The date is 10th May 2018, you wake up in the morning, thinking it is going to be just like any other day. A yawn and a couple of stretches later it dawns on you that today is the day of the first ever Cloud Native Wales meetup!
The one that Lewis and Salman have been planning for months. Mild panic sets in, to calm your nerves you the following thoughts go through your head:
- Two excellent speakers have been lined up
- The folks at DevOpsGuys (DOG) have provided us an amazing venue as well as sponsoring food and drink.
- People have signed up for the event on Meetup.
- We finally get to share our exciting announcements, CNW Book Club being one of them.
You think to yourself, actually, it is going to be a pretty awesome day! Start of a new community that you've been looking forward to build and be part of for the last few months!
Exciting times indeed.
Meetup hosted at DevOpsGuys on 22nd floor opened doors at 6.00 pm. By this time, the main room was ready to receive all the attendees and importantly the pizzas and drinks had been already laid out. As people arrived it was great to see people getting to know each other, they worked in different roles on different stacks and came from different backgrounds. We could see the opportunity this has to bring people together share ideas and experiences.
Pizzas!
CNW members arriving for first meetup
The proceedings of the day kicked-off with Lewis and Salman extending a warm welcome to all the new members of Cloud Native Wales (CNW) community. Lewis explained the purpose of the group, code of conduct, introduced the team and invited everyone to be a part of CNW as attendees, speakers, helpers and organisers. He stressed that Cloud Native Wales is a community open to everyone, no matter what ability, background, views and preferences. A community where people can learn and improve themselves in Cloud Native Technology and help others around them to grow as individuals.
The presentation can be found here. Fun fact: Lewis completed this presentation before the meetup, sitting on bike rack, next to a toilet on a train from Bristol to Cardiff!
Lewis with his last minute editing of CNW slides
And with this, it was time to hand over the floor to CNW's first ever speaker, Matthew MacDonald Wallace.
Matt started with a simple question which really had people thinking. Can physical IoT devices be Cloud Native? He brought with him some devices (the "things" of "Internet of Things") to show the Meetup attendees: one with Bluetooth & WiFi connectivity, one with cellular (2G/3G), one WiFi only, and intriguingly, a device around the size of a thumb with 8 analogue and digital inputs and outputs, so information can be collected from eight different sensors and have the results broadcast over radio.
Matthew with the first ever CNW talk!
Additionally, a LoRaWAN device was shown. Matt then discussed the use of Cloud Native technologies to aggregate and analyse the data captured by the 'things', along with a discussion of the devices' benefits and shortcomings.
"We have to run the Internet of Things...whatever that means, in a Cloud Native environment...whatever that means, ideally using DevOps practices...whatever that means"
There were a number of announcements at KubeCon EU 2018. One announcement which we felt had the most buzz about was Jenkins X! Jenkins X is a CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications on Kubernetes. James is one of the main contributors to the Jenkins X open source project and he delighted the audience with his talk Jenkins X and its integration with Kubernetes.
James started with a brief introduction into what Kubernetes is, its benefits and how it helps with container orchestration. He explained that due to Kubernetes' overwhelming popularity, it is used as a tool of choice with Jenkins X. Jenkins X tries to solve the challenges of getting started with Kubernetes, deploying applications, migrating application to the cloud and how applications can be accessed amongst other things.
James & Jenkins X!
In a series of live demos, James showed how easy it was to setup Kubernetes and deploy your application in public cloud using the Jenkins X command line tool, 'jx'. He also showed how Jenkins X creates a preview environment to test your application when a pull request is created. This really showed how Jenkins X is embracing the GitOps methodology. A lot of people were excited to give Jenkins X a try as it simplifies usage of Kubernetes!
Head here to find out more about Jenkins X. If you would like to be a part of this awesome project check out the community website here.
We previously spoke about the venue in our previous post, 000_CNWSETUP. We were hoping for a blue sky day and that's what we got, and had amazing views across all of Cardiff.
Cardiff Castle
View towards Cardiff Bay / Penarth
View towards Newport
We officially counted 48 attendees (not including Speakers, CNW members and DevOpsGuys (DOG) staff). It was great to see a community come together at the event, sharing their own stories and ideas as well as listening to our speakers share their talks.
Our first speakers have set the bar high for future events. The feedback received after the event about the quality of the content of the talks was amazing. There was so much energy in the room that evening, and everyone took something away from the talks. Thank you very much to our first speakers Matthew and James!
It takes a lot of effort for speakers to create talks with great content and then presenting them to a new crowd. We're so grateful for this that we offer small gifts of thanks. This time, we got Matthew a selection of Crafty Devil beers (a local microbrewery in Cardiff) and James a t-shirt from a bar we met at in Copenhagen, WarPigs. They're small gifts in comparison to the amount of gratitude we have for them to take the time and effort to share their talks.
We announced our CNW Book Club initiative (more details can be found on the link). The first two books were announced, Docker on Windows by Elton Stoneman and Cloud Native Infrastructure by Kris Nova & Justin Garrison. We had a lot of positive feedback about this on the night and the days following. Please feel free to share this to others around Wales who might be interested.
*Announcement time *
Even though we had a great evening, we made a couple of mistakes which we're hoping not to make again:
- The sign in process into the DOG office took too long, and we're currently looking into solutions for that.
- We forgot to ask for dietary requirements prior to ordering pizza, this has been resolved with a signoff process prior to the Meetup.
- The displays wouldn't connect to my MacBook for the last lot of announcements. A new AV system is being setup at DOG which will hopefully resolve this.
- We filmed the event, but sadly ran out of storage so haven't film the entire talk. We're looking to use a third party to film the event which we'll then share on online after the event.
We ran a Twitter poll and Tiny Rebel won, so we finished and went to the pub.
Here's the link to the Meetup.
The next Meetup is scheduled for Wednesday 20th June 2018 during the Festival of Innovation week, and we're very excited being a part of it. The confirmed speakers are Basia Fusinska (@basiafusinska) from Google and Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall) from Katacoda. We're really excited for their talks.
Why not learn something new on Katacoda and tell us all about it when we see you at the next Meetup!