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Re: Thoughts on KubeCon

Yaron Haviv <yaronh@...>
 

just for stats, for the ServerlessNYC event in 2 weeks (1 day we organized) we got about 50 submission, only 2 on Knative (one accepted)

also while most submissions covered real user stories based on experience, those two were entirely Theoretical

this further emphasize that the current decision criteria favor some big pocket companies, and KC users are less likely to to learn about other proven or more innovative approaches without the same marketing/brand power

Yaron

From: Ruben Orduz <ruben@...>
Sent: Tuesday, October 9, 2018 9:43:09 PM
To: Matt Farina
Cc: Liz Rice; Yaron Haviv; Dan Kohn; CNCF TOC
Subject: Re: [cncf-toc] Thoughts on KubeCon
 
I'm aware this is a bit a political minefield here, but I'm concerned the committee(s) are unintentionally choosing winners here (same for KubeCon EU Købnhavn). What I mean is this: "popularity" of a topic or tech can be driven/influenced by movers and shakers in the field. Google pushes for a tool they are working on will get much more traction than a competing tool from a small third party. A dramatic example of this phenomenon is having a whole track dedicated to Istio even though it was as yet a somewhat unproven technology on the field and far from production-ready for enterprise customers who tend to wait until a tech is more stable before deploying it. Several other service meshy-techs felt shunned by this. 

I'm getting the same feeling about knative here. Seeing the over abundance of talk proposals about it, it was perceived as a good gauge of community interest, which again, a behemoth is behind pushing it so that's no surprise.

I would posit we need to be more careful to unintentionally pick favorites based on popularity, specially when there's a huge asymmetry in terms of marketing power and community outreach among competitors in any given tech.

Best,
Ruben 

On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 1:46 PM Matt Farina <matt@...> wrote:
Liz, thanks for sharing those details. I know this is a tough job. Thanks for putting up with this extra work of the questioning and people poking at the ideas here. Anything I’m suggesting is more about clarifying for future conferences and trying to be explicit where we may not have been before.

I completely understand the desire to identify hot technologies. With 2/3 of the proposed talks on one technology it speaks to a level of hotness.

But, there are a couple other ways to look at this situation…

First, there is as a track attendee. 4 of 6 presentations on the same technology is not exciting and does not give me a diverse view. For someone not in the know it gives the impression that the space is not very diverse and that the main piece of technology is “work-in-progress” (the label on knative). Is this the impression we want conference attendees to have?

Second, there is from the perspective of people proposing sessions.

For Kubernetes there are currently numerous serverless technologies including, but not limited to:

  • knative
  • OpenFaaS
  • Kubeless
  • Fission
  • Brigade
  • Virtual Kubelet (works with serverless containers like ACI, Fargate, etc but is not FaaS)

Jupyter bills itself as a web application and notebook. It’s getting a lot of buzz but I’ve not heard of it being billed as Serverless.

There are also tools like serverless that can work with numerous technologies including kubeless (on this list) that are workflow solutions.

In addition there are things the CNCF serverless working group has been working on like cloudevents (which has an intro and deep dive out of band from the serverless track).

The serverless track then has 4 of 6 session on knative, 1 of 6 on something else (Jupyter), and sessions on other serverless technologies being rejected.

Can we all see how decisions here could be interpreted with malicious intent and how it could put a negative view on the conference and decision making process? Whether it happened that way or not, people could come to malicious conclusions.

This all leads me to other questions...

Do we want end-user presentations in this space? Since knative is hot but not ready for production some other technology would be used by them. But, it’s useful today and not “hot”. How do we encourage end-users to present here? Is “hot” or useful today more important?

Is a goal diversity? If so, mirroring presentations with only those that are hot doesn’t provide for diversity.

If some of the intent and goal components could be ironed out it would help future decision makers.



-- 
Matt Farina
mattfarina.com



On Oct 9, 2018, at 1:26 PM, Liz Rice <liz@...> wrote:

Matt, thank you for your thoughtful response. I like your list and your focus on identifying solutions for things that need to be improved. 

Yaron, by my very quick reckoning in a rather complicated spreadsheet: of ~60 submissions under Serverless, ~40 of them mentioned Knative. If number of submissions has some rough correlation to "what the community is currently interested in" (and I believe it does) then Knative is currently very hot, and we have tried to reflect this in the agenda. There's actually a seventh talk from the Serverless list that we accepted into the Observability track because we felt it straddled both topics. 




On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 5:15 PM Yaron Haviv <yaronh@...> wrote:

Dan,

 

looking at the schedule, the fact that out of total 6 sessions in the Serverless track there are 4 talks about Knative raises a serious question about the bias of this process

how come the only other two sessions are on OpenFaaS and Jupyter (serverless? really)  and other efforts in the space are left in the cold ?

 

Yaron

 

From: cncf-toc@... <cncf-toc@...> On Behalf Of Dan Kohn
Sent: Monday, October 8, 2018 23:35
To: cncf-toc@...


Subject: Re: [cncf-toc] Thoughts on KubeCon


 

Here is a summary of the discussion so far:



-- 
Liz Rice
@lizrice  | lizrice.com | +44 (0) 780 126 1145
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