VMblog:  As a KubeCon 2019 sponsor, how can people find you at the show?  Do you have a theme for this year's booth?

Containous:

• Booth S24
• Silver Sponsor
• Left side once entering the main entrance to the Sails Pavilion
• Theme: "Makes Networking Boring"

VMblog:  If an attendee likes what they see and hear at your booth, what message about your product can you send them back with to sell their boss on your technology?

Containous:  Traefik is loved and trusted by leading companies worldwide like Conde Nast, Expedia, eBay and Cisco. Traefik is easy to implement, has a breadth of desired features to ease the deployment of cloud applications, and works seamlessly - a strong differentiator among its competitors.

We are open source and community driven with over 1 billion downloads worldwide, +25,000 stars and +400 contributors on GitHub.

Traefik Enterprise Edition is available for production-grade deployments.

VMblog:  What are some of the reasons why you believe a KubeCon attendee should add you to their MUST SEE list?

Containous:  Containous is a charismatic company with 100% community driven, trusted open source products, and a truly best of breed enterprise software offer. We offer simplicity of configuration and the most desired features in a reverse proxy, made for the modern microservice ecosystem, being the easiest to use solution on the market.

Have you sponsored KubeCon before?  If so, what do you like most about this event?

Containous:  Yes. We love the Kubernetes community. It’s a community hungry to discover what’s next in container and microservice technologies. We are proud to be a part of it.

VMblog:  What brings you back as a sponsor?  

Containous:  We value meeting the global Kubernetes user base, including those in getting to know independent contributors, those in management, and those holding executive leadership positions. Kubecon educates us on what other leaders in container technologies are doing, and enables us to have conversations we wouldn’t normally be able to have by being with the innovators live and in person, as a part of this growing community.

VMblog:  Can you give VMblog readers a sneak peek as to what you will be showing off at your booth? What should attendees expect to see and hear at your booth?

Containous:  We will show live demos of our products, including Maesh, our new service mesh. As always, we’ll have a very special t-shirt to give away, with incredible limited edition artistry to commemorate Kubecon San Diego 2019.

VMblog:  Thinking about your company, give readers a few reasons why your product or service is considered unique.

Containous:  Traefik is known to be the most functional and easy to use edge router/reverse proxy solution on the market. We have a large organic community of users, who help us to develop a hyper relevant software which continuously offers the functionality needed for large scale, multi-platform, microservice ecosystems.

VMblog:  How does your company and product fit within the container or cloud ecosystem?

Containous:  We are in a mission to make routing simpler so developers can focus on building instead of operating. As an editor, we deliver open source routing softwares specifically built for a world of containers and microservices. From Traefik the open source cloud native edge proxy and TraefikEE its commercial offering, to Maesh open source SMI-compliant Service Mesh for Kubernetes, our products are fitting in the cloud native landscape with a focus on openness, simplicity, scalability, reliability and high availability.

VMblog:  Attendees always enjoy a good trade show tchotchke.  Are you guys giving away anything special or interesting this year?

Containous:  We will be appreciating the users of Traefik, by offering a Traefik Ambassador high quality embroidered hoodie to those who share their user story with us, while at Kubecon!

VMblog:  What do you attribute to KubeCon's growing success this year?

Containous:  The wide adoption of Kubernetes (which keeps growing) combined to the diversity and healthiness of the CNCF communities are key factors for KubeCon success. Being able to reach so many amazing people who are experts in their area to learn from them is quite appealing for any growing IT business.

VMblog:  Do you have any tips for first time attendees that you'd like to share?

Containous:  As a first time attendee, we are often overwhelmed by the amount of new things in the ecosystem. Embrace that there are more areas of knowledge that you could know at the same time, so do not worry about what you don’t know (already) and focus on what you are learning and don’t feel bad about this!

VMblog:  What would you say to prospective attendees who are thinking about attending KubeCon but aren't sure if it's worth it or not?

Containous:  Your time is valuable, and the amount of knowledge gained from such a conference is the same as what a training could bring. Proactively experiencing the diversity of profiles, cultures, businesses and experiences while there is a great way to get the most of KubeCon.

VMblog:  At what stage do you feel we are at with regard to containers?

Containous:  Our industry is in "Day 2" of the journey of containerized microservices:

• Day 0 was the premise that microservices, backed by Docker containers, would solve all of our problems (also known as Conference Driven Development)
• Day 1 was the initial build of the “workflow” from development to production, and the start of using containerizer microservices in production next to legacy monoliths
• Day 2 is the first step of operational maturity: Kubernetes allows for the operation of containers in production for microservices, setting the ground for Day 3.

VMblog:  What, if anything, is holding the container market back? Or what is holding back wider deployment?

Containous:  The transition to the "Day 3" is that containers must break out from IT departments. The business value of containerized microservices is big but still not widely understood. As engineers. We have to grow the “DevOps” culture to the entire organization, and start teaching what the others roles could do. For instance, what a sales person could gain from using Kubernetes with shorter sales cycle, costless PoC for prospect.