Cloud Native Transformation

Foreword

A few years ago, I was in Amsterdam for Dockercon Europe and met a very enthusiastic British guy with a northern accent, Jamie Dobson. He seemed to be running a company in Holland, but it wasn’t at all clear what they did. A bit later that company became Container Solutions and expanded to London, and I kept running into Jamie, Pini Reznik, and Adrian Mouat (and eventually Anne Currie) at other conferences. Then the Container Solutions crew came up with this crazy idea to run a conference in a dockside warehouse in Amsterdam, one that mixed software with a kind of Burning Man vibe. It was called Software Circus.

Outside there was a 30-foot-tall fire-breathing robot called Kevin¹ and a whole pig roasted on a spit for lunch. I was the opening keynote speaker, although I had no idea who would come and what they would want to hear about. Over 400 people turned up, and I improvised the talk with no slides, told stories, got suggestions from the audience, and the projected Twitter feed became an effective crowdsourced substitute for a presentation. Afterward, Kelsey Hightower, who was giving the keynote on the second day, told me he hadn’t ever previously thought of doing a talk with no slides, but he was now inspired to have a go. Kelsey then famously gave an entire talk on container scheduling while displaying himself playing Tetris. It was one of the more memorable conferences I’ve attended, but there were no videos of the talks; you had to have been there!

The people ...