I gave two talks at this year’s Indy Cloud Conf. It was the first time that I have ever spoken professionally in front of a crowd. I had a lot of nerves leading up to the event, but I feel like I put my best foot out there. It was a fulfilling experience, one that I’ll certainly be looking to do again.

When to rm -rf Kubernetes

Kubernetes is quickly becoming the de-facto choice for container orchestration. In the mad dash to stay relevant, it is constantly being recommended as a cure-all for every DevOps problem. There are an abundant number of articles and blog posts on why you should being using Kubernetes for managing your deployments. It doesn’t seem too often the question is asked, when should you not use Kubernetes?

I’ll share some of my experiences and frustrations interacting with clusters ranging from setting up a couple nodes on bare metal machines, to interacting with large homegrown clusters in AWS, to working with managed clusters in Azure.

All that isn’t to say Kubernetes may not be the correct solution for your problem, but like any technology, its strengths and weaknesses need to be evaluated before being chosen as the correct answer.

From Bare-Metal Windows to Kubernetes in Two Months

Some things are easier said than done. Containerizing a legacy windows application is hard. Doing so when there are several external services it has to interact with is even harder. Setting up a Kubernetes cluster from scratch is challenging to say the least. Doing all of that, and creating the CI/CD pipeline to connect them all together is a colossal task. Oh, and did I mention the deadline is in two months?

I’ll share my experiences regarding this exact scenario. There were a lot of aspects about the technologies involved that made things easier but there were plenty of them that made it much more difficult. Lessons were learned about Windows, Containers, Kubernetes, and how they all interact along the way, and I hope to share them in this talk.

The slides for both of these presentations (along with the slides for my coworker’s talks) can be found here