orchestructure / presentations

Holds and organizes all past, present, and future presentations at the meetup

Presenting at Orchestructure

Orchestructure meets monthly on the last Wednesday of each month at 6pm. We are always looking for awesome people who would love to present on anything relevant to modern DevOps and Infrastructure topics.

This repository is meant to be the authoritative source for information on speaking at Orchestructure, past presentations, and planning around future talks.

Interested in speaking at a future Orchestructure meetup!? File an issue!

Location: Orchestructure is based of out of Ann Arbor, MI and meets at different locations around the city.

Food: Food and drink is provided at every meeting! Don't worry, we're hungry too.

Suggestions are always welcome and encouraged!

Planned Presentations for 2020

All meetups take place from 6-7:30pm on the last wednesday of the month!

• January 29th - Marky Jackson
• February 26th - (TBD)
• March 26th - Thursday meeting!, Zach Steindler
• April 29th - Tentative Workshop
• May 27th - TBD - Duo Security, 1st St, Lower Peninsula Room
• June 24th - TBD - Duo Security, 1st St, Lower Peninsula Room

All following events will be Virtual until Further Notice.

• July 29th - Matt Farina - Helm 3
• August 26th - TBD
• September 30th - Nicholas Klick - GitOps with GitLab
• October 28th
• November and December - No Meetups! Enjoy your Holidays!!!!

Talk Semantics

Orchestructure is meant to be a place where people in (or adjacent to) computer infrastructure fields can assemble to teach, learn, and inspire others. We don't subscribe to any particular way of achieving a goal nor do we tout a singular technology as being the end-all solution.

With this in mind, we're exceptionally open to hearing about any and all methods or technology used by individuals and companies alike. Additionally, we subscribe to an interactive and thought provoking format where everyone can spawn discussion with everyone else.

Finally, presenters should not be afraid to delve into dense functional details and comprehensive descriptions of the topic. Attendees generally enjoy intricately discussed technologies and the varied strategies around solving problems.

A few guidelines all presentations should follow:

• Talks should be around 20-30 minutes (no longer than ~30)
• Demos, examples, interactivity, etc. are encouraged!
• Always start with an introduction of yourself and quick ELI5 of the topic.
• Presentations should have at least some cohesive flow (slides not required)
• One of the organizers should review your presentation resources (i.e. slides) at least 1 week prior to the meet-up
• Be ready to talk no later than 10 minutes after meet-up start (~6:10pm)

Topic Examples

A few examples of great topic ideas!

• Scaling (and associated challenges)
• Clustering/Distributed Workloads
• CI/CD Pipelines and Tools
• Security (or lack thereof)
• Automation/Bots
• Configuration Management
• VM's, containers, packaging and distribution
• Share your Stack! (seriously ;)
• Cloud Specific (AWS, Azure, Google, etc..)
• Interesting use-cases or stories
• The dev side of DevOps
• Team dynamics and working effectively

Of course more bare-bones items like networking, storage, load balancing, etc. are more than welcome!

Tips for a fantastic presentation

A few ideas to help mold your talk:

• Ensure to talk about where you're from, how you got here, and why you love what you do!
• Why you took a particular path to achieve a goal
• Cover lessons learned and retrospective
• Include details about how your team approached the problem/solution
• Focusing on the advanced applicability and execution is encouraged

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are short (<5min) talks or exercises where anyone can come forward about an exciting thing they've done, are working on, or found. This can be in any form: demo, slides, merely spawning discussion, etc..

Up to two lightning talks can be given after the main presentation finishes. Interested!? File an issue!

Recording

We try to broadcast and publish every presentation through YouTube live through Google Hangouts. They're available on our channel here.

If you would rather your presentation not be recorded, please let us know. Additionally, it is encouraged to not include sensitive information on your presentation materials. Orchestructure can't be held responsible for misuse stemming from your talk, materials, etc..

Remote Presentations

If you live elsewhere or simply can't make it to a future Orchestructure meetup, let us know. We allow a few remote presentations every year and will work with you to get everything setup!

Interested in Sponsoring?

We're always on the lookout for exciting organizations to help keep Orchestructure as strong as possible. Consider donating or becoming a sponsor to help perpetuate your brand and get more in touch with our community!

presentations's Issues

Get brunch like food decided on and setup for Workshop

This may also fall under Ithaka as they have hosted many events.

Define sessions to provide at Workshop

We should have a few breakout sessions with more focused content depending on interest areas (from #28). Work to garner people and topics for these sessions should begin immediately after #30

@jsvana would like to present!

He has a variety of talks. Just need to pick one that most members will find really interesting and get an optimal date when he can get out here. If he can't make it locally, we can do a remote talk.

outreach with workantile

http://workantile.com/

Local downtown Ann Arbor community for remote and/or self-employed people. It might be an ideal group to contact regarding meeting space, speakers, or just get the word out regarding orchestructure.

Ed from Packet.net to Present

Ed Vielmetti would love to do a talk very soon. Ideally, this presentation could be done at the fantastic Workantile location in accordance with #1

Let's figure out the topic/desc., iron out location, and we can get this announced!

Possible dates are Feb 28th or March 28th.

Host at new Nutshell offices

Nutshell has moved to a new building and we'd love to host with them in this new space.

Istio presentation

I'm engaging with the Istio community manager to see if there's a midwest-ish person that can present on Istio and/or grpc.

Lightning Talk Idea: CNCF project overview

The CNCF has 14 current projects and several more being vetted Technical Oversight Committee.
It might be worthwhile to have a reoccurring small lightning talk covering some of the projects e.g. "Prometheus in 5 minutes". Cover what the project is, brief history, and where to go from there for more information.

Hosting at Llamasoft and Presentation by Josh!

Josh Lynn has mentioned that Llamasoft would love to host a future meetup, the food+drink, and have him do an awesome presentation.

To figure out:

• Best month to do this (in Q2, 2018)
• Topic for presentation
• Details for location (exact address, instructions, etc..)
• Amount of food to obtain

Reach out to https://github.com/elisiano

Possible presentation from him etc..??? cc @castrojo

Matt Layher would like to present

Matt Layher (@mdlayher) is a golang developer that works for Digital Ocean and is a contributor to both Prometheus and metalLB. He would be happy to do a presentation on Prometheus or a few other topics.

Presentation from Andrew Sardone on Censys Infra

Message from Sardone talking about interest in speaking about the infra behind they're new startup: Censys

Garner feedback around best area of focus for Workshop

This would probably be best suited with a meetup, slack, or surveymonkey type poll or survey. We need to ask questions about what topics people are least up on, things they're most interested in, and advanced topics they'd like more clarity on. Things like focus areas (cloud vs ci vs k8s) and toolsets (cli, ui, saas, etc..) would also be helpful.

Helm presentation

Matt Farina from SIG Apps/Helm is local, I'm asking him about speaking opportunities.

Setup for May 19th Orchestructure Workshop

Due to much interest from local and remote members, as well as Detroit groups, the board has decided to hold an Orchestructure Workshop. This event will be an extended weekend meetup with multiple facets aimed at engaging, teaching, and bringing more people together.

This is the primary issue tracking preparations and other actions needed to make this a reality. (label search)

• Feedback - Lets do a poll to gauge interest and best options for engaging people. #28
• Format - How do we want to spend the time. #30
• Location - Get an excellent location that can facilitate our needs. #27
• Food - Well I mean of course. #29
• Talks - We'll want at least a few talks most likely. Let's round those up! #31
• Sessions - We'll probably do sessions so we'll need people to run them and decide on best content. #32

@bdimcheff on Olark's infra

Would love to get Brandon in to do a talk or lightning talk on Olark's journey to k8s relating to CI/CD and stateful applications.

Proposed lightning talks for future meetups

Hi All,
Here's some simple lightning talks my team wants to work on, and part of the reason we're seeking funding for our OSS team. They're both related to CI, automation and OSS. Let me know if you think they're on-topic enough for the meetup. I hope to give them a few more times as well.

https://gitpitch.com/solvingj/gitpitch-domino-lightning
https://gitpitch.com/solvingj/gitpitch-cianywhere-lightning

Reach out to @mattbostock about presenting

Matt is an SRE at Cloudflare, a company we all know and love. Would love to see him present at a future meeting about anything.
https://twitter.com/mattbostock

Service Mesh or WebAssembly+Envoy talk by Solo.io

Hello - I would like to propose a talk by our engineers or field CTO on Envoy / Service Mesh / WebAssembly for the Ann Arbor group. Is the Oct 28th session still available? Also interested in Q1 2021 if Oct if already taken.

Lightning Talk Idea: Log Collection - Fluent-bit vs Fluentd vs Filebeat : FIGHT!

Fluent-bit rocks

A short survey of log collection options and why you picked the wrong one. 😜

Log Collection

Principle 11 of the 12 Factor App is to "Treat logs as event streams".

While most traditional applications store log information in a file, the Twelve-Factor app directs it, instead, to stdout as a stream of events; it’s the execution environment that’s responsible for collecting those events. That might be as simple as redirecting stdout to a file, but in most cases it involves using a log router such as Fluentd, Filebeat, or Fluent-bit and saving the logs to Hadoop or a service such as Splunk.

In docker, the default log driver is json-file, but it also supports others, such as fluentd. Collection and shipping is otherwise bring your own.

In Kubernetes, you have at least two battle tested choices for automatic logging capture: Stackdriver Logging if you’re using Google Cloud, and Fluentd to Elasticsearch if you’re not. Both of those are actually Fluentd, since Stackdriver Logging uses a Google-customized and packaged Fluentd agent. You can find more information on setting Fluentd Kubernetes logging destinations here.

Filebeat is more common outside Kubernetes, but can be used inside Kubernetes to produce to ElasticSearch.

Fluent-bit is a newer contender, and uses less resources than the other contenders.

Why Fluent-bit rocks:

• Uses 1/10th the resource (memory + cpu)
• Extraordinary throughput and resiliency/reliability
• Detect multi-line stacktrace as single message support
• Ships kubernetes metadata with log messages (if you want that)
• instrumented with prometheus metrics
• Outputs to elasticsearch, kafka, fluentd, etc.
• TL;DR use 0.13-dev branch

Resource Comparison

Without monitoring to tailor to our workloads, just going from the recommended resource requests and limits, we have a stark contrast between the different logging collection.

Beats vs Logstash:

Beats are lightweight data shippers that you install as agents on your servers to send specific types of operational data to Elasticsearch. Beats have a small footprint and use fewer system resources than Logstash.

Logstash has a larger footprint, but provides a broad array of input, filter, and output plugins for collecting, enriching, and transforming data from a variety of sources.

Fluent-bit vs Fluentd:

Fluentd and Fluent Bit projects are both created and sponsored by Treasure Data and they aim to solves the collection, processing and delivery of Logs.

Both projects share a lot of similarities, Fluent Bit is fully based in the design and experience of Fluentd architecture and general design. Choosing which one to use depends of the final needs, from an architecture perspective we can consider:

Fluentd is a log collector, processor, and aggregator.
Fluent Bit is a log collector and processor (it doesn't have strong aggregation features such as Fluentd).

Combinations

Fluent-bit or Beats can be a complete, although bare bones logging solution, depending on use cases. Fluentd or Logstash are heavier weight but more full featured.

You can combine Fluent-bit (one per node) and Fluentd (one per cluster) just as you can combine Filebeat (one per node) and Logstash (one per cluster).

Comparisons

Fluent-bit from this file

        resources:
          requests:
            cpu: 5m
            memory: 10Mi
          limits:
            cpu: 50m
            memory: 60Mi

Fluentd from this file:

        resources:
          limits:
            memory: 500Mi
          requests:
            cpu: 100m
            memory: 200Mi

FileBeat from this file:

        resources:
          limits:
            memory: 200Mi
          requests:
            cpu: 100m
            memory: 100Mi

Keeping Stacktraces together

Most programs contain bugs, and those lead to valuable multi-line stacktraces which are unpleasant to reassemble after being shipped to an eventually consistent distributed data sink (ElasticSearch, Kafka, AWS S3, DynamoDB, what-have-you). It is more convenient if the collector could understand and keep those as single messages.

In fluentd, this is accomplished through fluent-plugin-detect-exceptions which has artisanally hand-crafted regexes for most languages.

In fluent-bit, you configure a multi-line parser for each language you wish to support, and have your application add an annotation that hints what parser to use. Feel free to steal regexes from the fluentd plugin above.

Resilience and Reliability

In kubernetes, using the default docker json-file log driver already provides a measure of on disk buffering for ephemeral containers. When Fluent-bit is tailing those files, it the recommended option is to use a sqlite database file can be used so the plugin can have a history of tracked files and a state of offsets. This is very useful to resume the state if the service is restarted. You may specify a retry limit for shipping logs to different outputs (including False which will retry forever).

In order to avoid backpressure, Fluent Bit implements a mechanism in the engine that restrict the amount of data than an input plugin can ingest, this is done through the configuration parameter Mem_Buf_Limit.

Monitoring

Prometheus Metrics out of the box in the 0.13.x series! Woohoo!

Log Pipeline

Ok great, we're collecting and shipping... and then what? If you want to do more than just searching ElasticSearch, you might consider a solution like minipipe to enable sophisticated analytics.

At Ithaka, here's a presentation about what our Log Pipeline and Analytics stack look(ed) like

Chris Short presenting for January

Talked with Chris at the end of 17' and he was super interested in doing a presentation. He has many good ones that he can cherry pick from. I also suggested a slight twist which he liked:

I like your lightning talk from gophercon. I think touting the usability and simpleness of Go would be good. I also like your devops readme lightning talk but instead of just books, maybe talking about other resources as well. Maybe some sort of combination of these two where you talk about how "traditional Ops" guys can slowly get into the "Dev" side of a modern DevOps position? i.e. An Approach to Dev from an Ops' Perspective: Resources and playing with Go

The January meeting would fall on the 31st of the month. I will also be opening up the floor to 2-5 minute lightning talks, among other announcements ;)

Lets use this thread to finish getting this presentation planned out and I'll make the meetup event.

Ask Bridget from Microsoft/DoD Minn to speak

@bridgetkromhout would be a great speaker. Let's ask Chris Short for help us convince her to come.

Cahoots - possible hosting location

This is a new space being developed, but looks right up our alley as far an Ann Arbor tech hub:
https://beincahoots.com/
https://twitter.com/beincahoots
https://medium.com/cahoots/ann-arbor-tech-hub-cahoots-announces-managing-director-7c7d55bc6024
http://www.mlive.com/expo/ERRY-2018/01/b105e6433d/index.html

Ping cloudflare about pizza

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-wants-to-buy-your-meetup-group-pizza/

Lightning Talk Idea: Home Infrastructure

5-10 min demo on my local infrastructure

Kubernetes hosting:
Local DNS using Pi-Hole
Lan Cache (games + apt + pypi + docker)
Media tools (couchpotato, sickrage, transmission, sabnzbd, emby)
Gogs (Git Management)
Drone (CI Pipeline)

I have two topics that I could present on.

1. An automated terraform pipeline for Azure
   We have completely automated our terraform pipeline for building resources in Azure. This presentation will detail how our pipeline works at each stage: presubmit validation checks, deployment to preprod using terraform, inspec validation, deployment to production, etc. Tools include Jenkins, Gerrit, Scripts, Terraform, Azure, and Inspec. The intent is to have a demo heavy presentation and show some of the code behind what we are doing, some of the challenges we faced, and plans for future enhancements. I want the audience to walk away from this presentation with ideas that they can take back and implement for themselves.

2. Lessons learned moving from AWS to Azure
   My team has had to make the shift from working with AWS to embracing Azure. This talk would be able the lessons we have learned so far. The good, the different, and the frustrating. The goal is to have people going way with glimpse into a the different cloud providers and the journey we have gone on.

Possible presentation from Brian @ Hashicorp

Through Armon, got directed to Brian who's out of Chicago. Told him about the group and the main Hashicorp products we're all interested in hearing about.

Influxdata possible presentation

I've connected with the awesome team at InfluxData on the possibility of them presenting around they're offerings (especially those related to Kubernetes). There seems to be a good amount of interest around Influx as most people are trying to optimize their entire logging/metrics data handling:

Setup for June 8th Orchestructure Workshop

With such a successful event last year, it's time to start planning the next one! This event will be an extended weekend meetup with multiple facets aimed at engaging, teaching, and bringing people together.

This issue will work similar to #33 except all discussion and checklist items will be managed here instead of in separate issues. I've left quick links to last year's version of each item for reference.

• Feedback - @jeefy - Lets do a poll to gauge interest and best options for engaging people. (ex #28) Created!
• Date - @orchestructure/board - Decided on June 8th!
• Format - @orchestructure/board - How do we want to spend the time. (ex #30)
• Location - @InAnimaTe - Get an excellent location that can facilitate our needs. (ex #27)
• Food - @mrbobbytables - Well I mean of course. (ex #29)
• Solve Recording Issues - @jeefy - Ensure we can reliably record each session this time around. Note that live streaming isn't exactly necessary. Also, get pictures taken of the event.
• Speaker Gift and Swag - @jeefy - Get a special speaker gift and something different for everyone!
• Meetup Page Post - @castrojo - Get the meetup page for the event created.
• Announce - @castrojo - Get out on Twitter, Slack, meetings, etc and announce the event

Sessions:

• Developer Workflow - Covers writing code and publishing a service from a developer perspective (editor, dockerfile, building, running tests, pushing, basic CI) - @swiggins83, setup by @InAnimaTe
• Automated Infrastructure - Utilizing tools to create self-driving Infrastructure with Kubernetes in AWS via EKS. - @StevenACoffman setup by @castrojo
• Container Orchestration - Focus specifically on semantics around orchestrating a container using a scheduler like Kubernetes. Delve into Application > Container Building (Dockerfile) > Kubernetes Deployment > Lifecycle. - @jeefy, help from @mrbobbytables
• Service Mesh - Pure focus on service mesh solutions and the value add they provide for cluster administrators as well as service operators. - @bdimcheff, setup by @mrbobbytables

Schedule

Start	Session	Length
10:00	Doors Open	1 Hour
10:45	Introductions	15 Minutes
11:00	Developer Workflow - Automated Workloads	1.5 Hours
12:30	Lunch	1 Hour
1:30	Container Orchestration - Service Mesh	1.5 Hours
3:00	Closing Remarks	10 Minutes

Josh and Mandar: Groundspeed Infra

Mandar says they may be interested in doing a presentation later this year. This issue created so we don't forget about it! cc @jclynny @mandarg

Talk from Nicholas Klick on Serverless with AWS

Nick reached out and is interested in doing another talk!

I want to propose to give a talk on "Serverless Applications on AWS" based on a project I recently completed. Essentially, I am leveraging AWS Lambda Functions, SQS. etc as part of a request failover system. I could feasibly demo how to set it up using either cloudformation and/or terraform.

Let's nail down a location and get this planned!

Get {presentation,lightning} talks setup for Workshop

We'll most likely have 2+ talks we want done throughout the workshop. Speakers and topics need to be ironed out and verified. This work should start immediately after #30 is done.

Nail down location for Workshop

I'll look into getting Ithaka to host as they have a wonderful space and showed great interest!

Sysdig Falco presentation

It'd be cool to see if we can get @mfdii up here to show us all the sysdig goodies. August 28 and September 25th are open.

Talk from Chris @ Little Caesars on their Infrastructure

And of course, they should probably provide Pizza ;)

Brian Nuszkowski to Present

I've reached out to Brian on the possibility of him giving an awesome talk at Orchestructure. He's got a great Vault slidedeck which our members would love to hear more about.

Meetup swag

Thinking about swag, not just for the meetup but for this/next year. Would like to hear thoughts. @orchestructure/board -- Also, I have neither bank info, nor a high-res logo copy. So I can line up what we get, but someone else will have to execute (or also just hook me up, I'm impartial)

Attendees

Besides stickers (which we should ensure we're stocked on)

$136 for 250 Pens Single color w/ logo on one side
https://www.discountmugs.com/product/bp320-customizable-black-ink-plastic-pens/

Coasters are single-use. Lots of other "conference swag" is cliche. I feel like pens are both useful hand-outs as well as decent promotional stuff. I can be swayed but I wasn't digging a lot of other things.

Speakers

$252.28 for 24 stainless steel tumblers single color w/ logo on one side
https://www.discountmugs.com/product/11-oz-harbor-stainless-steel-stemless-wine-glasses/

With the speaker gifts, each of these tumblers is $10.50. I'd propose, as part of speaker coordination, asking whether they prefer coffee, tea, soda, ??? and then include a bit of that in as well.

Lastly, I feel each speaker gift should get a small thank you note written by one of us (and I'd go the extra mile and make them unique per person)

Building Kubernetes Operators in an Ansible-native way

Building Kubernetes Operators in an Ansible-native way

Learn how Ansible can help developers (or any systems savvy person) quickly ramp up to build Operators to automate and manage the life cycle of complex Kubernetes applications.

Elevator Pitch

Operators simplify management of complex applications on Kubernetes. They are usually written in Go and require expertise with the internals of Kubernetes, but there's an alternative to that with a lower barrier to entry for all. Ansible is a first-class citizen in the Operator SDK that frees up application engineers and maximizes time to automate and orchestrate your applications across both new & existing platforms with one simple language. Here we see/demonstrate how.

Description

An Operator is a method of packaging, deploying and automating the complete lifecycle management activities of a Kubernetes application. Put more simply, an Operator encodes human operational knowledge. It is designed to watch and respond to the resources in your cluster and enable your application to run as desired.

While powerful, Operators are usually written in Go and requires expertise in the advanced libraries and patterns used to write Kubernetes controllers. Ansible can help. It is a first-class citizen in the Operator SDK providing a means of automating the deployment and management of Kubernetes applications on a cluster in an Ansible-native way. Ansible-based Operators provide a lower barrier to entry, faster iterations, and the power of Ansible and its ecosystem.

Combining Ansible and Kubernetes frees up application engineers to minimize the new skill sets required and maximize time to delivery. Furthermore, using the same tried and trusted Ansible tooling lets you automate and orchestrate your applications across both new and existing platforms with one simple language.

This talk introduces Operators with Ansible and demonstrates how you develop and deploy them to automate the management of complex Kubernetes application on a cluster.

Josh Curl on September 25th 2019

Josh will be in town to talk about his new IoT SaaS startup.

k8s presentation

Ralph Bankston is in East Lansing and available to do a presentation on something k8s related.

From feedback, define Workshop Format

Based on the response from #28, we'll need to decide on the best format for the workshop. This means properly defining the overall flow of information, sessions, talks, throughout the day. We need to keep people engaged by offering something for everyone!

No assignee's because this should be discussed together.