A Clearer CNCF Path: Exploring with Up The Stack

Embark on an enlightening expedition into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem with our session, "A Clearer CNCF Path: Exploring with Up The Stack." Unravel the intricate web of CNCF's incubating and graduated projects as we guide you through 55 key initiatives.

In this immersive experience, Up The Stack serves as your beacon, navigating the diverse landscape and shedding light on each project's significance. We'll delve into the life cycle of these projects, showcasing their evolution from inception to graduation. Discover the practical implications, use cases, and synergies they offer.

Whether you're a developer aiming to leverage specific CNCF tools, an architect seeking a holistic understanding of cloud native technologies, or an executive charting strategic directions, this session equips you with actionable insights. Up The Stack empowers you to traverse the CNCF realm confidently, transforming confusion into clarity.

Join us in "A Clearer CNCF Path: Exploring with Up The Stack" to gain a comprehensive perspective on CNCF's dynamic landscape. Navigate through the intricacies, informed by our exploration of each project's role and relevance. Step forward with confidence, ready to harness the power of CNCF's offerings and make informed decisions for your cloud native journey.

Solving Data Protection the DevOps Way

Does your DevOps strategy stand incomplete because of data protection challenges? Traditional methods often fall short in safeguarding stateful applications, particularly in DevOps and Kubernetes environments. This presentation offers a new lens to view this challenge, proposing a transformative approach where data protection becomes an integral component of the DevOps life cycle. Central to this approach is a cloud-native data management layer that efficiently streamlines data backup, recovery, and migration. We'll segue from this into the finer details of strategies ensuring backup consistency. Embark with us on this journey to reimagine data protection, enhancing the resilience of your data and supercharging the efficiency of your DevOps processes.

Kanister - Application Level Data Operations on Kubernetes

For stateful, cloud-native applications, data operations must often be performed by tools with semantic understanding of the data. The volume-level primitives provided by orchestrators are not sufficient to support data workflows like backup/recovery of complex, distributed databases.

To bridge this gap between operational requirements for these applications and Kubernetes, the open source project Kanister was created. Kanister is a framework to support application-level data management in Kubernetes. It lets developers define relationships between tools and applications, and then makes running those tools in Kubernetes simple. Kanister is managed through Kubernetes API objects called

CustomResourceDefinitions, and all interactions with Kanister take place through Kubernetes tools and APIs. In short, Kanister allows administrators and automation to perform data operations at the Kubernetes level regardless of the complexity of the application.

Cloud Native Data on K8s: The good, bad, and the unknown

Running database on kubernetes has always been an interesting topic. With Kubernetes designing to embrace ephemerality, running database on Kubernetes emerged as a necessity rather than a preference. How did it come about? What tools have been developed to address this need? And where do stand now as a community?

In this session, we will go back to a history lesson, before diving into a hands-on workshop where we will deploy a few different data deployments for our Kubernetes cluster. Through a series of hands-on labs, we aim to highlight the evolution of running data firstly in Kubernetes and how this has become a rapidly emerging field within the community. Do we have too many choices about how we can run data services in, or alongside our Kubernetes clusters? Should we run them within or just close by? We will introduce statefulset, operators, and data services outside of the cluster in this very hands-on workshop experience.

It's all about the Data

Data Management is required across the board when it comes to any platform, we could be talking
about Virtualisation, Cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc), Cloud-Native, and Legacy and sometimes all of
these platforms are linked together to serve the end-user. Data Management consists of many
different facets including Backup, Recovery, Migration, and also leveraging that data as part of
another use case that does not interfere with the production environment. In this session we are
going to focus on protecting stateful workloads in your cloud-native Kubernetes environment, the
importance of making sure your data services are protected but also the capabilities available to
enable easy migration between multiple different Kubernetes clusters and environments. Database
not running in Kubernetes? That is fine we also have a unique way of being able to protect your data
services that reside outside of the Kubernetes cluster. If we have time we can also touch on the
ability to add this to your continuous deployment process to ensure that your data service is also
protected before any code change.

Integrating Backup Into Your GitOps CI/CD Pipeline

The ability to deploy code and version code has been a de facto requirement and a reason we have CI/CD pipelines for our application development, but with Kubernetes in particular we are seeing a closer tie between code and data. In particular, code being deployed can affect and change your data, for that reason, we need to consider protecting that data as part of our Continuous Development pipelines, In this session, we will focus on how we can incorporate backup actions into your pipeline to ensure that any code changes will start by creating a restore point be it a snapshot or an export to another external repository. We will then as part of a demo incorporate a failure scenario into the environment pipeline to simulate how a configmap can manipulate data to cause data loss. Then we need a way to bring the data back!

Fantastic Features: The Secrets of Cloud-Native Data Management

Every single one of us has encountered data in our everyday life as a consumer and most likely in our professional roles in IT. The spoiler alert is a large majority of that data doesn't matter and if lost will not cause any issues however some of that data is going to be so important, without it there is no need to keep the lights on!

In this session, we will walk through some of the areas specifically to Cloud-Native that we have to consider when it comes to hosting, serving and protecting our data so that the above bad scenario does not happen or at least when it does we can get back up and running as fast as possible.

Specifically, we will focus on Kubernetes and data management in any Kubernetes distribution and then we will specifically look at the data services available within Kubernetes and how Application Consistency is still very much needed here as it was in Physical, Virtual and Cloud-based environments.

#90DaysOfDevOps - 2023, The Learning continues...

What started in 2022 with a 90-day focus diving into key areas of DevOps and documenting my journey. 2023 is here now and we had to continue this learning resource for the community.

The 2023 edition of the project focuses on the responsibilities of a role surrounded by DevSecOps processes and principles. With an emphasis on the Sec, something I missed in 2022 was the importance of Security within DevOps so we fix that here.

There is still the element of theory and hands-on for each of the 12 topics ranging from the focus on security to talking about serverless, service mesh and databases

In this session, we will take a look at this learning in a public resource that has gained over 20,000 stars on GitHub to date and still growing with contributors actively adding functionality and adding to the resource in so many ways including translating to Chinese amongst other languages.

#90DaysOfDevOps - The DevOps Learning Journey

I spent 90 days walking through some of the key areas of DevOps documenting my journey. Starting with What is and Why do we use DevOps? This touches on the responsibilities of a role surrounded by DevOps processes and principles. It then goes into hands-on practical examples covering, programming languages, networking, Linux, Containers, Kubernetes and lots more.

In this session, we will take a look at this learning in public resource that has gained over 10,000 stars on GitHub to date and growing massively fast with contributors actively adding functionality and adding to the resource in so many ways including translating to Chinese.

Data is not a game... Or is it?

Data within Kubernetes is becoming part of every day for Kubernetes administrators to deal with and architect. With this in mind, we have to consider the requirements around data management and what that means for this data set.

We have to think about not only the same backup and recovery challenges we have faced over years and years of other platforms and data strategies but we also have to think about the mobility of that data and disaster recovery.

In this session, we will take a look at our mission-critical application and the data and we can look to see how, where and why we might want to consider backup, recovery and mobility. Oh, and we will also look at application consistency when it comes to backup.

Kubernetes: The Storage & Data story

What if I told you, the data on Kubernetes is a thing and has been for at least the last 18 months, whether you agree or not, some major enterprises are running databases and data services within the cluster, but what if I was also to tell you it doesn’t have to be that way and that your service or your data service may actually reside outside of the cluster, but still be controlled in the same way as I Kubernetes constructs. In the session, we will cover the reverse roadmap from Kubernetes, we will cover some of the challenges and considerations when it comes to storing data within your cluster and outside the cluster. We will also perform a live demo for the worst possible scenario when it comes to your data, not only an outage but in packs to your service in the application and we will get that application up and running well as fast as we can

Live demo is mentioned if possible, I will also have a recorded demo to fall back on.

Securing Data in Cloud: Essential Considerations

This session delves into the critical realm of data security within cloud and cloud-native environments. As organizations increasingly migrate their operations to the cloud, safeguarding sensitive data has become paramount. This abstract elucidates the multifaceted landscape of data security challenges that arise in these environments.

In the realm of cloud computing, where data is stored and processed on remote servers, concerns about data breaches, unauthorized access, and data integrity necessitate meticulous planning. This abstract explores fundamental considerations such as encryption techniques, access controls, and identity management, all of which play pivotal roles in fortifying data security.

Moreover, as cloud-native approaches gain momentum, leveraging containers and microservices, a fresh set of security dimensions emerges. The abstract highlights the significance of integrating security into the DevOps pipeline, employing tools for vulnerability management, and ensuring runtime security.

By shedding light on these key facets, this session will underscore the urgency of addressing data security comprehensively in cloud and cloud-native deployments, serving as a guide for practitioners and decision-makers aiming to fortify their digital landscapes.

Securing S3 Backups Against Ransomware

When backing up cloud-native data, there is no better place than object storage. From databases to data protection applications, the cloud-native landscape is littered with projects that backup data to object storage. With all this mission-critical data being stored in object storage it’s no wonder that it’s become a high-value target for cyber criminals. This, in combination with the rising popularity of cryptocurrency, means that ransomware protection is now a requirement for IT departments of any size.

The S3 protocol has become the de-facto standard API for interacting with Object Storage. It is implemented by nearly all object storage providers and consumed by modern cloud native applications. Thankfully, it provides all the primitives needed to develop a robust strategy to protect against ransomware attacks.

In this session, we’ll walk through how backups saved in an S3-compatible can be made ransomware resistant. We’ll show which APIs are used and how to configure the buckets. If you’re considering backing up data in object storage and your data is too valuable to lose, then this talk is for you!

Structured Skills: Unleashing Potential with Open Source Learning and 90DaysOfDevOps

Discover the organic evolution of 90DaysOfDevOps, a personal learning journey turned open-source go learning resource. Originating as a collection of personal notes, this project has blossomed into a thriving repository with nearly 100 contributors and a remarkable 25k stars. From its inception in 2022 to the present format in 2024, witness the growth and collaborative spirit that has shaped its trajectory.

Explore how the open source structure, initially rooted in individual learning, has transformed into a global effort. With contributors correcting, updating, and translating content into 8 different languages, this session unveils the collective wisdom and diverse perspectives that have fueled the success of 90DaysOfDevOps. Join us to delve into the heart of this community-driven initiative, celebrating the power of open source in shaping the landscape of DevOps education.