When a Kubernetes and Cloud Native meetup happens in our Berlin office
Bertram Hass · January 17, 2024
On January 11th, we hosted the first Meetup in our Berlin office in partnership with Microsoft! Co-hosted by our very own MB.ioneer Bertram Hass, it was an evening full of knowledge, connection, and insightful presentations. We are thrilled to share the highlights from this event.
Nothing warms our hearts the most than seeing the tribe visiting our office and exchanging experiences and knowledge to deepen excellence further! But who better than Bertram himself to give us his point of view of this collaborative moment?
Tell us… How did this event happen?
I attended the meetup last summer because a former Mercedes-Benz.io colleague was doing a talk there. At the event, the community manager Benazir Khan made a call for action as they moved out of the office where they were hosting the event. As we have a big office ourselves, I just connected the dots and took the initiative to reach out to Benazir and our Space Center team to understand if we could support it.
Why is this good for a software development company?
As our main platform in Mercedes-Benz.io is Kubernetes and we try to adopt the latest and greatest from the cloud-native tech stack it's crucial to visit presentations of what is going on in the industry. The same goes for connecting to peers and sharing ideas (especially in the open-source world).
Simultaneously, having interesting events happening in the office fosters the tribe spirit, while motivating space to socialize and to talk about topics that are relevant for most MB.ioneers. All this while positioning Mercedes-Benz.io as an attractive and innovative software engineering company, making it known as a contributor to open-source projects.
What were the talks from this edition of the Kubernetes and Cloud Nation meetup?
We had two interesting exchanges in this edition. Thilo Froom is an engineering manager for Microsoft and works on Linux OS distributions and Linux Security at Azure. His talk "Zero-touch Infrastructure with Container Optimised Linux" was mostly focused on Kubernetes where we deploy applications as an instance of a pre-defined container image, its properties configured declaratively. This eases the automation and reproducibility of deployments, reducing operational risk.
The second contribution came from Philip Welz, a Microsoft Azure MVP, and GitLab Hero who works as a Senior Kubernetes & DevOps Engineer. The talk "Scaling AKS Nodes: Leveraging Cluster Autoscaler, Karpenter, and Node Autoprovision" allowed a comprehensive overview of the node autoscaling technologies in the Azure Kubernetes Service. Philip covered everything we needed to know about the default node scaler in AKS, cluster autoscale, and the new sheriff in town: Karpenter. He explored the differences between these technologies in a live demo and looked at the advantages and disadvantages.
What are your main takeaways as the main driver for this event?
It was a huge success and we had more than 40 people in attendance! Everybody seemed to have a very good time and engaged with the talks and our speakers. The topics were exciting, especially the second one as it was about Karpenter (a tool to scale nodes in Kubernetes which is a huge topic in terms of cost savings). Allowing people to comfortably socialize, mingle and connect was key to the success.
We are working hard to improve the setting, and other details, to allow us to grow and set the ground for future meetups. Stay tuned, there’s one happening at the end of February.
