Efficiency redefined: Discover the power of software operators during Operator Day, co-located at KubeCon North America 2023

by Michael C. Jaeger on 4 September 2023

Learn to build, deploy, operate and scale applications with software operators

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As a devops engineer or SRE, you’re used to spending hours of your time making sure the applications you manage keep running as smoothly as when they were first deployed. What if you could codify all your operational knowledge so software can run it for you? That’s exactly what software operators are about. 

Software operators encapsulate business logic in reusable software packages that automate every aspect of an application’s lifecycle. Today, they are crucial in the Kubernetes landscape, and an indispensable tool in every SRE / Devops engineer’s toolbox.  Canonical offers a toolkit to build software operators or charms, and an orchestration engine that enables their deployment, integration and lifecycle management, called Juju

Join us for this upcoming edition of Operator Day to learn about an enterprise’s journey with operators from start to finish – and find out how you can build yours today. 

What’s in store at Operator Day 

Operator Day will take place during  the KubeCon NA  conference on 6 November 2023.  We will take you through the journey of building, deploying, operating and scaling applications with software operators through the lens of a company called “Operator Inc.”

You will: 

  • Discover great examples of charms that illustrate the strengths and benefits of software operators.
  • Witness how to build a charm step-by-step, as if you were a devops engineer at Operator Inc. 
  • Learn to integrate the charm of Operator Inc. with certificate management, single-sign-on and observability tools.
  • See how the entire setup is covered by a Terraform plan using the Juju provider for Terraform.
  • Understand the “definition of great” for charms and what you need to do to publish your charm and make it available to the community

See the agenda at a glance:

Time (CST)

Title

Presenter

Part 1 – Introduction

09:00 – 09:15

Level up software operations with Juju

Cédric Gégout

Mark Shuttleworth

Open source adoption is growing. But adopting open source goes far beyond installing packages. Maintaining software built with open source components requires best-in-class operations, especially in enterprise environments with stringent resiliency and availability requirements.

Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu) and Cedric Gegout (VP of Product Management) will discuss the challenges of operating software at scale, how Juju helps alleviate those challenges and our long-term product vision.

09:15 – 09:25

The charm-ing story of Operator Inc

Operator Inc.

Get to know Operator Inc, a typical software vendor as it navigates the challenges of operating its solutions on a multi-cloud environment and finds a solution with Juju and charms.

Part 2 – See great examples!

09:25 – 10:10

Postgres – better with a charm

Mohamed Nsiri

PostgreSQL is one of the most popular open source databases for use cases like online transaction processing and analytics. Deploying and operating a highly available, resilient PostgreSQL cluster requires integrating several components that must be carefully orchestrated.

The PostgreSQL charm built by experts DBAs, reliably automates the deployment, maintenance and upgrades of your databases across private and public clouds. This presentation shows how easy it is actually to carry out complex operations with charms.

10:10 – 10:40

Operate AI pipelines at scale with Canonical MLOps

Kimonas Sotirchos

Running AI at scale requires large applications made of smaller services. They require multiple steps for setup and, consequently, several operational tasks to run at optimal performance.

Applications such as Kubeflow, benefit from having simplified and automated lifecycle management, as well as integrations with other machine learning tooling such as MLFlow. We will show how charms support  AI solutions at scale.

10:40 – 11:10

Bring your workloads to Kubernetes: the “charming” story of Spark

Enrico Deusebio

Apache Spark is a popular workload that many organisations are finding challenging to transition to Kubernetes.

Join this session to learn how the Charmed Spark solution can help provide distributed data processing workloads to Kubernetes.

Part 3 – Hands-on charm development for Operator Inc.

11:10 -12:10

Create a Charm in 50 minutes

Carl Csaposs (they/them)

See how Operator Inc creates their first charm. This will be a hands-on workshop. You will gain an understanding of Juj and charms, their structure and deployment.

12:10 -12:40

Using certificate providers with Charms

Ghislain Bourgeois

Using certificate-based encryption for communications is mandatory in most production deployments. Therefore, the charms covering certificate providers are a fundamental element of the operations ecosystem. This presentation shows hands-on how to integrate a certificate provider with the charm for Operator Inc.

12:40 – 13:00

Enterprise state-of-the-art SSO with Azure AD

Massimiliano Gori and Natalia Nowakowska

Configuring SSO is a critical, yet complicated and error-prone activity that can lead to data breaches if done incorrectly.

In this session we will show how the Canonical identity platform simplifies and automates the process of adding a centralised identity provider to all applications, irrespective of their security model.

13:00 -13:25

React before your users experience issues: add observability

Luca Bello

Predicting failures is key to achieving resilient, reliable operations. With the Canonical Observability Stack, this has never been easier.

In this hands-on session you will see how to integrate Operator Inc. solution with Juju's best-in-class, open-source observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Alert Manager)

13:25 – 13:55

Infrastructure-as-Code: Terraform your applications deployment

Tom Haddon

Terraform is one of the most popular technologies for implementing Infrastructure-as-code (IaaC). The Juju Terraform provider allows you to manage applications in the same way as  infrastructure. Learn  how to create a plan for the charms of Operator Inc.

13:55 – 14:15

Control your distributed workloads – Juju management at scale with JAAS

Alexander Kilroy

In a real production scenario applications are deployed on multiple clouds to meet resiliency requirements. JAAS is the component that enables centralised management to distributed juju controllers, allowing you to easily manage multi/hybrid cloud environments.

In this session we will demonstrate how Operator Inc can use JAAS to scale its deployments to multiple clouds and operate them with a web dashboard and cli client.

Part 4 – Be part of the charm ecosystem

14:15 – 14:35

Be part of it: how to join the ecosystem.

Michael Jaeger

How can you publish charms?

Canonical provides guidelines and a quality framework identifying different stages of maturity. This session explains how you can build a great charm.

Part 5 – Summary and Conclusions

14:35 – 14:40

The big picture for Operator Inc.

Cédric Gégout

We’re at the end of our journey: Operator inc has created a charm, integrated and extended it with the necessary elements for use in production.

The CEO of Operator Inc. reflects on the initial meeting of this day, and how charms helped the company fulfil its business objectives.

14:40 – 14:45

Closing Remarks

Cédric Gégout

We launched Operator Day at KubeCon North America in 2020. Since then, we have proudly hosted six Operator Day events with sessions covering Charms, what they are, how to use them, how to create them and how you can benefit from them. If you missed past events, you can freely access recordings on YouTube.

The 7th Operator Day is a virtual event and will take place on the first day of the KubeCon week, Monday, 6 November 2023. The event is entirely virtual. You can dial in from anywhere and attend. You can register at the KubeCon NA 2023 conference or directly at the event page.

Learn More

See the Operator Day event page
Learn more about Juju and charms
Browse our collection of charms on Charmhub.io

Questions? Please do not hesitate to reach out!

Contact Us!

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