Making Austria more attractive to deep tech and building a community of practitioners, that is the reason why the ADLS tech-lead, 5 volunteers and several team members attended and supported the KCD (Kubernetes Community Days) Austria 2024.

Under the umbrella of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF), these non-profit events foster highest quality engineering open to everyone. Obviously, sponsors are crucial to conduct these events but also community support, which is what our ADLS project did in the form of organizing during the year and helping during the event.

In 2023, the first Austrian such conference was held at the Cineplexx Wienerberg and this year, we repeated it with about 25% more attendees and offering 4 expert workshops, additionally. The Verein „Cloud-Native-Austria“ is a non-profit organization that serves as legal entity behind the initiative.

This year’s CfP was highly competitive, with over 200 submissions, out of which 28 talks were selected. Attracting renowned speakers and encouraging first-time presenters was a testament to the success of the 2023 event. Quality content was our primary selection criterion, avoiding any form of marketing in the talks.(see https://kcdaustria2024.sessionize.com/schedule )

To support first-time speakers, we introduced a category for lightning talks, although submissions were minimal this year. However, we were proud to see our own research selected as a student talk. The „Kubernetes Storm Center,“ funded by the Austrian Open Cloud Community and European Open Science Cloud, was presented by three students from TUW in the „Kubernetes Operations & Security“ track (https://github.com/k8sstormcenter ).

Positive Feedback and Future Plans

The feedback from attendees and speakers was overwhelmingly positive, and the organizing team is already planning for 2025. As a special surprise, we facilitated a „final exam“ to become a „Certified Kubernetes Austrianator,“ with questions about the event and its content, such as KCD-Austria planting 300 trees instead of giving out T-shirts.

These kind of high quality events can make all the difference to new comers, first timers and experts to exchange their knowledge. The tickets are very affordable (with 150Euro being the standard rate and 50 Euro the student rate).  Monetary support is essential to create such an event, however, it is the human commitment that makes it possible. We were very grateful to be part of the organizers!

Contact:

Dr Constanze Roedig
VSC Research Center
constanze.roedig@tuwien.ac.at