Software Circus Winter Wonderland

On 17 December 2015, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced its members, governance structure and the beginning of technical contributions.

On the same day, I attended a very unique software event named the Software Circus Winter Wonderland. Held in a conference center at the Ij Promenade north of Amsterdam Centraal, the event had limited seats (roughly 250), free of cost!

Our charming and witty host of the day, Mark Coleman of Implicit-Explicit choreographed a series of interesting talks on various things software development.

Even as Microservices is the hottest next thing, Simon Brown talked about how the design principles which apply to microservices is the same as those for a traditional monolith. At the end, we were left with this very simple but thought-provoking question: "If you can't build a modular monolith properly, what makes you think microservices is the answer?"

Next up was a code-walkthrough by David Gageot who showed us with an example of a nginx-redis based application how to use docker-compose to deploy and manage a kubernetes cluster locally and on the cloud. Despite some "standard demo errors" we could see the cluster deployed and working within a few relatively simple steps.

Another talk featured an expert from the Visual communications business Remember to play, who drew interesting parallels between the construction industry and IT architecture.

We know that containers are stateless, but folks from ClusterHQ showed us their new toolset flocker essentially makes them state-aware and the applications of this possibility. It was a revelation to learn that new Mesos frameworks (developed by ClusterHQ, Cisco Cloud and Container Solutions) are being released at such a frequency that they actually use an automated logo generator to supply a logo for each one!

ING are nowadays omnipresent at Devops conferences, and so were they here giving us a history lesson on their Devops journey.

The last talk of the day was definitely the one i found most fascinating. In this talk Pini Reznik of Container Solutions told us why DevOps is just an intermediate step towards building cloud native applications. The idea that infrastructure can be defined as the part of the normal development process and become a part of the application’s main codebase. He showed this and some of the ideas for the future of the cloud being developed together with other partners.