https://www.socallinuxexpo.org

https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/20x/schedule

Thursday 3/09/23

I attended a talk on Supply Chain Security Tooling for Kubernetes. The talk was on securing your Docker image by signing it with an author. Which pretty much means that when you pull a Docker image, you want to make sure it is untampered with and you can trace back the source of where the docker image was built. When you have a custom docker build, you build it on a base image such as alpine, node, etc. On this base image, you want to make sure it’s untampered and SLSA is a methodology you should follow. https://slsa.dev

Next I attended a talk on GitOps. Where we deployed a Kubernetes cluster and linked it with Flux which is similar to ArgoCD. We deployed a local kubernetes cluster with kind. You could also use k3s, minikube, etc. After the day ended, I networked with fellow attendees and talked about what their companies used and their use cases.

Friday 3/10/23

I attended the Exhibit Hall which had over 70 vendors attending. I got a Datadog, CircleCI, RedHat, Scale20x, GitHub, and Postgresql shirt. In the future, I’m going to be more picky choosing a shirt since there were so many options. Then I talked to Datadog booth where we discuss how improve our logging/metrics but they weren’t that helpful since they were mostly sales people.

I learned more about CNCF and their open-source products. https://landscape.cncf.io/?fullscreen=yes&zoom=40

I attended a talk on why companies moving to the Cloud may be a bad move since the Cloud costs so much. Some companies are moving back to on-premise data-centers because of compliances, safeguarding their data, and the amount of money it takes to run in the Cloud is not worth it.

Next, I attended an event where speakers only had 5 minutes to give a presentation and I got a lot of info on different tech and companies.

After this I went to an informal talk on Observability Trends and Challenges. The company hosting this event was kloudfuse. Their product was aimed to have Datadog, Grafana, and any observability stream into their Unified Observability data lake.

Saturday 3/11/23

On this day I met up with fellow club members from my college Cal Poly Pomona. I went with the Computer Science Club and Cal Poly FAST club which focuses on Cyber-Security. The Cal Poly FAST club hosted a CTF for Scale20x and it was interesting watching fellow attendees try to solve the problems to gain points.

I talked to more vendors today in the Exhibit Hall and tried to get a sense of the tech environment in our ever-changing climate.

I attended a talk on describing the challenges of running a Social Media website, in this case, Facebook. Issues talked on were from a former Facebook SRE. Some topics talked on were protecting user data privacy, maintaining your own datacenters, fighting spam/misinformation campaigns, and ensuring app consistency and reliability despite constant development by thousands of engineers.

After this talk I attended a talk on running a homelab at home. This pretty much means running servers on your home network. This can be a full server rack or a simple computer running applications on docker.

Overall the event was great and I see myself going next year!