The Southern California Linux Expo is Not Just About Linux

Did you know that?

I didn’t. I really thought it was just an entire conference dedicated to Linux. Which is fine, but I remember thinking “Wow. A whole lot of really cool open source projects have come along in the wake of Linux. And it’s been sixteen years since they launched this show. Why are they even still talking about Linux? Is there anything left to talk about?”

Turns out there’s plenty to talk about. As founder and organizer Ilan Rabinovitch explained to me on this week’s Cloud Unfiltered podcast, Linux is still evolving like crazy to adapt to all the exciting innovations happening throughout the stack, from containers and automation to security and monitoring. Public cloud, private cloud, multicloud, devops best practices, vertical-specific use cases…really, it is more than enough to build a conference around.

But on top of that, the SoCal Linux Expo (“SCaLE” if you’re a cool kid) has in fact expanded all the way into everything that’s going on in open source. Which means there are a lot of Kubernetes sessions, as well as Ubuntu, MySQL, and devops sessions. There are CI/CD sessions, Git sessions, cloud native, blockchain, and security sessions. Community management, open source for the enterprise, and Raspberry Pi sessions.

The bad news here is that this year’s conference already happened. It was last month. The good news is that most of the sessions were recorded and can be accessed online. I’ve bookmarked a few of the titles I found most compelling below. If you like ‘em, mark your calendar and venture out to SoCal next year to see it live. It sounds like a heck of a conference.

Why Your Last Server Sucks and How Language Theory Can Help Your Next One Suck Less

Silence of the Lambdas

Why Johnny Can’t Container: Application Onboarding to OpenShift and Kubernetes

Container Orchestration Nightmares

Bacon Flavored Open Source Dos and Don’ts

The Divine and Felonious Nature of Cyber Security – A DevSecOps Story

As for the aforementioned podcast, it’s worth tuning in to hear Ilan describe all these things himself, and to explain why he and his friends started SCaLE in the first place.

https://alln-extcloud-storage.cisco.com/ciscoblogs/5ad8d441ae7da.mp4

You can catch this episode on YouTube, iTunes, and SoundCloud.

Also, later in the podcast, you’ll hear Ilan talk about data monitoring best practices (he works at Datadog), and reference two different studies that they’ve commissioned recently. To links to those studies are below.

https://www.datadoghq.com/docker-adoption/

https://www.datadoghq.com/container-orchestration/

Finally, if you’d like to check out past episodes of this podcast (we’ve got 40 of them!), just pop on over to the archive at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/cloud/podcasts.html. Really. Do it. You’ll have a great time.