CloudYuga@KubeCon NA’18 in Seattle
Seeing things physically matters !! As I entered the KubeCon NA’18 venue; I saw CloudYuga’s logo on the wall, with other sponsors. Then I reached the booth and saw our booth. We have come a long way in 3 years !!
KubeCon NA’18 in Seattle was big, with close to 8K attendees and lots of sponsors/booths. This was our first time to represent on such a big platform. As my teammates could not travel, I went alone from Bengaluru. I got help from the community. Dustin, Jayaram, and Vishwas managed the booth along with me.
At our booth, we shared the details about our training and service offerings; along with the SaaS-based training platform we have been building. With that platform we plan to deliver all of our training, be it Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus or Istio. With so many booths around, it was a bit difficult to stand out. The most common phrase I mentioned is “Hi There …” and it really felt I am selling something. It was one heck of an experience. It was difficult to get people at the booth, but when they are at the booth; they appreciated the tool/portal, we built. So far, we have not opened it for paid courses but one of the participants wanted to enroll just then. So we had our first training sell, using the SaaS platform. It was a big moment for us.
Other than having a booth, this KubeCon was special; as I presented at the main conference. Karthik Gaekwad from Oracle and I delivered a talk called “Noobernetes”, in which we covered the top 10 questions newbies ask us on Kubernetes. We both are authors of the Kubernetes 101 course; Karthik authored an intro course on LinkedIn Learning and I did an official CNCF intro course, which is hosted on Edx. It was the last session of the day and to our surprise, it was full and very well received.
Just after the session Karthik and I did a podcast for Cisco’s Cloud Unfiltered Podcasts. Thanks to Alison Amagasu for hosting us.
It was great to be part of KubeCon’18. Some people were surprised that we sponsored the event and spent so much money to be there. Yes, it’s been hard on pocket when it’s coming from your own but “A turtle makes progress, only when it takes his neck out”. We got few good leads from KubeCon; let’s see if we can convert. Wish us good luck.
On a side note, we have indexed this KubeCon’s videos and slides here, which you may find useful.
