We’re excited to have a great lineup of sessions for our inaugural conference! The first two days of our conference will consist of 30-minute sessions. The majority of the content is pre-recorded, which allows speakers to respond to questions in real-time in chat. Most speakers will have time at the end of the session for a live Q&A as well!
The third day will be less formal (dare we say… unconference-like?!?), encouraging networking and free-form discussion. More details will be coming soon about how it’ll work!
Note that all times below are in EDT.
Welcome to the conference! We'll provide a quick run-through of how things are going to work and get ready to kick off the fun!
1:15PM
David Raymond (Virginia Tech and VA/US Cyber Ranges)
The Virginia Cyber Range is part of Virginia Tech's Division of Information Technology, but in many ways, we operate like a startup company. We were funded in 2016 by the state of Virginia to create a cyber range for use by students and faculty in Virginia high schools and colleges. To support this goal, we have developed a web portal and software that delivers our cloud-hosted, virtual infrastructure and cybersecurity courseware to thousands of students across the Commonwealth. In this talk, I’ll share how a startup mindset, and a DevOps approach, have led to widespread adoption and improved cybersecurity education across Virginia and beyond!
2:00PM
Jay Hulslander (Cornell University)
Agile project management is a buzz word used in the industry these days, but it means different things to different people. This talk will present some real life agile project management techniques my team uses to support Cornell University's accounting system. These techniques have improved our team's productivity, improved the over all quality of the application, and great improved customer satisfaction.
2:40PM
Christopher McNabb (Virginia Tech)
Keeping secrets isn’t easy. Managing the policies and access around them is harder. Tools like Hashicorp Vault provide secure, centrally managed, and auditable solutions for keeping secrets while providing access to those who need it. Service owners need to be able to control who has access to the secrets for their services and to be able to update those secrets when needed. Administrators of the secrets management tool need to be able to make approved configuration changes and perform other management tasks without being able to access the secrets themselves. This presentation is a basic overview of Hashicorp Vault and how we use gitops and CI/CD to manage Vault in a way that allows service owners flexibility in secrets access while allowing Vault administrators to make configuration changes without having access to the stored secrets.
3:20PM
Craig Riecke (Cornell University)
Higher Ed is chock-full of human beings with grandiose ideas and no focus ... and worse, they have just enough authority to fill your TODO list for years. How do you plan for apps that might be insanely successful, or might get no use at all? Kubernetes can help by isolating your workloads and making them easy to scale - all without worrying about cloud-specific details. We've used it with great success at the Cornell Vet School, most recently to build a university-side COVID-19 testing infrastructure in a matter of weeks.
4:00PM
Brian Maloney (Virginia Tech), Nandan Sadineni (Virginia Tech)
In pursuit of building a Platform to host customer applications at Virginia Tech, our team has gone through multiple iterations of cluster builds. From changing directions on managed Kubernetes control planes to bootstrapping the clusters, from solving chicken and egg problems to automating the cluster building process using gitlab CI, our team has encountered and solved some interesting challenges in the past 10 months. The team and the cluster have come a long way in regards to building using automated processes and testing on a scheduled basis. We will be presenting about how Virginia Tech builds a scalable Kubernetes cluster using AWS EKS, Gitlab CI, Terraform and other open source applications.
1:00PM
A quick welcome/intro before kicking off day two's fun!
1:15PM
Scott Chandler (Virginia Tech)
Few of us find the time to truly master the latest in front end. Take just half an hour to polish up your skills with 2021's latest HTML and CSS. We'll introduce modern units, calc, minmax, static ARIA, basis, ascii Grid, negative Grid lines, and progressive subgrid.
1:55PM
Dhruv Prabhakar (University of California, Berkeley), Naresh Meda (University of California, Berkeley)
What is DataOps? Come join us to learn how UC Berkeley automated the deployment of Data Pipelines using GitHub, Terraform and AWS CodePipeline for Enterprise Data Lake on AWS. This session explores the Terraform statefile management, Continuous Integration & Deployment using GitHub folder structure and AWS CodePipeline.
2:35PM
Tad Merchant (Cornell University)
Covering what happens from the initial request of "We need an app" to #ShipIt in prod with all the minutia you can stomach. We'll touch on Git/GitHub, Jenkins, ECS, Docker, Ansible, and enough AWS acronyms to make a hearty alphabet stew.
3:15PM
Phil Fenstermacher (William & Mary)
Loki is working on making log collection cheap and easy by skipping the expensive steps that parse, analyze, and index every line. At the same time, it's more than an API on top of syslog and grep. At William & Mary we're aggregating all of our container and webserver logs both on-prem and in the cloud to a single instance of Loki that we query alongside Prometheus to make life easier for everyone. Come hear about the architecture of Loki and how we made it go in just a few days.
3:55PM
Michael Irwin (Virginia Tech)
While Kubernetes has a rich feature-set with RBAC and namespaces, it still falls short in making a multi-tenant solution possible out-of-the-box. How do you protect teams from each other without simply taking all of the control from them? Fortunately, Gatekeeper has come to the rescue! In this talk, we'll talk about admissions controllers and how Gatekeeper can solve these problems. We'll go over the Rego language (which takes some time to wrap your head around) and provide several examples of how Virginia Tech is using Gatekeeper to support multi-tenancy.
4:35PM
Russ Scadden (Brigham Young University)
Hear how Brigham Young University created virtual teams supporting Agile and DevOps methodologies. This presentation explains each of the DevOps roles on the virtual teams and how the the individuals were sources from across the Office of IT. Student employees were key to the success including their role as Agile Coaches / Scrum Masters. Recently, we have also added the concept of Enablement Engineer focused on defining new methods and working with established teams to incorporate those methods into their development efforts.