Cloud Native Day 2020

The second edition of Cloud Native Day Montreal took place virtually on June 9, 2020. CloudOps was excited to organize this event which brought together community members virtually in celebration of all things cloud native. This year, due to the pandemic, we made the best of an online format. Though not ideal in terms of engagement, we were happy to be interacting with everyone. The day-long event was jam-packed with talks that helped participants deepen their engagement with the fast-growing and complex cloud native landscape. The talks were just published here on CloudOps’ YouTube channel.

The day started with a keynote by Tracy Miranda from CloudBees called ‘Advancing the Future of CI/CD Together’. As software delivery becomes increasingly complex due to cloud native environment and tool fragmentation, the Continuous Delivery Foundation drives open initiatives, encouraging interoperability between various projects. Tracy’s talk shared how you can get involved and work with others in open source to advance software delivery for everyone.

After Tracy, Alex Menezes from Red Hat gave a talk called ‘A Case Study on the Value of Operators’. Operators help provide platform users with seamless app store experiences. Alex’s talk discussed operator designs, operator-sdks (operator life-cycle manager), operatorhub.io, OpenShift embedded operatorhub, operator levels, and how these projects impact the open source, cloud native communities to accelerate the adoption of new technologies. 

Kevin Crawley from Containous presented ‘Untangling the Maesh – Thinking Outside the Net’. When the team at Containous decided to build a service mesh, they sought to find the most effective approach to its design, implementation, and compatibility. Kevin spoke about how they did so and why they decided to leverage their existing open source project Traefik. His talk covered the advantages and disadvantages of using a service mesh as well demoed how a realistic microservice application can be deployed on Kubernetes. 

The next talk was by Steve Tene from Container Solutions. In ‘GitOps Made Simple with Flux’. community members learned all about GitOps, how it originated at Weaveworks, and stands for having a git repository as the single source of truth for application code, infrastructure, and configurations. Steve showed how a simple tool like Flux can help you achieve results. 

Dima Kassab and Muneeb Master then presented ‘Google’s Approach to Configuration Management in Multi-Cluster Environments’. They discussed configuration management and policy controllers in general, by visiting other approaches and showing the approaches that were adapted at Google. This included challenges in multi-cluster and hybrid Kubernetes deployments, GitOps-style Configuration as Code, config sync, Anthos config management, Config Connector, and Policy Connector. 

Afterwards, CloudOps’ very own Filipe Santos presented ‘Kubernetes Dream’. We’ve all dreamed of having the ability to code Kubernetes clusters back-to-back regardless of the underlying infrastructure. We all strive to bring our applications closer to end-users. We’ve all realized that sort of magic doesn’t really exist. Filipe discussed how we at CloudOps implemented Kubernetes clusters around the world on various cloud and private providers with the end goal of bringing the application closer to customers.

Karen Bruner from StackRox then gave a talk called ‘Trust No 8: Kubernetes Needs the Zero-Trust Model’. As Kubernetes adoption continues to grow, so does the need for creating and following strong principles for securing Kubernetes clusters and workloads. Karen discussed how Kubernetes calls for a zero-trust architecture, noting what those principles would look like as they apply to different cluster components and resources. 

Following Karen, Kyle Davis from Redis Labs presented ‘Declarative vs. Imperative Caching’. While most application-level caching libraries take an imperative approach, declarative development implements flow controls to determine whether a query should be cached. Declarative caching means your application logic won’t be affected by the caching.

Ahmed Belgana from HashiCorp gave a talk called ‘Vault Over Multi-Region Set-Up to Ensure Resiliency and Provide HA’. Vault Enterprise supports multi-datacenter deployments where data can be replicated across data centers for performance as well as disaster recovery. In this talk, Ahmed discussed the two replication methods, highlighting how they can be set up and their ideal use cases.

Community members then listened to a talk called ‘At-Scale Kubernetes Clusters and App Management with Azure Arc’ by Mathieu Benoit from Microsoft. Azure Arc facilitates the management of Kubernetes Clusters and Apps at scale – across on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments – by offering one, centralized place for organizing and governing clusters. Mathieu demonstrated DevOps best practices with a security-first approach in his talk.

After Mathieu’s talk, George Kobar from Elastic presented ‘Observa-BLT, a Delicious Practice That Should Be More than just Tools for Logs, Metrics, and Traces’. Most organizations use all sorts of monitoring tools for different functions, none of which provide unified views of an entire system. George explored how a single tool can help you implement a single unified Observa-BLT practice.

Yan Lafrance from Citrix gave a talk called ‘How Could the Citrix ADC Help You Navigate Through a Kubernetes World’. IT transformation, cloud, and application development technologies are key to delivering services throughout the industry. Yan’s talk highlighted how Citrix ADC can help you better manage your cloud native infrastructures.

Dynatrace’s Steve Caron then presented ‘Embracing service-level objectives for your CI/CD pipeline’. He showed how service-level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs) can help you set up automated quality gates in CI/CD systems to increase the pace of delivery while preventing bad code changes from reaching production. He provided an introduction to Keptn, an open source pluggable control plane for autonomous software delivery.

Finally, CloudOps’ CEO, Ian Rae, concluded the day with a talk called ‘The Infinite Game: how open source enables us to own our destiny in the clouds’. He spoke about Simon Sinek’s infinite game theory, highlighting open source as the key to delivering the dynamic solutions required to participate in evolutionary journeys of continuous improvement. 

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CloudOps was happy to be a sponsor and organizer of this year’s event, and we can’t wait to see our community friends again soon. We’d like to thank HashiCorp, cloud.ca, StackRox, Citrix, Elastic, and Dynatrace for also having been sponsors.

If you missed Cloud Native Day but would still like to delve into containerization, sign up for our hands-on, 3-day Docker and Kubernetes workshops. You’ll learn the basics of app modernization and be launched on your cloud native journey.