Mission 011: Planning Our Way to 4 Talks at KubeCon India

KubeCon and CloudNativeCon is one of the most sought-after conferences on Kubernetes, containers, and everything cloud native. Over the last few years that I have spent at InfraCloud, I got the opportunity to attend multiple KubeCons. The first one that I ever attended was KubeCon Chicago (2023), where I had the opportunity to present at the platform working group meetup. A few months later, I found myself at a panel discussion on platform engineering at the Open Commons meetup at KubeCon Paris (2024), and most recently, I spoke about the platform readiness checklist at KubeCon Salt Lake City (2024).

When the first-ever KubeCon India was announced to take place in Delhi on December 11-12, 2024, we all at InfraCloud were excited, as we have been attending almost all KubeCon ever since it began. With my experience of attending multiple KubeCons, I saw this as an opportunity and responsibility to help my fellow Infranauts showcase their amazing work to the larger community.

In this blog post, I’ll share our planning for the first KubeCon India and how we managed to secure four talks.

InfraCloud at India’s first KubeCon

India is one of the largest contributors to open source, and with all the visa woes, having a KubeCon in India meant that many of them could finally attend and experience it in person.

While everyone around was happy that KubeCon came to India and was planning to attend, I had different plans. KubeCon India offers the perfect stage to showcase the amazing work that Infranauts are doing — from Kubernetes to platform engineering — and to share our knowledge and experiences with the community. With an acceptance rate of just 11% at KubeCon Salt Lake City, it wasn’t easy. But it wasn’t impossible.

The plan - Mission 011

As soon as the CFP dates were announced, the first step was to encourage more people to come up with talk ideas and submit CFPs. While there wasn’t a strict playbook for this, here’s how I helped:

Internal evangelism

The first and foremost thing was to increase the awareness of KubeCon and, more importantly, the opportunity to speak at KubeCon. While most Infranauts knew about KubeCon, not many were aware of the process of submitting and presenting a talk at KubeCon. To do that, I planned a “Mission 011” - an online session with a walkthrough to the attendees about KubeCon, the various tracks at KubeCon, what are the requirements to submit a talk, and the areas under each track where Infranauts could submit a talk.

After the first session, quite a few people expressed interest, which means the internal evangelism worked.

Ideation Sessions

The next follow-up sessions were planned with a smaller group of people who showed interest in submitting a talk. We went through the ideas together and understood the crux of all the ideas, the problem, and how we managed to fix them. While discussing these, the idea was to keep the audience in mind and the use case that each of these ideas catered to. These were all real-world problems that we had solved, benefitting millions of end users. This motivated us further to spread the knowledge to the wider tech community that might be navigating through similar challenges.

So there were a lot of ideas. We selected some, and we merged some into a single talk, but we couldn’t take up some.

CFP Reviews & Submission

Once the ideas were locked in, writing the CFPs was next. A couple of interested folks had already written and submitted CFPs earlier, but it was their first time for a few others. That’s when we used some of the previous CPFs I had submitted and references/analyses of previously selected Kubecon talks so that they got an idea of how a CFP needs to be written.

There were a few iterations for each CFP, during which we went through each one carefully and ensured that we were capturing the right details, highlighting the problem and giving the solution, and, most importantly, having the right title to convey the essence of the talk.

The Result - 4 Talks at KubeCon

It was the 1st of October, and I first checked out the KubeCon India schedule. It was a huge surprise that we had 4 talks selected—this is a first for InfraCloud. While some of us had spoken previously at local conferences and meetups, some had never taken the stage. So, it was going to be exciting times ahead.

I was there for all these talks in person, along with many others who didn’t get a seat to listen to them. In case you missed it, below are the talks that were presented at KubeCon India.

Empower Your Platform Journey with Platforms Working Group - Atulpriya Sharma

Event link and description: Platform engineering is gaining momentum globally, with companies increasingly adopting or building platforms. The interest is evident in the growing number of platform meetups, including in India. Amidst all the buzz and efforts around platform engineering, the Platforms Working Group, part of TAG App Delivery is there to help you on your journey of adopting platforms. In this talk, we’ll provide an insight into the Platforms Working Group and our mission to support the community’s platform adoption efforts.

Intro to the CNCF App Development Working Group | WG Lightning Talk by Sonali Shrivastava

Event link and description: We are excited to introduce the newly formed Application Development Working Group (WG) under the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for App Delivery within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Co-chaired by Mauricio Salatino, Daniel Oh, and Thomas Vitale, this WG aims to foster the growth of developers in the cloud native space.

Keeping the Lights on: Zero Downtime Application Upgrades in Kubernetes - Shashank Pai & Sagar Jadhav

Event link and description: Imagine adding all your favorite products to your shopping cart, only to have the page reload and—poof—everything’s gone. Frustrating, right? For mission-critical apps, seamless upgrades in Kubernetes demand a solid grasp of how to tackle these challenges effectively. This session equips you with practical strategies for performing zero-downtime upgrades in Kubernetes.

Scaling Beyond Autoscaling: How We Grew Our Kubernetes Clusters - Bhavin Gandhi & Ruturaj Kadikar

Event link and description: You configure auto-scaling of Nodes and Pods. Do you think that is enough, or do you need to look into other areas? What other components need scaling? What strategies should be devised? How do we verify whether there will not be any impact during scaling? In this session, we answer all these questions and come up with a blueprint for scaling a Kubernetes cluster from our experience with scaling our production cluster from merely 20-25 nodes to around 250 nodes with more than 5000 pods.

Final words

“This is the kind of talk we expect in KubeCon, which talks about the real problem. Thanks for this presentation.” This was the message I received from one of the speakers, and it speaks for itself. The quality of the talks was top-notch and well-received by everyone - thanks to the dry runs and mock practice sessions.

It was a plan that worked out really well. The entire developer relations team at InfraCloud was involved in the planning and execution stages, and the result was something that none of us had expected. Now, we may think that we have a runbook in place, but that’s not the case. Every conference is unique, and hence, we need an even better plan for KubeCon India 2025, which will be happening on 6-7 August in Hyderabad. With the CFP already open, we’re thrilled for our Mission 040 and can’t wait to see what’s ahead!

Until next time, keep reading our blog posts to see what we’re up to, or check out the various other talks our Infranauts have given. If you have some interesting ideas or want to discuss this further, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.