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Schedule
All sessions are delivered using YouTube. Sessions are streamed according to the schedule below and a live chat will start at the same time. If you want to participate in the live chat you need to register for a free YouTube account. If you already have a Google account, you can use that account to login. We recommend reviewing our tips for making the most of your Stratosphere experience in the days before the event to ensure technology compatibility.
Day 1 - October 6th, 2020
| Opening Keynote and Kick-off [Join session]
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| October 6th 12h45 to 13h15
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Greg Fergus, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board and to the Minister of Digital Government
Paul Wagner, Chief Technology Officer, Government of Canada
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| Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
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| 10 minutes, Bilingual
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| Join the GC CTO for the launch of Stratosphère 2020
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| Session 1B: Journey to the Cloud on Boats, Automobiles, Trains, and Planes - Part 2: We have lift-off! [Join session]
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| October 6th 13h15 to 14h15
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| Kofi Arthiabah, Joyce Lee
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| Transport Canada
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| 55 minutes, English
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| Part two of our movie themed story of TC's Journey to the Cloud : The lift off phase. We discuss Cloud Adoption, Workload Migration, Launching a protected-B application (before SCED), partnerships, taking risks, automation and sharing Microsoft 365 and Teams. COVID as a driver - it's got it all. Join us for some edge of your seat stuff!
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| Session 2A: High Performance Computing in the Cloud [Join session]
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| October 6th 14h15 to 14h45
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| Greg Cormier
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| Department of Fisheries and Oceans
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| 25 minutes, English
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| High Performance Computing is powering scientific research that informs public policy and impacts the lives of Canadians. Scientists are seeking every growing compute and storage capacity for analysis and modeling. Learn from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ experience with HPC on Azure.
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| Session 2B: TBS adoption of Agile, DevOps, and Cloud [Join session]
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| October 6th 14h15 to 14h45
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| Paul Girard, Sevac Eskibashian
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| Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
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| 25 minutes, English
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| How did the IT organization at TBS shift from being behind on technology to leading the way? This session will tell the story and how other government departments can leverage the some of the lessons learned of TBS.
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| Session 3A: Cloud Service Offerings and Workload Migration at ISED [Join session]
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| October 6th 14h45 to 15h15
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| Houda Hamdane, Artur Przybylo
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| Innovation, Science, and Economic Development
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| 25 minutes, Bilingual
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| ISED has initiated a Work Load Migration (WLM) and transformation initiative to modernize its workloads and move to the Cloud. The initiative is big and the impact on the way ISED delivers IT services is huge which requires a clear Cloud Strategy and a solid understanding of what Cloud Service offerings and practices are going to be used for the migrations. The presentation focuses on how ISED is organizing its Cloud Service offerings to execute efficiently its work load migrations to the Cloud
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| Session 3B: Integrating custom applications into Microsoft Teams platform for interoperability with on-premise systems [Join session]
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| October 6th 14h45 to 15h15
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| Chang Shu
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| Public Services and Procurement Canada
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| 25 minutes, English
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Microsoft Teams has quickly become the ultimate collaboration and teamwork application. Users can add, customize, and find everything they need in one place without the need to navigate to different places. Custom applications hosted in a cloud environment can interact with on-premise systems through APIs. The custom applications can be further integrated into Teams or other M365 components to expose the data and functionalities of the on-premise systems. Integrating custom applications and services into Teams platform can improve the productivity, provide focus and enhance collaboration. The presentation will go through the following parts:
- 1. New demands on GC application architecture;
- 2. APIs are the connective tissue for digital services;
- 3. Case study: PaaS/SaaS applications accessing on premise data and business logic through APIs;
- 4. Demonstration
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| Session 3C: Evaluating Technical Lock-in [Join session]
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| October 6th 15h45 to 16h15
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| Scott Levac
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| Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
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| 25 minutes, Bilingual
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| As the GC becomes increasingly reliant on commercially provided services, the risk of lock-in
weighs on the minds of departments. However, It is important to have a balanced
perspective and properly weigh the risk of lock-in against the opportunities gained when
using as-a-service models.
Information Technology has increasingly become commoditized. as-a-Service models and
public cloud are at the forefront of this commoditization. Using these services to modernize
application portfolios and at-risk technologies involves increasing reliance on private sector
providers. This brings with it the fear of lock-in. Lock-in is not unique to cloud, for years the
GC has been managing the exit strategy from a variety of technologies such as mainframe,
data centres, operating systems, databases, and Enterprise Resource Planning systems to
name a few. As this guide will show, the decision to commit to a technology and when to exit
cannot be driven by fear and risk alone, but must be weighed against the opportunity gained.
TBS guidance can be found here: https://wiki.gccollab.ca/images/5/52/02_-_Lockin_EN.pdf
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Day 2 - October 7th, 2020
| Featured Session: The Application Modernisation Program [Join Session]
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| October 7th 12h45 to 13h15
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| Dominique Jean-Noel
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| Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
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| 25 minutes, English
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| Learn how the Application Modernisation Program is providing support to departments modernizing their application portfolio using cloud services.
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| Session 4A: Cost for new products to get online - “Hello Pro-B World” [Join session]
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| October 7th 13h15 to 13h45
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| Gray O'Byrne
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| Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
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| 25 minutes, English
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| How much would it cost you to stand up a bare-bones web page in government that was “approved” to collect personal information? In other words, what’s the price tag for a government site that only says: “Hello world” but had gone through all the paperwork, infrastructure setup and approvals for collecting “Protected B” information. For our small project we estimate it's been over $500,000... and we're still not there yet. This represents a massive burden for small projects that will greatly limit innovation in the GoC if it persist. I will look at where we spent this money, then share my advice for small projects looking to prototype new services in government and share some thoughts on the broader implications for government.
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| Session 4B: Building for Automation [Join session]
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| October 7th 13h15 to 14h15
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| Mike Williamson
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| Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
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| 55 minutes, English
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| TBS Cyber's Tracker project will scan web and email security settings to automate compliance. Automating compliance more broadly will require more than TLS and DNS settings to be observable. Everything from workflow to infrastructure to the running system needs to be programmatically inspectable. This talk will center on work TBS Cyber is doing to build systems in a way that enables automated analysis and lay the foundation for automated compliance.
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| Session 5A: Can a ‘horizontal cloud’ approach leveraging leading edge geospatial technology revolutionize the way departments and agencies respond to future emergencies? [Join session]
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| October 7th 13h45 to 14h15
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| Janice Sharpe, Executive Director, FGP. & Chris Melnick-MacDonald, Enterprise Architect, COVID-19 Cloud, FGP
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| Natural Resources Canada
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| 25 minutes, English
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| The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, and the crucial need for public situational awareness, brought several departments together with an urgent and shared requirement for a means to create and deliver key data and information to decision-makers and the public. Within 72 hours of the ask for a shared cloud environment, Natural Resources Canada’s Federal Geospatial Platform team deployed a horizontal, multi-jurisdictional, geospatially enabled cloud that provided Public Health Agency Canada, Statistics Canada and NRCan, as well as provincial, territorial and private sector partners, with a shared environment for the rapid consolidation of key data, which was used to create online data visualizations and situational dashboards to inform on the unfolding crisis. Updated every 12 hours, the online maps and dashboards are publically available on the PHAC web site and are used in daily briefings with Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Tam.
The quick and agile deployment and marked success of the COVID-19 horizontal cloud has shown the true potential of an open, horizontal, cloud-based platform when working across jurisdictions. From the geospatial perspective, the COVID-19 cloud clearly demonstrates how the federal government can work effectively, across departmental and jurisdictional boundaries, and respond to crises in a timely manner. In this presentation, we will explain how a horizontal cloud approach that leverages leading edge geospatial information could revolutionize the way departments and agencies respond to future emergencies: how the collaboration was formed and governed, what technology was put into place, how the data was shaped and presented, and the key outcomes of this highly successful collaboration.
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| Session 6A: From communications systems research to public health: pivoting in the cloud to address Covid-19 ([Join session]
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| October 7th 14h15 to 15h15
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| Neil O'Brien, Sarah Dumoulin
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| Communications Research Centre
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| 55 minutes, English
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| The Communications Research Centre’s (CRC’s) Virtual Research Domain (VRD) is a cloud-based data processing and research environment. CRC’s data science team works in the VRD on big data problems relating to wireless telecommunications. When the pandemic hit, CRC was able to quickly pivot, repurposing existing research and data sets to study and measure mobility metrics for the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). Learn how the VRD and access to hundreds of terabytes of anonymous telecommunications data allowed the CRC to help PHAC understand how Canadians were self-isolating.
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| Session 6B: DAaaS: Data Analytics as a Service using CNCF technologies [Join session]
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| October 7th 14h15 to 14h45
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| William Hearn, Zachary Seguin
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| Statistics Canada
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| 25 minutes, English
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| In response to COVID-19, Statistics Canada quickly developed it's Data Analytics as a Service platform using Kubernetes, CNCF, Kubeflow and other cloud native technologies to quicky empower the department's data scientists in an isolated section of our public cloud infrastructure. Developed entirely in the open on GitHub, this talk focues on the technologies, the processes and the lessons learned in quickly responding to a challenge. The environment is fully automated using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code, and GitHub Actions for CI/CD. (https://github.com/StatCan/daaas)
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| Session 7A: Learning from failure while innovating [Join session]
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| October 7th 14h45 to 15h15
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| William Hearn, Zachary Seguin
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| Statistics Canada
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| 25 minutes, English
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| Cloud technology is quickly advancing, and with it comes larger opportunities for failure whether human led, system led or both. This talk covers some of the different failures that the Cloud Native Platform team at Statistics Canada has encountered while building a platform based on Kubernetes, CNCF and other open source technologies and growing as a team. On the human front, we'll focus on how errors can easily happen and how we can learn from them to prevent them from occurring again. On the system front, we'll walk through how to identify the problem and working with the community to find a resolution.
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| Session 7B: Advanced Analytics Workspace: Rapidly Deploying Data Science Capabilities in the Cloud [Join session]
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| October 7th 14h45 to 15h15
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| Brendan Gadd, Christian Ritter
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| Statistics Canada
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| 25 minutes, English
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| We would like to share our story of how we rapidly deployed a modern and open analytics platform in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a combination of Azure platform-as-a-service and open-source technology, we were able to deliver core analysis and collaboration capabilities to our data scientists – accessible from home equipment – within fifteen business days.
We will cover topics such as:
- Partnership: Creating a multidisciplinary team across the organization to contribute directly to the platform.
- Azure Services: How we leveraged core cloud services to enable authentication for internal and external users across loosely coupled components.
- Process: Lightweight agile methodology, working in the open, and leveraging GitHub for repository management and CI/CD.
- Tooling: Some of the open tools and services we set up that give scientists quick access to auto-scaling compute, storage, and specialized hardware (e.g. GPUs).
- Example use case: Demonstrate an actual data science product created using our Advanced Analytics Workspace.
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| Session 8A: Fold The North - How GC public servants mobilized to help fight Covid19. Grass roots style ;) [Join session]
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| October 7th 15h15 to 15h45
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| John Bain
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| Government of Canada Public Servant
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| 25 minutes, English
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- How we self organized and collaborated using cloud apps.
- How we used social media platforms to get our message out.
- What we're trying to do related to Protein Folding and our recruitment message.
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| Team Site: https://foldthenorth.ca/
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| Session 8B: Cloud adoption: accomplishments and lessons learned [Join session]
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| October 7th 15h15 to 15h45
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| Ari Rizvi, Scott Levac
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| Shared Services Canada & Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
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| 25 minutes, Bilingual
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| Discuss the accomplishments on cloud adoption across the GC (brokerage, intake, auditing, accelerators, etc.) and the lessons learned.
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| Session 9A: Azure Landing Zone and Guardrails Compliance Testing [Join session]
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| October 7th 15h45 to 16h15
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| Gerald Hill, Tarek Ali
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| Shared Services Canada
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| 25 minutes, English
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| The first part would be to present Azure Landing Zone developed by SSC to the GC. What was done, what were the needs, the challenges, and the avenues to explore. The second part will be focused on demonstrating the guardrails compliance tool.
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| Session 9B: Digital Transformation via Collaborative Product Visioning [Join session]
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| October 7th 15h45 to 16h15
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| Keith Colbourne
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| Code for Canada Fellow
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| 25 minutes, English
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| The path to the cloud is essentially about change. Technical advancement is not the only area of our work that is changing. Across the government, more and more departments and teams are moving to a multi-disciplinary approach, moving away from projects and towards products, and recognizing the importance of conducting research with users to make data-driven product decisions.
A key element in how our work is changing is the focus on user outcomes rather than team outputs. This talk will focus specifically on product visioning and how our team at Code for Canada and Transport Canada developed a product vision for ongoing work aimed at transforming the seafarer certification process with that goal of achieving positive outcomes
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