Day two started in the best way possible, with a sunrise skate around the bay. I met up with two of my friends in the area and spent about an hour skating around the west bay. Starting at the Ferry Building and just rolling around, enjoying the weather. I can’t think of any better way to start the day. But it couldn’t last forever, I am here for Google Next after all.
The day started with the first keynote of the conference. I missed a good bit of it because I was skating (oops!) but the last twenty minutes of it were filled with buzzwords and the usual enterprise marketing speak, so I assume I didn’t miss much.
After the keynote ended I wandered around the vendor hall for a little while. Bumped in to a few friends that were running the booths for their companies and had a good opportunity to catch up with them. I also took a moment to enter in to a few raffles; you never know, you might get some free stuff, right!? After wandering around the vendor hall for a little while, I went looking for lunch. The lunches at Google Next are generally box lunches; sandwiches, salads, etc. This year was no different; I had a chicken sandwich.
After lunch I went to the first actual talk session. This was on CI/CD in Kubernetes. I was left very disappointed. I was hoping this talk would be a bit more technical than it was. The speaker ended up mentioning a lot of tools but the part I was hoping to learn, how to link them together in ways that solve complex issues around CI/CD pipelines, was really not covered in any great depth.
The last talk I attended for the day was much better than the last talk. A discussion on access controls in GCP. I was very pleased with the level of technical detail that the speaker included. It got off to a slow start but I appreciated that the speaker was taking the time to cover the basic concepts for some of the less experienced members of the audience. One of the most interesting takeaways from the talk was the information about context aware access controls that are going to be going in to general availability soon. The ability to write access policies that are more or less restrictive based on the context of the access request will be infinitely useful. One of the most interesting uses for my areas of responsibility would be the ability to lock down ssh access to compute nodes based on the on-call schedule. In general, we want to discourage artisanal modification of our compute nodes, but sometimes it’s necessary for an engineer to do it in emergency, on-call situations.
The day wrapped up with some great socialization with my coworkers. I believe that it’s vital to have a very strong relationship with your team members in order for you to perform at your best. This is one of my favorite aspects of conferences. We are all normally so wrapped up in our work that it can be really hard to get to know your team during the normal work work.
That’s all until tomorrow!