A small army of community volunteers is necessary to host a KubeCon, but behind them is a professional events team. Colleen Mickey is Director of Event Services at the Linux Foundation and is responsible for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, as well as other events like Hyperledger Global Forum and cdCon. She talks to us about hosting, feeding and watering 10,000 people, as well as the change to virtual events.

We also bring the round-up of the KubeCon news, including our famous Lightning Round.

Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:

Chatter of the week

News of the week

New Relic and Pixie Labs blogs on Pixie being open sourced
- New Relic joins CNCF as a Platinum Member
Red Hat launches the Stackrox community at stackrox.io
- OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines
Snyk’s State of Cloud Native Application Security report announcement and results
OCI Distribution Specification reaches 1.0
Prometheus to launch conformance program
New CNCF sandbox projects:
- Vineyard, an in-memory immutable data manager
- WasmEdge Runtime, a WebAssembly Virtual Machine for cloud, AI, and blockchain applications
- ChaosBlade, an open-source version of Alibaba’s chaos tools
- Fluid, a data and storage abstraction for AI and cloud-native applications
- Submariner, a cross-cluster overlay of overlay networks
- Antrea, a Kubernetes CNI plugin
  - Episode 128, with Antonin Bas
CNCF Edge survey results and free Kubernetes on Edge Training
- Episode 116, with Alex Ellis
Inclusive Naming Initiative receives Honorable Mention at Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards
- ‘Master,’ ‘Slave’ and the Fight Over Offensive Terms in Computing by Kate Conger of the New York Times
- Episode 130, with Stephen Augustus
Spotify wins CNCF Top End User Award
- Episode 50, with David Xia
- Episode 136, with Lee Mills and Matt Clarke.

Lightning round

Accuknox secured $4.6m in seed funding
Accurics announced Terrascan integrates with Argo CD
Ambassador introduced a Developer Control Plane
Armory introduced mini-Spinnaker installation Minnaker, built on k3s
Arrikto announced MiniKF 1.3 and Eenterprise Kubeflow for Azure
Avesha launched Smart Application Cloud Framework
Bridgecrew published security trends from analyzing Helm charts
CAST AI announced Amazon EKS cost optimizer
Civo launched K3s-as-a service to early adopters
Cloudical introduced version 1.8 of VanillaStack
DataStax announced that k8ssandra supports all distributions
Dynatrace added the ability to ingest OpenTelemetry traces
HAProxy launched version 1.6 Kubernetes ingress controller
Kasten added ransomware protection with v4.0 of K10
Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform 2.17
Kubernative says that KubeOps is now a full-fledged Managed Kubernetes Framework
Netdata has added Kubernetes monitoring features to their Cloud service
Nirmata announced Nirmata Policy Manager, based on Kyverno
OpenNebula released a new K3s Virtual Appliance for running Edge Clouds
Portainer raised $6M in a Series A round to Accelerate their global expansion
Portworx pre-announced PX-Backup 2.0 with support for external auth services
Rancher launched a new Rancher Desktop tool in Alpha for Windows and Mac
Rafay launched new features to its Kubernetes Management Cloud
Splunk announced their Observability Cloud is Generally Available
StackPulse announced a Kubernetes-centric operations center
StorageOS version 2.4 brings encryption at rest and rapid application recovery
StormForge introduced automatic scanning of in-cluster resources
StreamNative open sourced Function Mesh for running Apache Pulsar functions
Sysdig added runtime detection and response for AWS Fargate
Tigera released Calico Enterprise 3.5 with Dynamic Service Graph and eBPF data plane
Timescale raised $40m Series B for Postgres-based TSDB and Prometheus cloud
Trilio announced Kubernetes Backup Monitoring for Velero users
Vitess launched version 10, with support for the Ruby on Rails framework
Wanclouds launched multi-cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service
Weaveworks launched Weave Kubernetes Platform 2.5 with multi cluster observability platform
Zebrium now automatically perform Root Cause Analysis with integration into Opsgenie

Links from the interview

The first KubeCon in 2015
KubeCon donated to the CNCF
CNCF presents CloudNativeCon and hosts future KubeCon events (2016)
Dreamforce brings in cruise ships
KubeCon NA 2017 in Austin, TX
Linux Foundation Climate Finance Foundation
Diamond sponsor lottery
Diversity and inclusion at KubeCon EU
Sponsorship open for KubeCon NA 2021
Event platforms:
- Intrado
- MeetingPlay
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021
GopherCon EU 2018 in Iceland
Colleen Mickey on LinkedIn

Putting on a KubeCon, with Colleen Mickey

Kubernetes Podcast from Google