PubCloud/Speakers
Spring 2020
Cloud is changing many things for IT Ops and Infrastructure teams. While the cloud represents a whole new set of infrastructure technologies to learn, the biggest change is the reduced complexity and flexible cost models, allowing the consumption of infrastructure without dedicated Ops and Infra teams.
This is a huge shift for many, but especially for those in Ops and Infrastructure roles. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to re-skill for the cloud and how to work with the other IT roles in your organization.
Joep Piscaer', dived into what these changes mean for you, as well as what developers and other consumers of cloud resources expect from you in this new Cloud, DevOps, and Infra-as-Code world.
He specifically looks at how you collaborate and work with developers in multi-disciplinary teams and Lean, Agile, Scrum, and DevOps ways-of-work.
He had done the 10,000 feet overview of the skills required, talked about monitoring (and observability), infrastructure-as-code, continuous integration (CI) deployment and delivery (CD), as well as look at containers and serverless.
A guiding principle of cloud technology is the ability to automate the deployment and configuration of infrastructure. In the second session of the course, Ned reviewed the principles of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and how they apply to public cloud solutions. Then he took a look at the landscape of IaC tools that exist and examine their pros and cons. With a solid perspective on the toolsets, hel dived into a real-world application of deploying IaC using HashiCorp's Terraform.
Nedl started the session with a basic configuration and deploy it to Microsoft Azure. Then he added more components and import existing infrastructure into the configuration. With a base layer architecture, we can layer on additional deployments for applications and services. Finally, he automated the project's deployment through source control on GitHub and a CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins.
By the end of his presentation, you will have a basic understanding of Terraform and a firm idea of how to apply it to your environment with the principles of Infrastructure as Code.
With the possible exception of scalability, storage presents many of the same challenges to public cloud users as to those running their data centers on-premises. Each has to choose from a plethora of options with very different performance, shareability, application, consistency, and data protection characteristics.
Hybrid clouds and organizations transitioning from on-premises to the public cloud face whole new classes of challenges driven by data gravity. Applications want to run close to the data, for lower latency, and data is expensive in both time and money to move from one place to another.
In this session with Howard Marks we reviewed the types of storage available across public clouds, how they differ between cloud providers, the applications and pitfalls associated with each. We looked at layering on storage abstractions with storage virtualization and distributed file systems. Our little tour ended with a look at cloud storage gateways, the connections between cloud storage and on-premises applications, and cloud solutions to other storage problems like global file systems.
In this session 'Matthias Luft recapitulated the Public Cloud Security groundwork detailed in Cloud Security webinar, and then dive into details needed to develop cloud security, and interact with a Cloud-native Security Team. He challenged the conventional 'wisdoms' with one of the most dreaded security processes: firewall rule change approvals! Stay tuned to see whether the Public Cloud can take the pain away...
Justin Warren explained how to make good tradeoffs between resilient hardware and resilient software.
He covered:
- A short history of software and hardware resiliency;
- Understanding failure: There's no such thing as human error;
- How the hardware/software interface affects resiliency;
- The CAP theorem;
- Murphy's Law and the pre-mortem;
- Resilient software patterns.
After this session you will have a better understanding of how to design resilient systems, and have plenty of reference material to dig into in more detail.