Actually, you would think that ordering tickets for a conference and booking a hotel would be easy, without any problems… Well, if it were easy, anyone could do it..

I first heard about “ContainerConf” a few months ago. After viewing the programme I was convinced that this would be extremely interesting for us. I gave a short info to our CTO Dima – ready to go. During the early bird phase, we booked tickets accordingly. Dima also signed up for the workshops on Tuesday, I only signed up for the 2-day talks.

Later it became known that Dennis is also coming to the talks. “Nice, I have a chauffeur then” I thought. Simone had taken care of the booking of the hotels, everything seemed to run smoothly. 1 day before we wanted to go to Mannheim, I created a checklist for packing together with Dennis:

+Clothes – Check

+Shower gel – Check

+Toothbrush & Toothpaste – Check

+Conference ticket – Um…

ContainerConf or what?

Then I noticed that Dennis had not booked a ticket for the conference. Of course, the conference was fully booked at that time.

“Shit. Now I have to go to Mannheim alone with the company car?” Inside, a slight panic broke out.

On the day of departure, we were able to get Dennis a ticket for the conference, but the booking for the hotel had already been cancelled and booked only for me. In the end Dennis had managed to get a room in a hotel in Heidelberg – 30 kilometres from Mannheim.

The trip

For a short time I was allowed to act as a driver of the BMW 3 Series – a disaster, I found. For various reasons Dennis took the wheel for the next 320km. The following 3 hours’ drive consisted of small talk and stupid.

After we felt that we were boarded through a construction site every 5 minutes, we defined a new game: In how many kilometres do we drive to the next construction site? – It’s 3:1 for me. At some point I turned up a Spotify 90s playlist and went on with karaoke.

The hotel and the first night

Arriving at “die Golde Gans”, we were warmly welcomed. The deal – booking confirmation for keys – went off without a hitch. On the way to the actual hotel, which was only 5 meters away from the reception, the first mishap: I knocked over the big ashtray with may bag. “GJ Sebbo, leaving a  impression”…

The night, however, I couldn’t fall asleep immediately and had a creepydream that someone was knocking on the room door, scratching and trying to get in with a key and I was lying in bed and couldn’t move.

My yield and me

 

The Conference

The talks were, I think, super informative. The speakers picked the listeners up and entertained us. For the most time, I focused on talks about “Kubernetes”. This topic is new territory for me at

Interesting talks ans cool experts

the moment, but I am constantly learning new topics and trying to plan corresponding infrastructures in my head. Tools like “Helm”, “Draft” or “Skaffold” should simplify the cluster orchestration. In my opinion, the theme park is very complex and solves as many problems as it opens up new ones. My mindset has developed in a positive way, just like in every other conference before, and now I look and evaluate some processes with different eyes:

 

  •     Does the (micro-)service provide metrics?
  •     Are there alerts?
  •     What does the visualization of the metrics look like?
  •     Is the deployment idempotent?

I feel like a junior again – with the goal of becoming a master in “Kubernetes” and all the useful tools that are available. If I have succeeded, I have certainly found a new, personal challenge.

New tools:

 

  •     Helmet
  •     draft
  •     skaffold
  •     Kaniko
Dennis and me at ContainerConf.