As speakers and sponsor, we are going to tell you how this edition of Devoxx France went.

Few words about the conference:

• 3000+ attendees
• 240+ speakers
• 6 keynotes
• 200+ conferences
• 70+ sponsors

Devoxx France is the biggest French tech conference (and one of the major European tech conference). This year, it was the eleventh edition in Paris, “Palais des Congrès”.

The chosen theme was “steam punk” and pictures have been generated by the IA DALL-E 2 OpenIA! And it was just … amazing 🤩.

OVHcloud talks

A lot of talks were given by OVHcloud.

Our colleagues gave very good talks and OVHcloud is very proud of them!

Eléa Petton – What if AI was the solution to understand sign language?

📜 Elea’s slides
🎥 Elea’s recorded video on YouTube

In the field of Artificial Intelligence, we often talk about Machine Learning or Deep Learning, but in the end what do these terms mean and especially how can they help us in our daily life?

During this talk we will first try to understand the place of AI in the vast field of health. We will then show the importance of data and develop an AI app capable of detecting and interpreting sign language.

This talk will show how it is possible to process raw data quickly to adapt an AI algorithm using Apache Spark. We will also see how to use distributed image processing as a way to enrich its training data.

The second step will consist in training an object detection model to recognize the different signs of the ASL (American Sign Language) alphabet through a Jupyter notebook.

Training a model is good, using it is better! Developers will learn how to create an artificial intelligence app from the trained model for sign detection on images or video streams. Finally, we will see how to deploy this application with Docker to make it accessible. This application will allow anyone to understand sign language with detection and written transcription.

Aurélie Vache – Common tips & mistakes in Go – and how to solve them

📜 Aurélie’s slides
🎥 Aurélie’s recorded video on YouTube

Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm … These tools may mean something to you, you may use them on a daily basis, but did you know that they were made in Go? Indeed, the Go language is a language that has been on the rise in recent years, used to make microservices, cross-compilation, by companies requiring high performance and resilience.

It is a practical language, easy to learn, typed and with a rich ecosystem.

And it’s true, creating an HTTP server or even a CLI application in Go only takes a few minutes. It’s perfect … or almost!

It is also easy to make mistakes in this language ;-).

We will see in this talk, under the background of ReX and experience, tips and common errors, their solutions and how to avoid them.

Stéphanie Moallic – What if you were building robots?

🎥 Stéphanie’s recorded video on YouTube

What if you were building robots?

Ever since I was little, I have been passionate about robots. Nono the robot from Ulysses, Johnny 5, R2-D2, the robot in “Laputa”, those described by Asimov, all these robots have always fascinated me and I have often wondered if I too will be able to build robots . In recent years, with the wide availability of programmable cards and microcontroller cards as well as the use of 3D printers, it is now easier to create mobile and programmable robots.

In this talk, I will introduce you to the different robots I have built and programmed over the years such as an Arduino-based mobile robot, a microbit board-based walking and dancing robot, and a board-based hexapod robot. Arduino Nano IoT programmed in Golang in its TinyGo version for microcontrollers. The idea is to scan some of the means available to us to create robots and give leads so that everyone can embark on this great adventure of creating robots.

David Aparicio – Security, where to start ? Install party 🎉

You probably know about Linux Install Parties? Then let’s do the same with Security, we will follow the DevSecOps approach of the US Department of Defense. For that, nothing could be easier, come with your computer, your open-source project and your tools (IDE, CI/CD).

After a few presentation slides, we will go step by step through the security of your application. If your application is dockerized, we will evoke the good practices of the ANSSI on this subject. We will see, through this workshop, how GitOps/CI/CD allow us and organizations to improve our posture towards security.

David Aparicio – Gosec, in the IDE or in the CI, how it avoids to find its PROD down/hacked?

Gosec is a tool that addresses security issues by scanning Go code (AST). In this lightning talk, we will introduce GoSec and explain how it can be used to improve the security of your modern applications that offers an advanced vulnerability detection and remediation solution.

We will cover key Gosec features, such as detection of DDOS or buffer overflows, SQL injections, low RSA key size, use of obsolete and vulnerable cryptographic algorithms, poor TLS settings. If you are a developer concerned about the security of your applications (like any normal, well-built dev), you should not miss this lightning talk on Gosec.

François Samin – Overview of concurrency management in several programming languages

🎥 François’s recorded video on YouTube

Choosing a language for a project is always an important moment. When objectively considering the numerous criteria, including syntax, ecosystem, maturity, etc., one is often overlooked but significantly impacts developer experience: concurrency management. In some languages, it is essential to understand how concurrency is implemented under the hood in order to avoid certain pitfalls and performance losses.

We will delve into the various implementations and uses of concurrency in Javascript, Golang, Rust, and Java to better understand the advantages and disadvantages of each. Sometimes supported natively by the language, sometimes provided by third-party libraries, concurrency implementations can be very different. We will cover concepts such as green threads, native threads, futures, promises, goroutines, work stealing, as well as asynchronous executors and developer experiences for each of these languages.

Olivier Beautier – Take the path of improvisation 🎭 to become a speaker 🎙️ who excites the crowds 🤩

Speaking in public is one of the most shared fears in the world, in the face of poverty, in the face of illness, in the face of death… (Nabla Léviste).

And it’s really a shame, because you have fascinating things to tell!

What makes the richness of our beloved “tech” conferences is largely the diversity of speakers. But it’s hard for many to take the leap, because you’ve probably never learned how to public speaking or build a compelling story.

In this workshop, we invite you to discover a selection, refined by us, of tools from theatrical improvisation, which will help you to manage your fear of speaking in public, and to give structured and exciting way to give talks.

Horacio Gonzalez – Kubernetes, dispassionate and for ultra beginners

🎥 Horacio’s recorded video on YouTube

Whether we like it or not, Kubernetes is part of our landscape today, adored by some and decried by many others. The reality is that Kubernetes is well established and will be present for a while, perhaps hidden under a layer of abstraction but the trend is still that it becomes the backbone of the Cloud Native ecosystem.

At this university, I propose you to start from scratch and discover together the fundamental concepts of Kubernetes: Pod, Service, Health checks, etc. During the 3 hours we will gradually enter more into the bowels of the beast to finish on these more advanced concepts such as the Operators. Each concept will of course be illustrated with concrete demonstrations. Being a developer myself, the angle of attack will be that of deployment and management of applications, all the operational part such as the establishment of a cluster will not be covered.

Behind the scene

Many members of OVHcloud were at the Devoxx France.

It was an opportunity to meet each others in real life!

The booth

All the team was involved in the booth setup and was present on the booth during the event .

The booth was amazing, thanks to Horacio for his wonderful drawings 🤩.

During three days we met at our booth a lot of different people: developers, SRE, UX designers, architects, students, startupers, speakers, sponsors, organizers… A very pleasant moment of share and discussions.

Being present on the booth is not restful … The first thing is that we get up early, the opening to the public being at 8:30 am, you have to be there before (around 7:45 every morning) to set up the booth (mainly take out the goodies 😉).

Three awesome days of interactions, demos, discussions and … few talks. Yes, it’s not a secret, when you are a sponsor you can’t attend all the talks :).

Between each conference (breaks), we saw a lot of people, like a wave, arriving at our stand. A wave of people pouring down on us looking for goodies but mostly with great questions about what exactly we do, what moving to the Cloud means,…

The atmosphere was cool and we make beautiful encounters both with potential users and partners.

Note from Thierry: I was the junior this time, and it felt good ☺️ Devoxx France is a conference I wanted to attend for 10+ years.
The intensity of discussions was a pleasant surprise: that’s the first time I have such deep architecture discussions, or even little support cases.
Huge thanks to my experimented team that helped me to have a wonderful first experience at Devoxx 💞

As speaker

How did David experience this Devoxx?

DevoxxFR2023 is a great event. I love the level of all talks, and also for the diversity & quality of the attendees. This year, I spent a lot of time in the Hands-on lab, the fact that they are not recorded, in very small groups, so the exchanges are rich, the workshop speakers are in proximity with the audience. Therefore they are extremely popular, because sometimes they are full, more than half an hour before the schedule. So it was a hunt for tickets (who mentioned black market 🤣).

How did Stéphanie experience this Devoxx?

As every time I go to Devoxx France, I always have a mixture of feelings: joy, fear of making a mistake, looking forward to discussing with people the subjects that interest me,… Always full of new things to discover but also topics to explore further. Many exchanges with people around. I didn’t go to talks because I’m always afraid of dropping out and I prefer to have discussions with people around.
It was also an opportunity for me to present a talk on a subject that fascinates me: robots and how to build and program them. The talk went well and people seemed interested and asked me a lot of questions during and after. It was really great.

How did Aurélie experience this Devoxx?

Devoxx France is not a conference like the others, at least that’s how I feel. Being a speaker at DevoxxFR is an honor, a chance, a great opportunity and also a lot of stress 😆 I always want to do well, and so I put a lot of pressure on myself for that 😅.
I wasn’t leading off before my talk, I knew that I exceeded 2 minutes during my rehearsals and that I passed in very last on Wednesday. But the talk went well, the participants took a lot of pictures (so they seemed to learn something) so I’m happy 🙂.

And the little bonus track, I had the honor of being Stephanie’s assistant for her talk on robots. The electronics and I have been 12, so I tried to do my best to prepare what I could so that she could concentrate as much as possible on her talk. Well, I made a few blunders, of course 🤣, and Stéphanie was awesome! Well done ma’am 👏

How did François experience this Devoxx?

I hadn’t been to Devoxx since the COVID crisis. I could see that the event had grown considerably since 2019, but without losing its essence: high-quality keynotes, conferences, labs, and a lot of kindness in the exchanges with all participants.

Can’t wait for next year!

Next?

A big thanks to the whole organization team, you did an amazing work for this super edition 💪.

Can’t wait to return next year!

As speakers, we are going to tell you how this edition of Devoxx Morocco went.

Few words about the conference:
– 1200+ attendees
– 2 keynotes
– 150+ conferences
– 11 sponsors

The conference

Devoxx Morocco is a very big conference, the biggest in Morocco.
What was striking was the enthusiasm and passion with which the participants went to the talks.
There were often very nice post-talk exchanges between the whole audience.

Participating in such a conference, far from France, is an opportunity to discover another culture, both in terms of computer science and personal life.
We come back home with a lot of beautiful images, contacts with wonderful people and a lot of stars in our eyes.

Let’s see from a more standard point of view how Devoxx Morocco went!

OVHcloud talks

Horacio Gonzalez & Stéphane Philippart – How to develop a Kubernetes operator in Java with Quarkus.

Abstract:

Kubernetes operators are taking up more and more space in the Kubernetes ecosystem. An Operator simplifies the packaging and deployment of applications within Kubernetes but it also automates the operational part such as updates, migrations etc …
After a quick presentation on the key concepts of operators, this workshop will be an opportunity to dive concretely into the depths of the development of an operator.
So we are developing an operator. Great, but with which language?
For us, old developers, the choice was obvious: Java! And as we love Quarkus, we might as well mix business with pleasure: it is with Quarkus and the Java Operator SDK that we will accompany the participants of this Workshop.
We will develop a small Quarkus application and then we will code a Kubernetes Operator to package and deploy it. Finally, we will automate the operational part so that this application works perfectly and robustly. All this without leaving Java and Quarkus!
No need to be an expert in Quarkus or Kubernetes to follow the lab, loving to code and knowing the basics of Java are more than enough. You will no longer need to install anything on the machine, a simple browser and voila thanks to the power of GitPod.

Behind the scene

As an attendee

What a wonderful experience!
The location was amazing: Agadir and the Hilton.
Many of the conferences were very interesting with many conversations after each one.
And, as usual, it was the opportunity to meet some friends from other companies and have many discussions.

As a DevRel

As always in conference the meetings and other stuff for OVHcloud keep going 😉.
That’s the life of a DevRel on the road.

It was also the occasion to met other DevRel and have passionate discussions.

And of course it was an opportunity to meet many attendees, even if we didn’t have a booth 😊.

As a speaker

This is the first time Horacio and Stéphane gave this workshop.
The attendees were enthusiastic and many interesting questions were raised.
And at the end, one attendee won the Kahoot contest and won the book on Kubernetes written by Aurélie Vache.

Can’t wait to return next year!

But what is your backup and restore strategy?

It is important to be aware that in the event of failure of your infrastructure other than those related to the engine, you are responsible for your backups and restores.
What scenarios exist for a Kubernetes cluster?
You have the choice, and there is no universal answer to this question, because everything will depend on your strategy and your organization.

In the event of a functional or technical failure, your strategy may be to rebuild everything from your sources, on a freshly created Kubernetes cluster.
This rollback strategy will be even more effective if your organization practices the DevOps principle of “Shift Left”, which implies that your developers are responsible for deployments via a policy based on infra-as-code.
There are potentially a few downsides to this backup/restore method.
Indeed, the life cycle of your resources can cause a difference between the definition of these and their real assignments in the cluster.
The role of Kubernetes is to be able to manage your resources, and transform them as needed depending on the load or third-party events.

Take the example of a Kubernetes API update, your resources will be automatically updated with the new version, but the initial definition of your resource will become obsolete without your intervention.
Another example, if among the Kubernetes ecosystem you use tools such as kyverno or OPA Gatekeeper, you will have discrepancies between the definition of your resources and their deployment, which will complicate the restoration.

Alternatively, you can assign this restore task to people within the Ops role in your organization.
In this case, the approach will be rather “system”, that is to say decorrelated from the business, the restoration strategy will be the restoration to a state at time T of the technical environment, often resulting from an image capture, called a snapshot.
To achieve this result, various tools are now recognized for backing up and restoring your Kubernetes cluster. Some examples:
– Trilio
– Velero
– Stash
Our managed Kubernetes offer today does not offer an integrated backup solution, because, as we have seen, there are too many strategies and organizations.

A few months ago, the company Trilio came to offer us, via a Pull Request (PR) on our public documentation space, a very complete tutorial on the installation of their Triliovault for Kubernetes product on our managed Kubernetes offer.
After some technical discussions on implementation and formatting, we were pleased to add this tutorial to our official documentation:

To summarize very succinctly what Triliovault for Kubernetes offers us, here is a simple diagram.

See the complete Trilio documentation

The tool backs up resources first and makes snapshots of physical volumes. The backed up data is stored in an Object Storage such as S3.
Saved resources can be filtered, by namespaces, services, etc.
The administration of the tool is done either by applying manifest files or via a web console.
If we look at Trilio’s offer, we see that the Triliovault for Kubernetes tool adapts to many cloud platforms: OpenShift/OKD, Rancher (RKE1/RKE2), K3S, EKS, AKS, GKE, TKG, MKE, Digital Ocean and of course OVHcloud.
Ref: Compatibility matrix

We greatly appreciated working together on this PR, as it was done without any commercial or strategic agreements.
For our part, we are committed to offering the best Kubernetes service to our customers, and Trilio to ensuring that this environment is secure.
A fine example of complementarity technologies and alignment of objectives.

The story does not end there, then, because in a week at the time of writing this article, we have the opportunity to meet “in the flesh” at Valencia Spain, on the occasion of the Kubecon Europe 2022.

If you are therefore interested in our respective offers and would like to see a demo, this is the perfect opportunity!

As speakers, we are going to tell you how this conference went.

Few words about the conference:

• 650+ attendees
• 190 talks submissions in CFP (Call For Papers)
• 2 keynotes
• 40 conferences
• 10 workshops
• 16 sponsors
• 1 unconference day

The Snowcamp conference is a separate concept: workshops on Wednesdays over a full day to learn or deepen a particular technology; a conference on Thursday and Friday, more classic with 45 minutes talks; finally on Saturday, an unconference/a relaxing day in the snow.

And what can you say about the place?

Keynote

We had already seen the talk of Noel Macé and Pierre Tibulle (at Riviera Dev and/or at the JUG Summer Camp) but I must admit once again it was awesome!

Title: “👨‍🎨 Once upon a time… the browsers ⛵️”
🇫🇷 👨‍🎨 Il était une fois… les navigateurs ⛵️

Abstract:

“Great battles and great innovations, told and sketchnoted live! Come with us to listen the animated history of the browsers, from the CERN to nowadays… and their probable futures!

Delve back into the adventure and great ideas of web browsing, lulled by the voice of Noël and the drawings of Pierre!”

The keynote format suited them, it was really great. Imagine the story of the browsers told to perfection and sketchnoted live with humor and a great duo, it was simply brilliant! From the first to the last minute, we loved it!

OVHcloud talks

The conference was punctuated by 50 talks, given by 65 speakers from all over France. Unfortunately, the talks were not recorded this year, but this can also be an advantage, less stress for the speakers and freedom of what they want to say.

Among these talks, 4 were given by OVHcloud speakers:

Stéphane Philippart – Open source to the rescue of the developer (and the architect ?)

🇫🇷 L’Open Source au secours du développeur (et de l’architecte) ?

Abstract:

This talk is about the reasons that drove Stéphane to look in the open source development.

Before to being a DevRel at OVHcloud Stéphane was a Software Architect. During these years, despite its passion for development the opportunities to develop were less and less. His talk explains why and how he started to participate to open source projects and what they bring to his developer’s life.

It’s also an occasion to take tips and advice on the problems he met.

Aurélie Vache & Horacio Gonzalez – What the heck is DevRel?

🇫🇷 Mais, à quoi ça sert un DevRel ?

Abstract:

“In recent years, we have seen new job titles appear, at the crossroads between tech, marketing and the community: Developer Advocate, Developer Evangelist, Technical Advocate… These jobs are grouped together in a large category: Developer Relations, or quite simply DevRel …

But what exactly is a DevRel?
What does he/she do for a living?
Is he/she just a glitter thrower?
Does he/she spend his/her life in conferences?
Does he/she know airports and train stations inside out?
Does he/she have a unicorn costume in his/her luggage?

Aurélie and Horacio will show you in this talk, with their humor and good mood, their daily life, the different types of activities and what is really behind this DevRel job… And you might even get some little anecdotes ^^”

Aurélie Vache – Common tips & mistakes in Go and how to solve them

🇫🇷 “Common tips & mistakes” en Go – et comment les résoudre

Abstract:

These tools may mean something to you, you may use them daily, but did you know that they were made in Go? Indeed, the Go language is a language a lot of used to make microservices, cross-compilation, by companies requiring high performance and resilience.

These last years Go is everywhere: micro-services, cross-compilation, used for building resilient and efficient applications. Learning Go look easy and it’s a convenient language (strong typed and a rich ecosystem).

It is a practical language, easy to learn, typed and with a rich ecosystem. And it’s true, creating an HTTP server or even a CLI application in Go only takes a few minutes. It’s perfect … or almost!

Aurélie explained in her conference, based on her experience and real life things, some tips and some recurring errors with their solutions and how to avoid them.

David Aparicio – Father Castor 🐻, tell us a story about OPS

🇫🇷 Père Castor 🐻, raconte nous une histoire (d’OPS)

Abstract:

“Failure as a source of knowledge.

Can we learn from the mistakes of the big tech (companies)?
To do so, we will review some of the major outages of the last decade: Github, Amazon, Google, OVHcloud, Apple, Fastly, Microsoft, Gitlab or more recently Facebook. Through the reading of the post-mortems of the incidents, we will analyze the root cause, the implementation of the remediation, and extract some good practices

~ IaaS (Interruption as a Sageness) #HugOps”

Our DevRel team

And what about our DevRel team?

Tuesday we onboarded our 4th colleague at the Paris office (welcome again Stéphane!), who presented a talk at Snowcamp as a DevRel for this first week of work at OVHcloud!

Unconference

Snowcamp is also a day outside the conference, called “unconference”, with snowshoes for some and skis for others. Even if we have to come back on Friday evening, because as we said in our talk about the DevRel profession, it is important to reconcile personal, family and associative life, we hope that one day we will be able to take advantage of this great unconference day!

Behind the scene

What is behind the scenes of an event of this type?

We know you are waiting this moment since the beginning of the article ^^.

This time we were “only” speakers, but that’s no excuse not to tell you about all the adventures we may have had 😆.

Mixing the onboarding of our 4th colleague and a trip to a conference was sporty enough, enough for Horacio to forget, an important accessory necessary for our talk, on his bed on Tuesday when he left at 4am. So imagine a DevRel running around Paris at 5 p.m. to find … a backup unicorn costume 😆. Challenge accepted and passed!

Between a plane and a train, what about enjoying the sun during a little session of work? ^^

And yes of course, repeat, repeat and repeat our talks even on a plane

This kind of events are also an opportunity to meet awesome people, to share, to get to know each other.

Attending a conference can also be a way to meet sponsors, participate and win one of their contests! Congratulations David!!

Thanks again to the Snowcamp organizers!

Bye bye Snowcamp, and see you next year 🙂.

“Et pendant ce temps à Vera Cruz”

Olivier was not with us, sniff, but our “Poulpito” was there to manage the fort with a master hand 💪.

What are people saying about us?

As sponsor and speakers we are going to tell you how this first physics conference of the year went.

Few words about the conference:

• 300+ attendees
• 121 talks submissions in CFP (Call For Paper)
• 2 keynotes
• 18 conferences
• 9 quickies
• 2 workshops
• 10 sponsors
• 20 preparation meetings to organize the event (almost of all them was done in remote)

OVHcloud talks

The conference was punctuated by 31 talks, given by 37 speakers from all over France. The talks given in the two largest rooms have been recorded, you can watch the talks in replay if you wish in the Touraine Tech YouTube channel (when they will be available).

Among these talks, 3 were given by OVHcloud speakers:

David Aparicio – Père Castor 🐻, raconte nous une histoire (d’OPS)

Abstract:

L’échec comme une source de connaissance. Pouvons-nous apprendre des erreurs des plus grands ? Nous allons, pour cela, faire la revue de quelques grands outages de la dernière décennie : Github, Amazon, Google, OVHcloud, Apple, Fastly, Microsoft, Gitlab ou plus récemment Facebook À travers la lecture des post-mortems des incidents, nous analyserons la root cause, la mise en place de la remédiation, et en extraire des bonnes pratiques

~ IaaS (Interruption as a Sageness) #HugOps”

Sébastien Jardin – Would like to learn how manage your passwords like your code?

Abstract:

La gestion de mot de passe est une partie bien-souvent douloureuse, voir fastidieuse.

Qui a raison? L’informations qui est en prod ou bien celle du Keepass, ou encore celle que l’on croit avoir configuré ?

Le développement en collaboration est désormais beaucoup plus aisé depuis des outils comme SVN et désormais l’incontournable GIT, projet initié par Linus Torvald !

Mais alors pourquoi pas gérer nos mots de passe comme du code ? C’est finalement du texte, qui doit être versionné, on souhaite approuvé son changement, et on est potentiellement plusieurs à vouloir le modifier, et mieux encore on aimerait les voir se déplacer magiquement de notre référentiel vers notre production… cela ne vous rappelle rien ?

Nous allons voir comment nous avons réussi avec finalement peu de moyens et d’investissement à résoudre notre problématiques de gestion de mot de passe grâce à plusieurs outils : Password-store (coffre fort GPG), Git, une CI/CD, et c’est tout !

Nous avons environ 200 mots de passe quasiment géré de manière automatique, avec tous les avantages de Git et la sécurité de l’automatisation qui évite les erreurs humaines

Horacio Gonzalez & Philippe Charrière – GitPod : IDE as a service, ou comment ne pas acheter un MacBook Pro à 6000 € et être heureux avec une petite machine

Abstract:

Nous allons vous conter plusieurs histoires, dont vous développeurs, êtes les héros La 1ère, vous êtes contributeur opensource:

Il est tard, les enfants sont au lit, vous avez enfin un peu de temps pour geeker tranquillement 🎉. C’est le moment de vous lancer à contribuer dans ce projet open source qui vous tient à cœur. Vous commencez à suivre les instructions pour préparer l’environnement de dev : telle version de node, en conflit avec celle qui vous utilisez au jour le jour, telles bibliothèques, telles dependences qui marchent pas bien sur votre machine… Après deux heures, vous avez réussi à tout préparer, mais votre envie de coder s’est éteinte 🥱 à force de vous battre avec l’environnement, et vous allez vous coucher … 😴

La 2ème, plus classique, vous êtes chef de projet “couteau suisse” en ESN:

Vendredi matin, vous travaillez dans l’ESN “HGJ”, votre patron vous annonce que vous êtes promu Chef de Projet, que vous avez hérité du projet “EnRetardDèsLeDépart” et que votre équipe de 20 personnes commence Lundi et le client a exigé qu’elle soit opérationnelle dès Lundi. Pas grave, vous avez tout le week-end pour installer les 20 postes de développement et les paramétrer 🥵 Il faut juste expliquer à votre compagne pourquoi vous allez devoir annuler le week-end prévu depuis des semaines … Bon courage 😈

Qui n’a pas eu ce type d’expérience, ou d’autres semblables : devoir contribuer à un nouveau projet avec l’ordinateur du travail, dont le verrouillage mis par la RSSI rend hyper compliqué d’installer des outils, développer depuis son iPad car on est en déplacement et on n’a plus de batterie sur le laptop, développer sur un même projet mais avec des paramétrages complètement différentes selon l’environnement, faire un quick fix sur un dépôt sans devoir télécharger la moitié d’internet sur son poste… ?

GitPod est une solution étonnement simple et efficace à tous ces soucis. Le principe ? Un environnement de développement dans le cloud, basé sur Git, Eclipse Theia et Docker, vous permettant de développer, tester et déployer votre code directement depuis la fenêtre de votre navigateur.

Avec nos 2 histoires, nous allons vous expliquer et démontrer comment utiliser GitPod pour monter un environnement de développement en quelques minutes, comment ne pas passer un week-end à préparer l’arrivée d’une équipe de développement, comment utiliser GitPod avec GitLab ou GitHub pour fournir des environnements clés en mains pour des projets, workshops, formations …

Bref, à la fin de notre talk, vous saurez utiliser GitPod, et vous serez peut-être même “acro” à cet IDE dans le cloud (qui fonctionne même avec FireFox ou Safari iOS 😉 … et que vous pouvez aussi installer chez vous, ou mieux encore, dans le cloud publique d’OVHcloud)

Our DevRel team

During this day, the Devrel team was complete for the first time in physical (our 4th future colleague was even present)!

Our booth

During all the day we met at our booth a lot of different people: developers, SRE, students, startupers, speakers… A very pleasant moment of share.

It was also an occasion for people to scan the QRcode in the kakemono in order to discover our open job offers:

Quiz time!

As you can see in the pictures, we had some limited edition stickers for attendees but also a Nintendo Switch vide game console. But how to win it?

For that, we organized a quiz to have a chance to win the Switch Lite blue (blue like OVHcloud logo 😆).

We created a quiz with Kahoot with 20 questions about OVHcloud… and it was a real succes!

Behind the scene

And what is behind the scenes of an event of this type?

DevRels’ work does not begin when the conference doors open and does not end when the last visitor has left the premises.

During this event we were sponsor and speaker. There are two different things to organize.

As a speaker

The preparation starts several months in advance. First we need to submit our talk(s) to the CFP of the event so we need to think about a title, an abstract (description of your talk). If our talk is accepted, (yipeeaa!), it’s time to start, continue, finish or improve our slides and repeat, repeat and … repeat it again, even the day before the event during the travel and at the hotel ^^.

Several months of work for 45 minutes in live.

As a sponsor

The preparation starts several months in advance too, when we decide to sponsor the event. A lot of e-mails and phone calls later, when the sponsoring is validated, we can start to think about the booth. Does the event have a theme? What topics we want to share to the attendees?

For this conference we decided to organize a contest (a Quiz) with a nice prize for the person who will know OVHcloud the most. So we created the quiz, think about questions and of course we bought a nice prize: a Nintendo Switch Lite.

The stickers offered at the booth are personalized, the drawing was designed for the occasion, the model sent to the printer, and after that a cutting session followed.

On our kakemono, we added QR-Code links to job offers for David’s service, very practical because David was present, he was available to talk about it and answered questions with interested people. Useful information has also been added, such as the time and place of our talks, which was greatly appreciated by visitors and organizers.

The kakemono model has been specially chosen for its practicality, once folded up, it does not take up much space and can be transported very well on the train or plane (as we do for DevFest Lille event for example).

As both

This kind of events are also an opportunity to meet interesting people, to share, to get to know each other.

in short, conferences like Touraine Tech are very intense moments, with a lot of preparation work, busy days on site, moments of conviviality and sharing and in general a great fatigue when we finally land in the evening in our hotel rooms…

And sometimes we have the little comforting surprise of having a nice bathtub in the room… even if like this time, only one of us three had this chance (grrrrrr 😡).

Sometimes we also get some unexpected surprises, like when Aurélie discovers that she served as a model for the visual of the event!

What are people saying about us?

Do you want to meet us?

The next stop for our DevRel team will be at SnowCamp in Grenoble (France), on February 2nd to 4th.

If you happen to be there don’t hesitate to ping us!

In this first post of 2021, I would like to indulge in a review of the last year for the OVHcloud blog.

A year like no other…

I feel like a lazy writer by typing a heading like that, it both seems trite and cliché. But honestly, I can’t find another way to start a 2020 retrospective, so much so this year has been unique.

The Covid-19 crisis has marked the whole year, and we at OVHcloud blog team have tried to be a relay for initiatives and messages from OVHcloud and its ecosystem to take part in the effort combat this healthcare crisis.

During the first lockdown, we talked about the #Open_solidarity initiative to offer free infrastructures to remote working, collaboration and healthcare hosting solutions for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. We also gave some advice on protecting your IT infrastructure and the security issues raised by the sudden wave of remote working. We showcased some concrete examples, like the BigBluButton based solution used by the ISEN Ouest engineering school and by out internal training teams.

What did we talk about?

The most commonly-explored subjects were:

• Open Source
• Web Hosting
• Kubernetes
• Infrastructure
• Machine learning & AI
• DevOps & Automation

Some highlights

We feel really proud of all the posts we published last year. We feel that the diversity of subject matters, contributors and technologies showcase the richness of OVHcloud teams’ expertise.

It’s always unfair to make a ranking, because bare audience metrics don’t necessarily correlate to a post’s interest or reach. However, let me showcase some of the most widely-read posts from this first year.

Disclaimer: it is not a strict ranking, as I am only putting one post per category into it

A journey through the wondrous land of Machine Learning series

In this series of posts, Solutions Architect Guillaume Ruty does a very practical, down to Earth, introduction to Machine Learning by using a scenario easy to relate to:  how Machine Learning could have helped him estimate the price of the apartment he bought; what tools he would need to do that, how he would proceed, and what difficulties he might encounter. 

In the first post, Did I get ripped off?, he does a naïve implementation of the Machine Learning process, and show how the results are aberrant, in the second one, “Can I really buy a palace in Paris for 100,000€?”, he explains why and proposes some solutions.

The Bastion series

In this series, our Head of Security Tools Squad, Stéphane Lesimple, describes our The Bastion security infrastructure, the constraints, the features, and how and why we decided to release it as open source last Fall. The series of articles offers a good peek to how we manage the access to our servers.

A public and participative roadmap for our Public Cloud!

Last December we released the roadmap for our Public Cloud. Maxime Hurtrel, Cloud Native Services Product Manager, explains in the post why and how we decided to

The Agile Telemetry series

A series of posts about Agility, in the OVHcloud way. Pragmatism, automation, metrics and a dose of plain old good sense allied to the Agile principles to build an Agile methodology that simply works.

The Self-heal at Webhosting series

With almost 6 000 000 websites hosted on more than 15 000 servers, the OVHcloud Webhosting SRE team manage lots of alerts during their working day. In these posts, the SRE team explain how they have been the self-healing, a set of tools to help them in their tasks.

An old favorite

Looking at the blog stats for 2020, I was pleasantly surprised to find an oldie but goodie, a post from 2019 that is still one off our most read post (and very highly placed in search engine searches):

Getting external traffic into Kubernetes — ClusterIp, NodePort, Load Balancer, and Ingress

In this post, we tried to summarise some answers to a question that came up a lot as our customers began to explore our Managed Kubernetes service: How do I route external traffic into my Kubernetes service?

Part of the problem was the sheer number of possible answers, and the concepts needed to understand them, so in the post we tried to explain and illustrate those concepts.

Not only a tech blog

The OVHcloud blog was rebooted in January 2019. Our aim was to build a technical blog in English, use it as a platform for documenting some of the lessons we learn as we build the best alternative cloud, and share them with the community. But during 2020 we have also added some post that, even if less strictly technical, we believe interesting for our readers. In these posts we talks about our strategy, our position, our culture and our values, about all the factors that make OVHcloud a particular actor in the Cloud ecosystem.

In February we published a post by our founder Octave Klaba, If I were an American, exposing our vision and our values, and how they reflect in everything we do. Later he completed the vision in another post, Toward the Democratisation of Premium Bare Metal Cloud.

In May, our CEO Michel Paulin wrote a post on OVHcloud’s commitment to investing and building trust for the future and one of the concrete actions towards that objective, the Open Trusted Cloud catalog of trusted solutions.

In June, we shared The Forrester Wave™ report that classed OVHcloud as a Leader in the European Hosted Private Cloud market.

During Summer, we published Privacy Shield: Invalidation, explaining the context and meaning of this much-awaited ruling.

Just before our OVHcloud Ecosystem Experience, we published The customer’s role in data center eco-responsibility, where we discussed in an open way about eco-responsibility, energy consommation, innovation and transparency.

In November, we published 4 Programs to Succeed Together, where we showcased some of our ecosystem oriented programs: OVHcloud Partner Program, OVHcloud Startup Program, Open Trusted Cloud and OVHcloud Marketplace

That month we also talked about data sovereignty, and the impacts of the choice of a cloud provider, and how this choice has needs to be aligned with the long term strategy of companies.

And to end the year, we published a post about innovation, patents and our commitment to open innovation and open source.

Last but not least, OVHcloud is Guriosity’s sponsor of the month

Here at OVHcloud blog team, we are happy to be sponsors of Guriosity, our favorite French tech blog aggregator.

Guriosity is a curated aggregator of technical articles from almost 70 tech blogs by French companies. The site shows the posts, classed into categories, and they also have a weekly newsletter that showcases some of the most interesting posts.

And to celebrate this sponsoring, we will be giving some vouchers every week of the month to the readers of Guriosity newsletter, to allow them to discover some of our products.

And for 2021?

This year, we intend to continue the trend and publish even more technical content. We want to diversify it even further, with more contributors, more teams, more products, and more technologies.

Our goals are always the same: to give back to the community, showcase OVHcloud’s diversity and savoir-faire, and give our teams a platform for sharing the challenges they face and the solutions they implement.

We’d like to give a massive thanks to all of our contributors who create the content that we offer, our Content team for proofreading every post, and the OVHcloud Blog community that help us make it happen. And above all, thanks again to all of you for reading our blog, sharing it on social networks, and giving us your feedback.

Speaking of feedback, if you want to give us your opinion, suggest some topics you’d like to see us cover, or ask us for more details, please reach out to us (@OVHcloud) or directly to me (@LostInBrittany) via Twitter, and I will pass it on to the right teams.

Welcome to 2021!

Kubernetes is in constant evolution and amelioration, every new version brings a lot of new feature and fixes. The 1.19 is not the exception:

Finally, we have arrived with Kubernetes 1.19, the second release for 2020, and by far the longest release cycle lasting 20 weeks in total. It consists of 34 enhancements: 10 enhancements are moving to stable, 15 enhancements in beta, and 9 enhancements in alpha.

So what’s new in Kubernetes 1.19?

You can find the whole change list in the official release notes, and a more casual reading version on the Kubernetes blog, but in this post we want to have a look to some of the (in our highly subjective point of view) major themes in this release:

Ingress graduates to General Availability

Ingress is a Kubernetes API object that manages external access to the services in a cluster, typically HTTP. It may provide load balancing, SSL termination and name-based virtual hosting.

Ingress is nowadays a central feature of Kubernetes, widely used in production. And surprisingly enough, it was still officially a beta. By graduating it to GA, the Kubernetes community acknowledges its importance and its de facto standard status. And of course, it opens the way to working on an Ingress v2, or some extensions, to give it even more features.

To get an overview of what’s Ingress and how does it compares (and interacts with) other ways to get external traffic into your Kubernetes cluster, you can read our Getting external traffic into Kubernetes – ClusterIp, NodePort, LoadBalancer, and Ingress post.

An you can of course find more informations about Ingress at the official documentation.

Avoiding permanent beta API Versions

Ingress isn’t the only API that have been in beta status for ages, in fact it’s only one of the numerous examples of a semi-permanent beta status for new APIs, where widely used features remain as beta release after release even if they are considered production-ready by most users.

From Kubernetes v1.20 and onwards, SIG community have decided of a new policy is to avoid features staying in beta for a long time: when a new feature’s API reaches beta, that starts a countdown. The beta-quality API now has three releases (about nine calendar months) to either:

• reach general availability (GA), and deprecate the beta, or
• have a new beta version (and deprecate the previous beta).

More informations in this Kubernetes blog post.

Increase Kubernetes support window to one year

Until this release 1.19, minor versions of Kubernetes had a support window of nine months, from Kubernetes 1.19 onwards, the support window for minor releases increases to one year.

As a Managed Kubernetes provider, we are particularly happy of this change, as our observations fully align with the working group (WG) Long Term Support (LTS) showing that a significant proportion of Kubernetes users didn’t upgrade in the 9-month support period.

Other APIs graduate to GA, and some new betas

Some other Kubernetes APIs that been upgraded to general availability, and the old API endpoints have been deprecated:

• apiextensions.k8s.io/v1beta1 -> apiextensions.k8s.io/v1
• apiregistration.k8s.io/v1beta1 -> apiregistration.k8s.io/v1
• authentication.k8s.io/v1beta1 -> authentication.k8s.io
• authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1 -> authorization.k8s.io/v1
• coordination.k8s.io/v1beta1 -> coordination.k8s.io/v1

Some APIs also get a new beta version:

• autoscaling/v2beta1 -> autoscaling/v2beta2

Better Logging

Dealing with logs in Kubernetes has always been a tricky task. As there was no uniform structure neither for log messages in the Kubernetes control plane nor for the reference to Kubernetes objects in the logs, automating the log management relied in ad-hoc solutions and in fine on dreaded regular expressions… In consequence, building analytical solutions using those logs, was not only complicated to develop but also hard to maintain.

Version 1.19, the  SIG-instrumentation begins the migration towards a new structured log paradigm. The migration is ongoing, not all the logs are structured yet, so you still should have to handle the unstructured log messages. But the promise is that when the migration will be done, most common logs will be more easily queryable, with standardized log messages and references to Kubernetes objects.

You can get more information in the corresponding KEP (Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal) and in the system logs section of the documentation.

Did you know ?

Deprecated detection

In Kubernetes 1.19, SIG API Machinery has implemented deprecation warning on Kubernetes APIs. From this version onwards, making an API request to a deprecated REST API endpoint returns a Warning header in the response and a deprecation annotation on the audit event associated to the API call, and some metrics.

The warning includes details about the release in which the API will no longer be available, and the replacement API version. The idea is to inform both the end-user and the cluster administrator when deprecated APIs are used in the cluster.

To help you to upgrade those deprecated APIs, kubectl may warn you when you’re using them. the resource is deprecated. Simply use the –raw or --warnings-as-errors flag in your kubectl calls:

~$ kubectl get --raw /apis/apiextensions.k8s.io/v1beta1/customresourcedefinitions > /dev/null
Warning: apiextensions.k8s.io/v1beta1 CustomResourceDefinition is deprecated in v1.16+, unavailable in v1.22+; use apiextensions.k8s.io/v1 CustomResourceDefinition

More information on this Kubernetes blog post.

Ecosystem

The Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) coming in November! CKS focuses on cluster & system hardening, minimizing microservice vulnerabilities and the security of the supply chain.

Community

Kubernetes.dev, a Kubernetes contributor focused website has been launched. It brings the contributor documentation, resources and project event information into one central location.

Some useful links

https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/release/notes/

https://www.kubernetes.dev/

https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/07/15/certified-kubernetes-security-specialist-cks-coming-in-november/