Congregating the Cloud Native Community
Published: June 10th, 2019
By: Boris Mimeur, VP, Engineering Operations, CENGN
Tomorrow there is an important event happening in Montreal, Quebec for the Canadian developer community. It’s called Cloud Native Day and is taking place on June 11th at Le Gesù. This is the first ever Cloud Native Day and is organized by our close partner, CloudOps. The event is a culmination of the Kubernetes, Cloud Native, OpenStack, and Open Source Meetups that have gained traction in Eastern Canada over the past few years. With a focus on cloud native solutions and CNCF projects, it will be a great opportunity to explore new use cases, demos, and provide insights to developers using cloud platforms empowering them to build better applications.
If you’re not familiar with what cloud native actually is, it extends beyond simply operating within a public or private cloud. Cloud native is a modern approach to developing applications that tap into the power of cloud computing. Each application is a collection of small services that are operated independent of each other and live within a containerized environment. The benefit of this is highly accessible, scalable, portable applications that are easy for developers to build up and tear down quickly. On top of that, cloud native applications create a DevOps culture allowing for rapid creation and enhancements to new and current services between developers and IT operators. There is an organization dedicated to cloud native called the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that supports the creation and development of cloud native technologies. CNCF has over 400 members including every major public cloud provider.
Switching back to Cloud Native Day, CloudOps and the organizers of Cloud Native Day have pulled together some of the world’s top cloud native organizations to sponsor the event including Instana, GitHub, Rancher, Aqua, Red Hat, and more. To augment that, they have put together a list of speakers from some high-profile organizations that are active in the cloud native field including:
- Raymond Maika, Engineering Team Lead, CENGN
- Moh Ahmed, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, CENGN
- Syed Ahmed, Cloud Software Architect, CloudOps
- Luc Perkins, Developer Advocate, CNCF
- Eric Schnabel, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM
- VM (Vicky) Brasseur, Director of Open Source Strategy, Juniper Networks
CENGN will have representation on June 11th with two members of our engineering staff presenting at Cloud Native Day including Raymond Maika, Engineering Team Lead and Moh Ahmed, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer. Their presentation will give DevOps professionals insights on how to use Rook to manage Kubernetes storage with Ceph. Rook is a storage orchestrator for Kubernetes that is used to automate the tasks of a storage administrator for distributed storage systems. Beginning with Ceph as its primary storage backend, Rook now supports other storage providers such as EdgeFS, Minio, CockroachDB, Cassandra, and NFS.
The adoption of Rook has grown rapidly after establishing itself as a stable technology (even being utilized in HBO’s Game of Thrones Season 7 premiere) and moving Rook from its sandbox entry stage to the CNCF incubator. CENGN is pleased to say that our organization and team members played a significant role in the progress that Rook has made by being an early adopter of the technology. CENGN deployed Rook in our production environment using Ceph as a backend storage system. Our technical team provided feedback on strengths and areas of improvement for the technology, earning us an early adopter reference in the Rook presentation to CNCF, which assisted in moving Rook to the next level within CNCF, which is their project incubator.
Beyond Rook, CENGN has adopted several technologies from the CNCF into our infrastructure including Kubernetes, Prometheus, CoreDNS, CNI, Helm, ETCD, and others. Doing so has enabled CENGN to offer a cutting-edge, high-performance infrastructure to strengthen the technology and business value of Canadian small and medium enterprises, train students and industry talent, as well as evolve into key contributors in the open source and cloud native technology landscape. We encourage you to attend Cloud Native Day and drop us a line at events@cengn.ca if you’re interested in meeting up to chat!
About the Author
CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.
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