As another Kubecon + CloudNativeCon draws near, we here at Upbound are making our final preparations and getting pumped to travel to Chicago for all the festivities next week! Kubecons really do make for some of the highlights of our year as we get the opportunity to connect with a ton of amazing people from the ecosystem, as well as share all of our exciting recent progress that we’re very proud of. We’re still feeling a bit of the buzz from Kubecon Amsterdam, but we’re ready to top it off again!

Chicago is a great city to host us next week. In addition to the conference content and experiences, I personally will be aiming for more than just one dinner of Chicago-style deep-dish pizza 🍕. Unfortunately, I can’t work it into my schedule to also catch a show at The Second City, but I highly recommend their hilarious brand of comedy to any folks that can make it next week alongside everything else going on! Okay, back to conference content…

Our Experts Have a Lot to Say

There are multiple sessions being delivered by Upbounders next week, all of which will make for very interesting material and experiences. Tuesday will be a bit hectic with multiple sessions going on, but we are always ready to rise to the challenge to share great content with you all! We’re even hoping to see our recent Crossplane project updates on the big stage for the Keynotes, so keep an eye out for that! Other talks we’re involved in that you should not miss include:

• Crossplane Contribfest @ Tues Nov 7 11:00 AM - Write code hands on alongside the Crossplane maintainers (more below)
• API Machinery maintainer track @ Tues Nov 7 11:55 AM- Learn more about the internals of the Kubernetes API with our very own control plane expert Stefan Schimanski
• Crossplane Introduction and Deep-dive @ Tues Nov 7 2:30 PM- The maintainers of Crossplane will provide an overview of Crossplane for newcomers and then dive deeply into some of the most impactful new features like Composition Functions
• Streamlining Infrastructure with Crossplane: a Transformation Story @ Tues Nov 7 5:25 PM- Hear the details, obstacles and successes of the Crossplane adoption journey of Consensys, along with my explanations of foundational Crossplane features to up your control plane game
• Introducing The BACK Stack! @ Thurs Nov 9 2 PM- David Murphy will be walking everyone through a new architecture and practical guidance for building internal developer platforms that utilizes 4 key cloud native technology projects (of course the ‘C’ stands for Crossplane!)

Empowering New Crossplane Coders

I’m particularly excited about the Crossplane Contribfest session that we’ll be running next week. We did the first ever Contribfest in Amsterdam earlier this year and we’ve got a few ideas to improve the experience even more. This will be such a fantastic opportunity to connect with the community in a more intimate setting and put our heads together to write new code for Crossplane. We’ll be collaborating on writing Composition Functions to teach Crossplane new tricks and accelerate the building of your control planes.

We only get 90 minutes together, so it will be chock-full of “roll up the sleeves” hands-on learning, so bring your laptop and get ready to code with us!

Come by for a Valuable Chat

As usual, we’ll be hosting two booths in the Solutions Showcase - one Crossplane focused booth that is part of the CNCF’s Project Pavilion and an Upbound booth focusing on our products and solutions that are ready to scale with your production ready Crossplane needs. These booths are seriously where some of our best connections with the ecosystem are formed.

If you’re a Systems Integrator, Reseller or Software Vendor interested in working with Upbound to deliver Crossplane-based solutions, you can connect with our partner team here.

I can’t stress enough how valuable all the feedback and insight truly is from everyone stopping by and sharing their experiences with us in person. It’s not an exaggeration to say that all that data impacts our roadmap and helps shape what features we prioritize delivering.

So we highly encourage you to stop by, share your thoughts, and get your questions answered as well! I hear there’s a really cool new popsicle neon sign that will show you the way to our booths…

See you in Chicago

We certainly recognize its a privilege to be able to travel to Chicago next week, so for all the Crossplane and Upbound fans around the globe that can’t make it, we not only hope to see you soon too, but we invite you reach out virtually on Crossplane Slack and the Upbound website - we’d love to hear from you.

For folks fortunate enough to travel next week, there are a lot of opportunities to connect with us at Kubecon Chicago, and we encourage you to take advantage of as many as you can! Our Kubecon Chicago page has details to find us, including an exciting happy hour event and directly booking a meeting to sit down with us away from all the chaos. As we said, LOTS of opportunities to see each other!

• Upbound talks, events, and opportunities to connect at Kubecon Chicago

With your help, the Upbound team is ready to make this the best Kubecon + CloudNativeCon yet. We hope to see you next week! 🍕🌬️🏙️