After postponing the February meetup to the 1st of March, then postponing to the 22nd because of the cyclone, this meetup was long overdue. I had received many messages from people looking to talk at one of our meetups, and it was about time to give them a stage.
The meetup should have happened at Acensi, but due to communication error, and a staff change, we arrived to deserted offices. Because of the rain, the mosquitoes were out in full force as well.
So, I hurriedly sent out an email to the attendees who had RSVP'd, as well as a message in the Telegram group, that we were relocating to Kuumba Coffee, a cafe in Telfair not that far away.
Additionally, we had a significant deviation from the schedule, as Bruno had fallen ill and Ish had been too tired to make slides. They were replaced by me and SM respectively.
The Meetup
Because we were now at a cafe, we didn't have a main projector to share slides to. We made do by taking out all our laptops, tablets, and phones, and viewing the slides on there while the speaker gave the presentation and told us when to change slides.
More YAML with Talos Linux
I started off the event, an hour late, with my talk on Talos Linux. I had been experimenting with Talos for a while through VMs, as a "worklab". Talos is a minimal (only 12 binaries), very lightweight OS without ssh, systemd, package managers, and managed through an API server and tons of YAML. While you have "full" Linux distros (like OpenSUSE Leap) for traditional server workloads, and "micro" Linux distros (like OpenSUSE Micro) for container workloads, Talos is made for only one thing - Kubernetes.
Talos is a very interesting take on operating systems, and is a bizarre concept for those of us used to manually configuring servers through ssh and normal bash. Instead, everything from storage, to networking, is configured and applied through a yaml file and `talosctl`
ClusterAPI in Action
Prashant Ramhit, first-time speaker at one of our meetups, and more commonly known as CookieMonster on Telegram, talked about ClusterAPI. I have seen it floating around in the Rancher UI, but never dug deep into it so this was an interesting revelation for me.
Following the YAML trend, he showed how you can provision and manage worker clusters through a single management cluster and a standardised API which works across a dozen cloud service providers.
As Cookie also works for Mirantis, he introduced us to 3 of their open source technologies: k0S, k0SMOTRON and k0RDENT. I had already heard about k0S but have mainly been using K3s as lightweight Kubernetes distro.
Chance of Rain
It came as no surprise to me that SM, the cryptic and mysterious figure in the tech community here, thought up a title which gave no hint to his talk. His presentation was not inherently "cloud native" but rather about how we know and use "the cloud" in Mauritius. From a server sitting in Dubai to a pair of load-balanced Wordpress instances, the general consensus of the cloud tends more towards "cloud naive". Is the cloud nothing more than someone else's computer?
SM also brought up risks of trusting vendors with your servers and data, substantiated by VMWare's acquisition by Broadcom (which led to price hikes by 300-1000%). I later argued that this was precisely the advantage of having non-profits like the CNCF leading industry standards, particularly with Kubernetes being cloud-agnostic.
SM mentioned the paper on The Intergalactic Computer Network by J.C.R. Licklider, in 1963 - prior to even ARPANET (which evolved into the Internet). Another person of note in this vein of history is Anatoly Kitov, who proposed an Internet-like digital communications infrastructure which would have spanned the USSR, before even Licklider's papers. Unfortunately, Anatoly's proposal was never implemented due to the astronomical cost.
On a side note, I had done some research on Anatoly a while back and it infuriates me to no end how hard it is to find information from that part of the world. Makes people think that the US is the "sole contributor" to technological innovations and this "erasure of history" is depressing.
Time For More
This was easily one of my favourite Cloud Native meetups, and I am very happy with the way it turned out, despite the sudden change of plan in the morning. Afterwards, a few of us went to Flying Dodo to continue the tech talk. The next Cloud Native meetup will [tenatively] be on the 26th of April, and we look forward to seeing you there.
You can check meetup.mu for all the tech meetups in Mauritius, or simply cloudnativemauritius.com for our events.