This October, I made my first visit to Europe to attend the Cloud Foundry Summit in Basel, Switzerland. This was possible because of the generous scholarship grant from the Cloud Foundry Foundation to support diversity at the Summit. The scholarship applications form opened and I filled it out immediately. The reasons I was so keen to apply were: First, I wanted to learn more about Cloud Foundry as I worked on it in my summer internship project and second, I was eager to meet my mentor, Vlad Iovanov, as he was giving a talk at the Summit.
Vlad Iovanov and Venkata Krishna Rohit Sakala
The Summit was held for three days from October 9th to October 11th, 2018. As soon as I landed in Basel, I headed for the convention center. I met some very cool people at the Hackathon who were discussing ideas for the event. One of the ideas that caught my attention is building autocomplete for BOSH commands.
On the second day, I attended sessions and a panel discussion regarding the integration of Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry frameworks which was related to my internship project. The second day was a very tense day for me as I had an interview with SUSE for a role of open source software development. Gladly, I got a job offer from SUSE and I am very happy about it!
Apart from the technology, there were talks on the philosophical aspects of software development — for example, “Pros and Cons of using Slack or email” which was very funny. I also met people from Cloud Foundry Foundation who were super excited for the diversity scholarship recipients and they were very welcoming. Big shout out to Swarna Podila and Caitlyn O’Connell who went overboard to make us feel at home.
On the third day, I attended the Diversity Luncheon where I was very inspired to hear the stories of many diverse people. There was also a reception at the end of the Summit where I talked to people and learned about their work and culture.
My biggest technical takeaway from Summit was that Cloud Foundry makes it easy to deploy cloud native apps for end users. The templated workflow of Cloud Foundry makes it easy for developers to deploy apps faster. I got to know about the innovative trends happening in the cloud frameworks, its best practices and most importantly, the requirements of end users.
I enjoyed the Cloud Foundry Summit as it was a very strongly connected community. I am thankful to executive director Abby Kearns and CTO Chip Childers, Swarna, Caitlyn, Shubhangi and all the other people I met without whom this Summit wouldn’t be as fun and inspiring as it was.
