Kat Cosgrove
Open Source Advocate
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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Kat is a Lead Developer Advocate focused on the growth and nurturing of open source through authentic contribution. In particular, her specialties are approachable 101-level content and deep dives on the history of technology, with a focus on DevOps and cloud native. She was the Kubernetes Release Lead for 1.30 Uwubernetes, and currently serves as both a Release Team subproject owner and SIG Docs tech lead.
When she’s not at a conference, she spends her time playing video games, watching horror movies, or reading science fiction, but her current hyperfixation is film photography. She lives in Scotland with her cat, Espresso, who is the real brains behind the operation and actually ghostwriting all of her tweets.
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Dungeons and Deployments v2: The Clusters of Chaos
You haven't mastered the basics of Kubernetes until you have a grasp on its security concerns. Join our merry band of adventurers as we journey to the Duchy of D'voups in search of knowledge, glory, and the Weregoose who stole the Holy Certificate. We will need to find ways to buff our party's defenses, guard our camp, and watch each other's backs, all while making sure the Weregoose doesn't learn our secrets. Whether you're a paladin, a rogue, or a sorcerer, there's a way you can help keep your cluster secure.
This is a light-hearted talk covering the fundamentals of Kubernetes security, while the panel plays a tabletop role-playing game. You will learn about role-based access control, transport layer security, controlling privileges, and more. Roll for initiative: your cluster is under attack.
Dungeons and Deployments: Leveling up in Kubernetes
How do you know if your kubernetes clusters are running well? In this session, you make a “Knowledge: Kubernetes” roll on a D20. This talk will illustrate and explain many kubernetes concepts while the panel “plays” a tabletop role-playing game. You’ll see how the Game Master is really an API server, your CI/CD is run by actual Wizards, and your kubelets never stop attacking.
This is a light-hearted talk about fundamental kubernetes concepts and how they all fit together. At low level, it may be tempting sometimes to burn your infrastructure to the ground in frustration, but let us help you get a handle on those early concepts, and you’ll have enough experience to level up in no time. You might even multi-class into DevOps.
Breaking Gates: We Haven't Always Known Everything
There are more computer science graduates than ever, and the number keeps rising. Include coding bootcamp graduates, and the number of junior engineers out there is staggering. More engineers means more help for our projects, and the whole world benefits because we’re solving harder problems faster. That's what we're supposed to be about, yeah?
It’s not that simple. Tech advances quickly, becoming more specialized, with layers and layers of abstraction. We frequently assume that the people reading our documentation and using our tools already have context specific to our corner of tech, and we forget about all of those new engineers with fresh ideas who are hungry to learn. We don't mean to do it, but we're gatekeeping them, and it's slowing our progress. This talk will be a deep dive on the ways we're preventing ourselves and those who come after us from being their best in the cloud native landscape, and provide actionable advice for doing better for the future.
Historical Context: CI/CD
When you’re new to an industry, you encounter a lot of new concepts. This can make it really difficult to get your feet underneath you on an unfamiliar landscape, especially for junior engineers. A lot of the documentation out there assumes you already have additional context and experience, or are proficient in some related tooling, and that doesn’t exactly make it easy to learn. We're absolutely swimming in abbreviations and abstractions, and sometimes it's difficult to define a term satisfactorily without needing to define three more for context. It’s like running into a brick wall. In this talk, you'll learn about CI/CD: what it is, its history, and how it makes your life easier as a developer.
Historical Context: From Makefiles to Infrastructure as Code
We rely on context a lot as engineers, passing state around so one function knows what the last did, and how it was impacted by the one before that, and on and on. Without passing around context, a lot of things would be much more difficult to build, or at least much more wordy. People need context too. Sure, we’re smarter than a function that only knows how to do one thing, and we can figure it out eventually, but it’s easier to learn a new tool or concept if someone hands it to us.
This is especially true as the DevOps and cloud native technologies grow further into the mainstream. Abstractions are great, but they can create a hostile learning environment for anyone touching these tools for the first time, new and experienced engineers alike. You need to understand the technical hurdles and pain points that led to doing things the way we do now. In this talk, I’ll give you the historical context of infrastructure as code – what that means, the technical and social changes that led to every leap from Makefiles to Terraform, and why it's crucial today.
Fly Me to the Moon: Punch cards, Supercomputers, and Kubernetes
Kubernetes is the sometimes-controversial darling of the tech industry. It’s indispensable in situations where it’s useful, but undeniably complex and can be difficult to use. We tend to chalk that up to its relative newness and the complexity of the problems it's solving, but exactly how new are these problems? CI/CD feels new, but its origins predate DevOps. Infrastructure as Code feels new, but we’ve been programmatically defining machines for decades.
Kubernetes isn’t any different; since the dawn of computing, we’ve had issues with workloads and scale. What’s actually going on is that we’re solving the same technical problems over and over again, flavored by the circumstances of the time in which a pain point becomes impossible to ignore. To better understand how Kubernetes came to be, we need to look backwards to its predecessors: the struggle to achieve virtualization, a supercomputer, and a trip to the moon.
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