OVHcloud at Devoxx France 2023

Between Wednesday and Friday April 12-14, 2022, Devoxx France took place in Paris, France.

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!