As last year, different meetup groups from Bangalore joined hands to do a joint meetup on 24th March’18 at Walmart Lab’s office. This year 9 meetup groups participated.
Like last year, different meetup groups from Bangalore joined hands to do a joint meetup on 24th March’18 at Walmart Lab’s office. This year 9 meetup groups participated AWS, Azure, CNCF, DevOps, DigitalOcean, Docker, Elastic, Kubernetes and Kubernetes, and OpenShift.
To have some seriousness around RSVPs, we followed a similar approach as we did last year. We charged INR 250/- for registration. As Walmart sponsored the event venue, food, etc, we really did not have any expenses. Later I’ll talk about what we did with collected money. We sold ~150 tickets, within the first week of the event announcement and that is even without the agenda. We got a similar response for CFPs as well. Overall we got ~50 CFPs and as we could do only one track, we had to select 8-9 talks. After we announced the agenda, all the tickets were sold in no time. While doing the registration, we asked people which meetup group they belong but we added one extra option None – I just belong to Technology 🙂 and interestingly 161 people from 396 chose that.
The CFP selection team really had a hard time selecting just 9 talks from all the submitted CFPs. Thanks to everyone who showed interest and confidence in our community-driven efforts. In the end, we had the following agenda:-
- Introduction to Containers – Neependra Khare, CloudYuga
- Introduction to Serverless – Srushith R, CodeOps
- Securing the cloud and modern workload infrastructure – Pravin Goyal, Cavirin Systems
- Git based application deployment patterns for Kubernetes – Shahidh K Muhammed, Hasura
- Istio as a service mesh in Kubernetes – Chandresh Pancholi, Arvind Internet
- How Qubole saves upto 80% of cloud cost for customers by using spot instances – Ajaya Agrawal, Qubole
- Deep dive into operability and maintenance challenges – Gaurav Bahrani and Shanker Balan
- Distributed Tracing with Jaeger & Kubernetes at Scale – Vivek Sridhar, DigitalOcean
- Need, growth, and implementation of ChatOps and automation – Vishwa Krishnakumar, Yellowant
We had a very energetic environment on the event day. ~380 people attended the event. All of the talks were very technical and the speakers made sure that they are useful to our audience. Unfortunately, we could not record this time. Next time we’ll plan to have a dedicated team to handle it.
With registration, we received ~73K INR after deducting the payment gateway fees and GST. As we are doing this as a non-profit, the amount it spent as following:-
– Donation of INR 30,312 to Akshar Bharati, which provides libraries for underprivileged children between ages group 5-15. Thanks to our 5 speakers, who chose to donate their gift amount for this cause.
– Amazon gift coupon of INR 5750 to our other 4 speakers
– Amazon gift coupon of INR 2000 to 10 winners from the quiz, we did towards the end of the event.
Thanks to all organizers from different meetup groups for coming together to make it happen. And thanks to Walmart and volunteers who managed logistic support to us for the event. Special shout out Deepak, Jeevan, Anirudh, Karan, Jasnoor and Krishna for sharing the workload of this event.
This is our largest community-driven event in the last 2 years and we agree that there were some shortcomings. Some of the participants were unhappy about them. We tried our best be make the experience as smooth as possible and would improve on that.
So now What Next? We, as organizers think that this model works and we should take it to the next level. Following are thoughts about that, from some of us:-
– Keep it non-profit
– Keep participation (registration) fee low
– Request for sponsorship on different logistics items – Venue, Food, Video Recording, etc
– If there is remaining money, donate to a social cause
If all goes well, we’ll one more such event in the latter part of this year. Let us know what do you think !!
