discussion panels, workshops, and BoF sessions (“Birds of a Feather”) on a wide variety of topics from the Debian ecosystem. Some key topics this year:

Many of the presentations will, as always, be recorded and are publicly available on video.debian.net, or can be viewed live via https://debconf25.debconf.org/.

Credativ’s Commitment – not just On-Site

As a long-standing part of the Debian community, it is natural for credativ to contribute as a sponsor to DebConf again in 2025. Furthermore, our colleagues Bastian, Martin, and Noël are on-site to exchange ideas with other developers, attend presentations or BoFs, and experience current trends in the community.

Especially for companies focused on professional open-source services, Debian remains a cornerstone – whether in data centers, in the embedded sector, or in complex infrastructure projects.

Debian Remains Relevant – both Technically and Culturally

Debian is not only one of the most stable and reliable Linux distributions but also represents a special form of community and collaboration. The open, transparent, and decentralized organization of the project remains exemplary to this day.

For us at credativ, the Debian project has always been a central element of our work – and at the same time, a community to which we actively contribute through technical contributions, package maintenance, and long-term commitment.

Thank You, DebConf Team!

Heartfelt thanks go to the DebConf25 organizing team, as well as to all helpers who made this great conference possible. Brest is a beautiful and fitting venue with fresh Atlantic air, a relaxed atmosphere, and ample space for exchange and collaboration.

Outlook for 2026

Planning for DebConf26 is already underway. We look forward to the next edition of DebConf, which will take place in Santa Fe, Argentina – and to continuing to be part of this vibrant and important community in the future.

PGConf.DE 2025, the 9th Annual PostgreSQL Conference Germany, was held on May 8–9, 2025, at the Marriott Hotel near Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. The event interconnected PostgreSQL enthusiasts, developers, DBAs, and industry sponsors for two days of fascinating talks across four parallel tracks. It was the biggest event so far, with 347 attendees. The whole conference was very well organized, and therefore special thanks are due to all the organizers—in particular Andreas Scherbaum, the main organizer—for their efforts and hard work.

Our company, credativ GmbH, being independent again, participated as a gold sponsor. The credativ CTO Alexander Wirt, Head of Sales & Marketing Peter Dreuw and team leader of Database team Tobias Kauder, were available for attendees at the credativ booth. Many thanks to our team colleague Sascha Spettmann for delivering all the stands and billboards to the conference and back again.

    

In total, we held four talks at the conference. Michael Banck, technical leader of our database team, presented the German-language talk “PostgreSQL Performance Tuning.” He provided a deep and comprehensive overview of the most important performance-tuning parameters in PostgreSQL and explained how they influence the database’s behavior. His talk attracted a large audience and was very well received.

  

I had an absolutely unique opportunity to present three different talks in the English track. In my regular talk “PostgreSQL Connections Memory Usage: How Much, Why and When,” I presented the results of my research and tests on PostgreSQL connections’ memory usage. After explaining the most important aspects of Linux memory management and measurements of memory usage reported by standard commands, I detailed PostgreSQL connection memory usage during query execution based on numbers reported in smaps files. I intend to publish detailed blog posts about my findings soon. My other talk, “Building a Data Lakehouse with PostgreSQL,” was originally chosen as a reserve talk in case of a last-minute cancellation. Unfortunately, this indeed happened: the talk “Creating a Board Game Chatbot with Postgres, AI, and RAG” by Matt Cornillon had to be replaced. The speaker could not attend because his flight was unexpectedly canceled at very short notice.

 

In the sponsor track, credativ CTO Alexander Wirt and I presented a talk titled “Your Data Deserves the Best: Migration to PostgreSQL.” It featured our new migration tool, “credativ-pg-migrator.” It is capable of migrating data models (tables, data, indexes, constraints, and views) from Informix, IBM DB2 LUW, MS SQL Server, Sybase ASE, SQL Anywhere, and MySQL/MariaDB. In the case of Informix, it can also convert stored procedures, functions, and triggers into PostgreSQL PL/pgSQL. We will share more details about this tool in a separate blog post.

Since there were always three or four parallel talks, I had to carefully choose which sessions to attend. I greatly enjoyed the talk “András in Windowsland – a DBA’s (mis)adventures” by András Váczi from Cybertec. The speaker presented many useful tips for accessing and troubleshooting PostgreSQL on Windows. I also enjoyed the German talk “Modern VACUUM,” delivered by Christoph Berg from Cybertec. He provided valuable insights into the history and implementation details of the VACUUM command and autovacuum background processes. Another very interesting talk was the German presentation “Modernes SSL ideal einsetzen” by Peter Eisentraut from EDB. The talk covered selecting appropriate protocol versions and cryptographic cipher suites, managing keys and certificates, and configuring client/server settings to meet contemporary security standards. The talk “Comparing the Oracle and PostgreSQL transaction systems,” delivered by Laurenz Albe from Cybertec, received a lot of well-deserved attention. Key topics included Oracle’s undo/redo mechanism versus PostgreSQL’s MVCC approach, differences in isolation level defaults and anomalies, and how each database implements constraints and transactional DDL. Last but not least, I want to mention the talk “What is an SLRU anyway?” delivered by major PostgreSQL contributor Álvaro Herrera. He explained that SLRUs are essentially circular logs with an in-memory cache used for tracking information such as committed transactions or snapshot data and he highlighted the significance of PostgreSQL 17’s innovations which made SLRU cache sizes configurable. Unfortunately, the talks were not recorded, but slides for the majority of the talks are already available on the conference website.

The whole event was highly informative and provided excellent networking opportunities. We are very much looking forward to participating in the next PGConf.DE. In the meantime, stay tuned to all credativ news, follow us on social media – LinkedIn and Mastodon.

If you are interested in our PostgreSQL related services, click here!

The Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day (P2D2) is a well-established Czech PostgreSQL conference. This year’s 17th edition was exceptional, with 275 registered visitors and 16 talks across two tracks. Notably, several major PostgreSQL contributors and core members were present, underlining the event’s significance. Tomas Vondra, as in previous years, organized the conference. Bruce Momjian, Vice President and Postgres Evangelist at EDB, led a half-day workshop titled “Postgres & AI: From the Trenches to the Sky.” Robert Haas delivered a really interesting talk on Incremental Backup in PostgreSQL 17, a feature he developed.

I had the fantastic opportunity to contribute to this conference with my new talk, “Building a Data Lakehouse with PostgreSQL: Dive into Formats, Tools, Techniques, and Strategies.” Given the still evolving nature of this topic and the varying definitions of data lakehouses, I covered the most important areas, highlighting the functionalities and extensions PostgreSQL offers. I received very positive feedback on my talk and had several insightful discussions about the topic with different people.

Among the talks I attended, I particularly enjoyed Robert Haas’s presentation on Incremental Backups, the practical demonstration of PostgreSQL statistics in the talk “Statistics: How PostgreSQL Counts Without Counting” by Sadeq Dousti, and the very interesting presentation “Anatomy of Table-Level Locks in PostgreSQL” by Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek. She explained in detail the hierarchy of different locking levels and the events leading to delays in operations due to locks. Other notable talks included “Replicating Schema Changes with PostgreSQL” by Esther Miñano and “When Autovacuum Met FinOps: A Cloud Romance” by Mayuresh Bagayatkar. You can find summaries of all talks and soon also the slides on the P2D2 website. I want to express my gratitude to all the organizers of this amazing event, especially Tomas Vondra and Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek, who both do a great job in organizing PostgreSQL events not only in the Czech Republic.

 (c) Tomas Vondra EDB & organizers of P2D2 conference

DebConf 2024 from 28. July to 4. Aug 2024 https://debconf24.debconf.org/

Last week the annual Debian Community Conference DebConf happend in Busan, South Korea. Four NetApp employees (Michael, Andrew, Christop and Noël) participated the whole week at the Pukyong National University. The camp takes place before the conference, where the infrastructure is set up and the first collaborations take place. The camp is described in a separate article: https://www.credativ.de/en/blog/credativ-inside/debcamp-bootstrap-for-debconf24/
There was a heat wave with high humidity in Korea at the time but the venue and accommodation at the University are air conditioned so collaboration work, talks and BoF were possible under the circumstances.

Around 400 Debian enthusiasts from all over the world were onsite and additional people attended remotly with the video streaming and the Matrix online chat #debconf:matrix.debian.social

The content team created a schedule with different aspects of Debian; technical, social, political,….
https://debconf24.debconf.org/schedule/

There were two bigger announcements during DebConf24:

  1. the new distribution eLxr https://elxr.org/ based on Debian initiated by Windriver
    https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/138-a-unified-approach-for-intelligent-deployments-at-the-edge/
    Two takeaway points I understood from this talk is Windriver wants to exchange CentOS and preferes a binary distribution.
  2. The Debian package management system will get a new solver https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/8-the-new-apt-solver/

The list of interesting talks is much longer from a full conference week. Most talks and BoF were streamed live and the recordings can be found in the video archive:
https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2024/DebConf24/

It is a tradtion to have a Daytrip for socializing and get a more interesting view of the city and the country. https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/24/DayTrip/ (sorry the details of the three Daytrip are on the website for participants).

For the annual conference group photo we have to go outsite into the heat with high humidity but I hope you will not see us sweeting.

The Debian Conference 2025 will be in July in Brest, France: https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/25/ and we will be there.:) Maybe it will be a chance for you to join us.

See also Debian News: DebConf24 closes in Busan and DebConf25 dates announced

On Thursday, 27 June, and Friday, 28 June 2024, I had the amazing opportunity to attend Swiss PGDay 2024. The conference was held at the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, Campus Rapperswil, which is beautifully situated on the banks of Lake Zurich in a nice, green environment. With approximately 110 attendees, the event had mainly a B2B focus, although not exclusively. Despite the conference being seemingly smaller in scale compared to PostgreSQL events in larger countries, it actually reflected perfectly the scope relevant for Switzerland.

During the conference, I presented my talk “GIN, BTREE_GIN, GIST, BTREE_GIST, HASH & BTREE Indexes on JSONB Data“. The talk summarized the results of my long-term project at NetApp, including newer interesting findings compared to the presentation I gave in Prague at the beginning of June. As far as I could tell, my talk was well received by the audience, and I received very positive feedback.

At the very end on Friday, I also presented a lightning talk, “Can PostgreSQL Have a More Prominent Role in the AI Boom?” (my slides are at the end of the file). In this brief talk, I raised the question of whether it would be possible to implement AI functionality directly into PostgreSQL, including storing embedding models and trained neural networks within the database. Several people in the audience, involved with ML/AI, reacted positively on this proposal, acknowledging that PostgreSQL could indeed play a more significant role in ML and AI topics.

The conference featured two tracks of presentations, one in English and the other in German, allowing for a diverse range of topics and speakers. I would like to highlight some of them:

At the end of the first day, all participants were invited to a social event for networking and personal exchange, which was very well organized. I would like to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of all the organizers and thank them for their efforts. Swiss PGDay 2024 was truly a memorable and valuable experience, offering great learning opportunities. I am grateful for the chance to participate and contribute to the conference, and I look forward to future editions of this event. I am also very thankful to NetApp-credativ for making my participation in the conference possible.

Photos by organizers, Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek and author:

 

 

   

On Wednesday, June 5th, I attended the Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day 2024. It is the premier PostgreSQL conference in the Czech Republic, and this year marked its 16th iteration. The event was held in the modern and convenient environment of the Czech Technical University and was attended by almost 270 participants.

During the conference, I presented my talk, “GIN, BTREE_GIN, GIST, and BTREE Indexes on JSONB Data.” This talk summarized the current findings of my project at NetApp (credativ), which I initiated to deepen our understanding of these indexing methods and their performance results. Our goal is to provide relevant and valuable solutions to our customers, who often struggle with implementing JSONB columns and operations into their applications and find the available information insufficient. Even existing AI models fall short as they rely on the same limited publicly available data. The project is focused on JSONB data; however, the results have already shown applicability beyond just this type of data. The positive reactions from the audience indicated that my presentation was well-received. The conference is a bilingual event, with presentations in both Czech and English. Being from Czechia, I delivered my talk in Czech but used English slides.

The conference also featured seven other insightful talks throughout the day. The first talk by Jan Karremans from Cybertec delved into the CloudNativePG operator, which implements PostgreSQL to run on Kubernetes. The second talk by Jakub Zemanek from initMax provided a detailed guide on configuring PostgreSQL accounts based on Active Directory using Ansible and the ldap2pg program. Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek from EDB followed with a practical example of implementing vector storage of AI embeddings in PostgreSQL. I also really enjoyed the engaging and informative talk by Boriss Mejias from EDB, who explained different types of consistency and ways to ensure them in PostgreSQL using synchronous or asynchronous replication, and colored his talk with practical examples from a big musical event, where payments from multiple sources must be quickly and safely distributed throughout the system. Pavel Stehule offered a deep analysis of the pros and cons of the existing cost-based optimizer in PostgreSQL (slides in Czech lang). Pavlo Golub from Cybertec delivered an informative session on programming different PostgreSQL operations with the Go language. In the final talk, Ales Zeleny presented an in-depth analysis of the features of two extensions focused on monitoring query performance in PostgreSQL – pg_stat_statements and pg_stat_monitor.

The conference was really well-organized, and I extend my gratitude to Tomas Vondra and the other organizers for their hard work. Overall, it was very successful event, filled with valuable insights, engaging discussions, and networking opportunities. I look forward to applying the knowledge gained here and I am eager for future editions of the P2D2 conference.

Useful links:

  1. Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day 2024 talks – summaries with links to slides (English / Czech)
  2. Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day 2024 conference recap – Tomas Vondra (English)

Photos by Tomas Vondra (EDB):

 

Once again a KubeCon has come to an end

This year, the CNCF hosted the meeting in the French capital. In the south of Paris at the PARIS EXPO PORTE DE VERSAILLES, over 12,000 participants came together again this year.

In addition to various talks and unconferences, there was also a wide range of Contribfests slots, which made it easier for interested parties to get involved in various projects. The thematic focus this year was clearly on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Wednesday morning started at 9 am. All keynotes had one thing in common: the topic of AI/ML! Here are a few titles: “Accelerating AI Workloads with GPUs in Kubernetes”, “Build an Open Source Platform for AI/ML” or “Optimizing Performance and Sustainability for AI”. In addition to the keynotes, participants were also offered plenty of talks on the topic of AI and ML. Anyone interested in this topic could find what they were looking for at any time during the three days in the “Paris” room. The new white paper on “Cloud Native AI” was also announced during the keynotes.

Location

Anyone wishing to enter the conference first had to pass through security, consisting of metal detectors and possible bag checks.

Unfortunately, there was again the problem of overcrowded rooms this year. Several times during the day it was necessary to reschedule spontaneously, as the selected talk was unfortunately already overcrowded and admission was no longer possible. Unfortunately, this also applied to some keynotes in the morning.

A few impressions

The CNCF Storage TAG and the Storage SIG reported on current developments in the storage sector and mentioned various white papers (“CNCF Storage Whitepaper, Performance and Benchmarking whitepaper, Cloud Native Disaster Recovery whitepaper, and the Data on Kubernetes whitepaper.”). Among other things, it was shown how “PersistendVolumeAttributes” can be used to adjust PersistentVolume attributes, for example to adjust the number of IOPS for a volume during operation.

In the Contribfest slot on Metal3 (Metal Kubed), the maintainers of the project gave a first insight and showed how a development environment can be set up. Among other things, Metal3 offers a ClusterAPI (CAPI) implementation that can be used to manage bare-metal systems. Ironic, which originates from the OpenStack project, is used in the background.

At the “From UI to Storage” talk Thanos maintainers gave an insight into the current implementation and potential future improvements.

In the “CRI-O Odyssey”, the CRI-O maintainers talked about innovations within the Container Runtime. This included the topic of “Confidential Containers” and “Podman-in-Kubernetes”. The topic of WASM integration was also on the agenda.

The maintainers of Fink reported on “Fink on Kubernetes” and how the system is used to classify objects like astroids or supernovas in the field of astronomy.

In the talk “eBPF: Abilities and Limitations”, not only general misconceptions were clarified, but also ways to work around existing limitations were pointed out. In addition, the question of whether eBPF touring is complete was raised and a version of Conway’s “Game of Life” in eBPF was presented.

Those who have always wanted to know how Istio mTLS can be implemented in multi-cluster environments with the help of SPIRE found what they were looking for in room D. After a short introduction to SPIFFE and SPIRE, it was shown how Istio components can be connected to the SPIRE agent.

Maintainers of operator-sdk talked about current innovations in operator-SDK and OLM V1. Particularly interesting were the changes in the Operator Lifecycle Manger that have been introduced in version 1 (previously version 0). Among other things, OLM v1 is now able to manage packaged operators via Helm, even without prior preparation by the operator maintainers.

Conclusion

In addition to many interesting talks, there were plenty of opportunities for lively discussions with other conference attendees and exchanges with exhibitors or project maintainers.

We are already looking forward to KubeCon 2025 in London!

This year’s FOSS Backstage took place on 2024-03-04 and 2024-03-05 at bUm in Berlin, Germany. One Debian Developer and employee of NetApp had the opportunity to attend this conference: Bastian Blank.

FOSS Backstage focuses on the non-coding aspects of Open Source projects. Aspects like governance, how to structure a project, and how to grow your project where talked a lot about. But also legal aspects on licenses choice and license compliance showed up.

Many startups will eventually show up the radar of Venture Capital. While this will make some people wealthy, this is often a turning point for FOSS principles. Melanie Rieback presented the keynote with insight into her successful non-profit security company. A company that can’t be sold to anyone really.

Once in a while, hopefully not too often, it will be necessary to change the structure of a project. For example if the founder of the project and his company suddenly goes away. Ruth Cheesley showed how changing the governance model can work in reality.

Funding is a not so easy, but still important part of every project. Some insights where given by Shane Curcuru about how projects are currently funded, with data he collects and publishes.

All presentations have been recorded and should show up on the YouTube channel of the organizers.

Introduction

For the first time ever, one of our colleagues had the chance to visit the North American edition of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Chicago this year.

Our colleague Michael Sprengel who already works 8 years for credativ and has gained a lot of experiences with Kubernetes and the development of Kubernetes controllers in that time, is sharing his experiences from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2023.

So with no further ado, let’s hand it over to our colleague Michael.

Come fly with me back to Chicago

Hi folks, my name is Michael Sprengel – Professional Service Consultant here at credativ – and I want to share my experiences with you from this year’s KubeCon / CloudNativeCon in North America. So come with me and let me give you a first person view of all the talks and things that I was able to experience here in Chicago. You may not had the chance to visit the North American edition of KubeCon so far, so this is the best chance for you to get some insights which could make you think of also attending KubeCon and CloudNativeCon next year then.

Those editions will take place in Paris and Salt Lake City.

Chicago – The Windy City

The good thing about such conferences is not only the possibility to attend talks and learn about new technologies that you can use in daily projects but it’s also an opportunity to learn new cultures and leave with a bag full of new memories.

This year, the conference took place in Chicago that is also known as the Windy City. I was lucky enough to arrive on Saturday, so that I had a chance to pack my backpack and pay Chicago a visit a day before the conference started. Hereby, I was able to check some of Chicago’s well known sights like for example Lake Michigan or the mighty Millennium Park in the center of Downtown Chicago.

The only downfall to this was that Chicago’s Cloud Gate that is also known as The Bean. This landmark is currently under construction at, so that I could only take a picture through some construction fences. But other than that, the city has a lot to offer like Deep Dish and Thin Crust Pizza or some university you may want to visit. Chicago is definitely worth it.

Day 1: Operator Day

Besides of this wonderful city, the actual conference has also a lot to offer. If you’re lucky enough to get a All-access pass for KubeCon, you can already visit some CNCF-hosted Co-located events near the venue. But don’t worry. Even if you don’t have such a pass, you can attend some virtual events already.

For me personally, I attended the so called Operator Day by Canonical. It’s a full day event that takes place from 9am to 4pm. It gave me some pretty good insights in implementing Kubernetes operators the Canonical way by using Juju.

Unfortunately, the current edition from Chicago isn’t online so far, but you can check out the last Operator Day from Europe by watching the videos below:

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Day 2: First experiences from the venue

The second day was really mind blowing. If you never attended such a conference before, you will be surprised by the amount of talks as well as by the size of the actual venue.

After arriving at the venue, I had a chance to grab a breakfast and a coffee as well as attend the Opening Remarks in which leading Kubernetes and CNCF developers, engineers and ambassadors highlight the latest and greatest changes in Kubernetes and the CNCF space. Here, you could really feel how Machine Learning and AI is influencing Kubernetes and how features are added to this project to better support ML/AI.

Next to this, you have a big variety of talks that you can attend or you can go to the Solutions Showcase where all the major companies and sponsors have their booth. There, you can talk to maintainers or get in touch with companies that are using CNCF related projects or Kubernetes in their business. Typically some booths also offer so called Lightning Talks. These are like general talks but they tend to be shorter than the usual ones and they are mostly focusing on hands on sessions or live demos.

Day 3/4: Talks, talks and some more talks

In general, I was able to attend a lot of talks during the conference. Some of them were exactly what I was expecting and others however surprised me. Thereby, I visited the following talks:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

The Service Mesh Battle Scars talk was one of the talks that surprised me, because it was basically and public battle between the maintainers of the biggest Service Mesh solutions in Kubernetes.

  1. Cilium
  2. Istio
  3. linkerd

It surprised me because it was quite interesting to see how each of those projects were arguing differently to specific topics like transport encryption as well as Sidecar, Sideless or Ambient mode. As an attendee, you could really get a feeling of what thoughts each project put into specific topics before realizing them. Especially the topic about encryption caught my attention. Istio and linkerd simply use mTLS for encryption, whereas Cilium now tries to use TLS for the initial handshake while using the resulting encryption key for IPSec to implement transport encryption. This concept led to a heavy discussion if this approach is still considered to be secure since Cilium is only reusing some part of TLS instead of using it completely and usually reusing well known and accepted security algorithms is always preferred in modern IT.

Next to this, it was also pleasing to attend the Spotify talk in which Tim Hansen explained how the engineers at Spotify implement GitOps and what effort it takes to create a new project / repository that should be deployed on production. Spotify uses some self-written solutions to achieve this and overcome some limitation that already existing solutions might have. For building and deploying for example, Spotify uses their own CI/CD solution Tingle. Tingle was created in 2017 to serve as the centralized CI/CD system for backend, data and web services and it thereby replaced 200 stand-alone Jenkins machines. More information about this, can be found here:

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Although this talk mainly focused on Spotify and their GitOps tools, the presenter also showcased open source tools which helps to accomplish similar functionality without relying on Spotify’s own tools.

Overall, the majority of talks really helped me to broaden my knowledge regarding Kubernetes and the solutions out there. Only some talks didn’t match my expectation, but even then you still have plenty of other talks to choose from.

Get the first person view

If you want to get an idea of how such a conference looks like, I create three videos which let you experience the conference similar to what I was able to experience. Give it a try and visit KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2023 with me again!

Conclusion

Having the opportunity to travel to Chicago and experience KubeCon and CloudNativeCon for the first time was an one in the lifetime experiences. You not only have the chance to get insights to so many CNCF related projects but it’s also a good opportunity to get in touch with developers, engineers, managers and other people who use Kubernetes on daily basis. If you have the chance to visit such a conference, I would highly recommend to take the chance and attend them.

On KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, I learned a lot about new stuff and got an idea of design decision that probably will help me to solve some upcoming challenges in one of my own projects and which I wouldn’t know about if I hadn’t attended this conference. Thereby, one quote from Dr. Angel Diaz, VP Technology Capabilities & Innovation at Discover Financial Services really stick to my head:

Code, Community, Culture

And this is what it’s all about. You not only learn new stuff that you can use in your code, but you become a part of a community and get use to a culture which enables you to contribute to projects that are the baseline of most of our daily projects.

With a lot of Deep Dish Pizza in my stomach and a lot of new knowledge in my head, I’m happy to return from KubeCon North America and start working on my Kubernetes projects again.

Thanks for sticking around with me and I hope to see you on next year’s KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, too.

And by the way, if you’re searching for experts in Kubernetes and CNCF related topics, give our sales department a call and we might be able to help you with that.