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, the CfP was  highly competitive, with over 200 submissions out of which 28 talks were selected (see https://kcdaustria2024.sessionize.com/schedule ). Being able to attract “big names” to submit for our event as well as encourage first time speakers was indirect feedback for how well the 2023 event had been received. Quality of the content was the most important selection criteria and we tried to keep any form of marketing out of the talks.

Since the event also offers a chance to first-time speakers, we offered the category of lightening talks. However, almost no submissions were received this year. However, from an ADLS-project point of view, we were very proud to see our own research getting selected as a student talk:  the Austrian Open Cloud Community and European Open Science Cloud funded “Kubernetes Storm Center” (https://github.com/k8sstormcenter ) was presented by three students from TUW in the “Kubernetes Operations & Security”-Track.

The feedback from the attendees and speakers was excellent so the organizer team will definitely prepare another round in 2025.

At the very end, as a special surprise, it seemed appropriate for us as university to facilitate  the “final exam” to become “Certified Kubernetes Austrianator”. The questions were about the content and the event itself: such as KCD-Austria having planted 300 trees in lieu of T-shirts (for those attendees who opted-in).

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