Metal3 at KubeCon EU 2024
The Metal3 project was present at KubeCon EU 2024 with multiple maintainers, contributors and users! For many of us, this was the first time we met in the physical world, despite working together for years already. This was very valuable and appreciated by many of us, I am sure. We had time to casually discuss ideas and proposals, hack together on the ironic-standalone-operator and simply get to know each other.
Photo by Michael Captain.
As a project, we had the opportunity to give an update through a lightning talk on Tuesday!
On Wednesday we continued with a contribfest session where we gave an introduction to the project for potential new contributors. We had prepared a number of good-first-issue’s that people could choose from if they wanted. Perhaps more important though, was that we had time to answer questions, discuss use-cases, issues and features with the attendees. The new quick-start page was also launched just in time for the contribfest. It should hopefully make it easier to get started with the project and we encourage everyone to run through it and report or fix any issues found.
Photo from the official CNCF Flickr. More photos here.
Finally, just like previous, we had a table in the Project Pavilion. There was a lot of interest in Metal3, more than last year I would say. Even with five maintainers working in parallel, we still had a hard time keeping up with the amount of people stopping by to ask questions! My takeaway from this event is that we still have work to do on explaining what Metal3 is and how it works. It is quite uncommon that people know about baseboard management controllers (BMCs) and this of course makes it harder to grasp what Metal3 is all about. However, the interest is there, so we just need to get the information out there so that people can learn! Another takeaway is that Cluster API in general seems to really take off. Many people that came by our kiosk knew about Cluster API and were interested in Metal3 because of the integration with have with it.
For those of you who couldn’t attend, I hope this post gives an idea about what happened at KubeCon related to Metal3. Did you miss the contribfest? Maybe you would like to contribute but don’t know where to start? Check out the good-first-issue’s! There are still plenty to choose from, and we will keep adding more.