Cloud Native August Meetup

Hello! Cloud Native Mauritius, the local CNCF Chapter, had its first meetup on the 31st August 2024. With 20 of 25 RSVPs showing up, Ish (organiser) and I (also organiser) could not have hoped for a more successful first event.

Planning

Planning for this meetup started at the end of this year's DevCon, following a great deal of hype being generated around Cloud Native and Kubernetes through a series of sessions and workshops hosted then. Given that I was working at SWAN as intern in software development, I decided to ask Didier if it would be possible to host our first meetup there. It was the perfect opportunity to also introduce Cloud Native at SWAN which is currently considering a move to Cloud. For the uninitiated, SWAN is a massive partner of the tech community in Mauritius, sponsoring DevCon and hosting a multitude of meetups throughout the year. Kudos to them and massive thanks for hosting the Cloud Native meetup!

After a great deal of back-and-forth regarding attendee estimates for lunch, Ish and I confidently settled on "no greater than 20". Really we were expecting more in the range of 10-12, so 20 was a safe maximum. Turns out we were quite off the mark, and I unfortunately had to close registration at 25 to prevent attendees from going un-fed which would be a travesty!

The Event

On the day itself, I got to SWAN HQ in Port Louis early, to make sure everything was in order, and to see if anyone needed help setting up. I got a ride with my mum, and we picked up Neil along the way. When we arrived, Ish was already there, adding finishing touches to his slides. We had the opportunity for a conversation as attendees started arriving. The guys at Swan were amazing, offering tea/coffee and an assortment of biscuits before the event started.

After a majority of attendees were here, I started off the event, giving a brief summary of what the CNCF is, as well as what our local chapter represents (hint: we want to convert you to kubernetes. follow our religion or die). Afterwards, I gave a quick introduction to SWAN, our venue and lunch sponsors, and their ever-evolving approach to IT.

The Sessions

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Chittesh going through Docker

Chittesh Sham started off with his presentation - or rather live demo - of containerising Wordpress. He went over the advantages of containerisation, the main one being avoiding a situation where "it runs on my machine"! Containers give an isolated, consistent environment for running applications, while being much faster, lightweight, and portable than fully-fledged VMs.

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Me, trying to make Kubernetes easy

Afterwards, I took to the stage to build on the container foundation which Chittesh had set, introducing Kubernetes, the different parts making it up (eg pods, deployments, services, pvcs), and what makes it such a great tool for orchestrating your containers. I had recycled parts of the presentation from the one I gave on the first day of DevCon, as I had realised late at night on the eve that explaining the kube-apiserver and kubelet would go wayy over people's heads. As usual, I enjoyed answering the questions and engaging in discussions at the end.

Ish being daring with a demo of kubectl

As we had both been quite quick, finishing in our 30 minute slots, Ish had time to go for his presentation - Cloud Native for the Monolith user, where he described the story of running L'Express on VMs versus on Kubernetes and how the Cloud Native architecture offered better robustness and scalability for the millions of views the site receives every month. He then topped it off with a quick demo of kubectl and how easily he could scale a pod containing a Laravel container in a matter of seconds, with the service doing load balancing across all of them.

Ish finished right on time, at which point we lined up for a group photo before breaking for lunch. The corridor discussions are always the best, and I was really pleased to see a lot of people talking about implementing Kubernetes in the workplace, and the options open to them. The second best part was the lunch itself - a "buffet" of finger food; sadly after going around completing check-ins and chatting with people, there wasn't much left for me. Oh well, the benchmark of a great meetup is how little food is left over.

The Conclusion

After lunch, we gathered round for a short discussion around Cloud Native Mauritius, introducing the website hosted on community.cncf.io as well as our own website cloudnativemauritius.com. If you want to join the community, you go through the community.cncf.io site, but we list all our meetups on cloudnativemauritius.com as well. We also have a blog where we occasionally post cool snippets regarding some Cloud Native tech or other. Do check it out!

For next month, we're partnering with the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community at MCB Digital Factory for yet another day packed with Cloud Native goodness. Looking forward to seeing you there!