Stratosphere2019
Stratosphere - The Government of Canada Conference for Cloud and DevOps
About the Event
The Government of Canada (GC), in partnership with Association of Public Sector Information Professionals (DPI), is hosting Stratosphere, a conference focused on Cloud and DevOps.
The adoption of Cloud, and more recently, DevOps, have become growing themes amongst GC IT professionals. This conference is an opportunity for participants to share their experiences and lessons learned with their peers, and for the GC IT community to learn about possible partnerships with industry.
Where: The Shaw Centre, Downtown Ottawa
When: June 20th, 2019
Who: Employees of the Government of Canada
Fees: None, free for all GC employees
To help you with your day, here are some last minute items to keep in mind:
- Bring your Eventbrite ticket and wear your government ID. Due to being oversold, we will be checking to ensure attendees are ticket holders as they enter the facilities.
- Friendly reminder: lunch will not be provided and the Shaw Centre does not allow food to be brought on-site. The Rideau Centre food court is an option for attendees.
- Presentation material will be posted 2 to 3 weeks after the event on our wiki site
Event Schedule
| Vendor Registration and Setup
Canada Hall 3 (capacity 600) | |||||||
| Attendee Registration Parliamentary Foyer 8:30-16:00 |
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| Opening & Welcome
Dan Cooper, Chief Architect, TBS OCIO Kickoff Canada Hall 3 (capacity 600) 9:00-9:30 | |||||||
| Attendee Registration Parliamentary Foyer 8:30-16:30 |
Vendor Exposition Canada Hall 3 (capacity 600) 9:30-10:30 |
Invest in Canada's CRM Journey Tracy Reid Room 202 – Cloud Adoption (capacity 110) 9:30-10:30 |
How to Draw an Owl - A pragmatic approach to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Calvin Rodo 9:30-10:30 Kubernetes + containers ecosystem, CNCF, Security with Istio Service Mesh, KNative and Serverless, Open Policy Agent Willian Hearn 10:00-10:30 Room 209 – DevOps (capacity 90) |
Jumping into the cloud - falling through or a solid landing? Elizabeth Rhodenizer Room 204 – Culture and Change (capacity 100) 9:30-10:30 |
Leading the Change – "Real Time" Panel Discussion Mike Murphy Room 211 – Leading the change (capacity 80) 9:30-10:30 |
WORKSHOP: Help Build DevOps Practitioners for the Digital Age – Skills, Competencies and Curriculum Digital Academy Room 203 – Hands on learning with CSPS’ digital academy (capacity 120) 9:30-10:30 |
Architecture in an agile/DevOps enterprise Floyd Pushelberg, Cole Cioran and Ross Castillo Room 212 (capacity 100) 9:30 - 12:30 |
| Coffee Break & Vendor Exposition Canada Hall 3 (capacity 600) 10:30-11:30 | |||||||
| Vendor Exposition Canada Hall 3 (capacity 600) 11:30-13:30 |
A federal government in the age of Cloud Learning Jean-Francois Goubet 11:30-12:00 Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery in a Hybrid Cloud Environment Erik Vollebekk 12:00-12:30 Room 202 – Cloud Adoption (capacity 110) |
Tools & Culture in Cloud/DevOps @ ISED Mohamed Frendi 11:30-12:00 Bringing cloud deployment previews into your review process Tim Arney 12:00-12:30 Room 209 – DevOps (capacity 90) |
Accessibility Matters: Effective testing gives you back a lot of time later Julianna Rowsell & Bethany Dunfield Room 204 – Culture and Change (capacity 100) 11:30-12:30 |
The Journey to Protected B Cloud Tyler Moule (CCCS) Pat Nadarajah (SSC) Po Tea-Duncan (TBS) Room 211 – Leading the change (capacity 80) 11:30-12:30 |
Automated End to End Testing using Cypress.io Calvin Rodo Room 203 – Hands on learning with CSPS’ digital academy (capacity 120) 11:30-12:30 | ||
| DevOps, Cloud and open source software - Pillars of a Digital Government Guillaume Charest Room 202 – Cloud Adoption (capacity 110) 12:30-13:00 Lunch Break (not provided) 13:00 – 13:30 |
GitOps for Infrastructure Ross Clarke 009 Room 209 – DevOps (capacity 90) 12:30-13:00 Lunch Break (not provided) 13:00 – 13:30 |
Lunch Break (not provided) 12:30 – 13:30 |
Lunch Break (not provided) 12:30 – 13:30 |
Lunch Break (not provided) 12:30 – 13:30 | |||
| Keynote (Exposition closed) Keynotes: Alex Benay, CIO Government of Canada Paul Glover, President, Shared Services Canada Lucie Loignon, CIO, Environment and Climate Change Canada Q&A facilitated by Natalie McGee, Executive Director, Enterprise Strategic Planning, TBS OCIO https://app.sli.do/event/gza7oden Canada Hall 3 (capacity 600) 13:30-14:30 | |||||||
| Coffee Break & Vendor Exposition Canada Hall 3 (capacity 600) 14:30-15:30 |
Journey to the Cloud on Boats, Automobiles, Trains, and Planes - The Transport Canada Cloud Story so far Kofi Aarthiabah Room 202 – Cloud Adoption (capacity 110) 14:30-15:30 |
Just-in-time compliance - taking your security assessment process from six months to six minutes Max Neuvians Room 209 – DevOps (capacity 90) 14:30-15:30 |
Panel Discussion on WLM to Cloud Michael Goit Room 204 – Culture and Change (capacity 100) 14:30-15:30 |
TBS Journey - Making Cloud first a reality Paul Girard Room 211 – Leading the change (capacity 80) 14:30-15:30 |
Open Source - The Spirit of Sharing Guillaume Charest Room 203 – Hands on learning with CSPS’ digital academy (capacity 120) 14:30-15:30 | ||
| Vendor Exposition Canada Hall 3 (capacity 600) 15:30-16:30 |
CRA Cloud Adoption, Chatbots and Performance Testing Anik Egan Room 202 – Cloud Adoption (capacity 110) 15:30-16:30 |
Enforce ULL/PBMM on IaaS using Ansible Greg Cormier Room 209 – DevOps (capacity 90) 15:30-16:30 |
GCdocs Program Journey to DevOps Marshall Rowlandson Room 204 – Culture and Change (capacity 100) 15:30-16:30 |
Creating and operationalizing a cloud only organisation in GC - Lessons learned 20 months on Gary Devis Room 211 – Leading the change (capacity 80) 15:30-16:30 |
Launch Your First Container Will Hearn Room 203 – Hands on learning with CSPS’ digital academy (capacity 120) 15:30-16:30 | ||
| TEAR DOWN 16:30-17:00 | |||||||
Break-out Session Information
Session Title: Invest in Canada's CRM Journey
Description: As the first Salesforce customer in the Government of Canada, Invest in Canada will share their Salesforce journey from identifying the need for a CRM through to roll-out. This will cover how and why Salesforce was chosen (needs and requirements, CRM evaluation, decision), how it was implemented (design and architecture, roll-out) in addition to providing reflections on the whole process and lessons learned.
Presenter(s): Tracy Reid Gary Devis
Department(s): Invest in Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: A federal government in the age of Could Learning
Description: I am the manager of the first Enterprise Cloud solution procured and launched by ESDC in 2017. 25000 employees are completing their corporate training and operational training through a Cloud application. I will discuss about the benefits and lessons learned of working in a cloud environment.
Presenter(s): Jean-François Goubet
Department(s): Employment and Social Development Canada
Language: Bilingual / Bilingue
Duration: 25 min
+
Session Title: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery in a Hybrid Cloud Environment
Description: At Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada we’ve recently begun migrating workloads to the cloud. As part of our cloud journey we’ve had to find creative ways to marry existing development and deployment processes with newer continuous integration and continuous delivery processes (CI/CD). This has led to the development of a hybrid CI/CD process which leverages existing on-premise tools while also taking advantage of cloud-based services.
Presenter(s): Erik Vollebekk
Department(s): Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
+
Session Title: DevOps, Cloud and open source software - Pillars of a Digital Government
Description: My goal with this presentation would be to go over the GC Digital Standards and showcase how they essentially are embodying these three pillars. Cloud is a scalable and standardised deployment approach, DevOps is the people working together to generate value based on the three ways and Open Source is the collaboration of various individuals and groups addressing common challenges.
Presenter(s): Guillaume Charest
Department(s): Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
Language: Bilingual / Bilingue
Duration: 25 min
+
Session Title: Journey to the Cloud on Boats, Automobiles, Trains, and Planes - The Transport Canada Cloud Story so far
Description: Our story of leveraging Cloud to modernize our infrastructure, applications, to support Transport Canada's Digital Transformation. It has got elements of organizational culture change; embracing Digital principles; Adopting DevOps; Senior management support; Learning from others; sharing; working with Partners. It's got action, adventure, suspense, and excitement... get some pop-corn and a drink, then sit back and watch ... "Journey to the Cloud on Boats, Automobiles, Trains, and Planes - The Transport Canada Cloud Story so far"
Presenter(s): Kofi Arthiabah Vivian Nobrega
Department(s): Transport Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: CRA Cloud Adoption, Chatbots and Performance Testing
Description: An overview of the Canada Revenue Agency's (CRA) overall Cloud Adoption to date, including various challenges faced so far will be presented. Charlie, the CRA’s first chatbot developed in the cloud environment, is an example of the rapid development of a public service that was made possible because of the GC Public Cloud offering. We share with you what we learned in our quest to improving service to Canadians by leveraging cloud based technologies. An update will also be provided on how the team repurposed a development load testing environment hosted from within MS Azure, to enable performance testing of cloud services with minimal time and effort. In addition, discussion around how CRA is further developing automated processes for Performance Testing on Demand, in order to streamline and improve the testing required for Cloud.
Presenter(s): Anik Egan James Stinson, Blenard Helmesi/Philippe Bélanger
Department(s): Canada Revenue Agency
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: How to Draw an Owl - A Pragmatic Approach to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
Description: I want to give a short presentation on how we organizations can start their DevOps Journey today for little cost and time investment using free and open source tools.
Presenter(s): Calvin Rodo
Department(s): Employment and Social Development Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
+
Session Title: Modern Application Delivery with Kubernetes
Description: Kubernetes + containers ecosystem, CNCF, Security with Istio Service Mesh, KNative and Serverless, Open Policy Agent
Presenter(s): William Hearn Zachary Seguin
Department(s): Statistics Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
+
Session Title: Tools & Culture in Cloud/DevOps @ ISED
Description: Tell ISED journey to DevOps; ie how ISED adopted CI/CD prior to cloud and emphasize on the importance of the culture shift/support to adopt new approaches/technologies particularly in the cloud.
Presenter(s): Mohamed Frendi Mohamed Frendi
Department(s): Innovation, Science & Economic Development Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
+
Session Title: Bringing cloud deployment previews into your review process
Description: Testing and verifying changes to applications before putting them into production is often a very slow and manual process, involving costly, hard-to-procure servers. Speeding up that process with cloud deployments on low-cost servers removes huge barriers for all your stakeholders.
Heroku pioneered “disposable” apps created per pull request allowing easier review. That works great for small services, but what about more complex setups like Kurbernetes?
At Canadian Digital Service, we’ve prototyped a solution to this problem by allowing you to replicate production deployments from scratch in under 10 minutes per pull request. This presentation will explain why this is needed in the deployment process and do an overview of the prototype.
Public source code: https://github.com/cds-snc/kubernetes-branch-review
Presenter(s): Tim Arney
Department(s): Canadian Digital Service
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
+
Session Title: GitOps for Infrastructure
Description: Building Cloud Technologies using GitLab and Terraform
Presenter(s): Ross Clarke
Department(s): Statistics Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
+
Session Title: Just-in-time compliance - taking your security assessment process from six months to six minutes
Description: Security assessments, compliance validation, and reporting represents a huge investment of both time and money by departments building software solutions. This talk will demonstrate a DevOps solution used at the Canadian Digital Service to automatically assess, build, and report our compliance posture as part of our continuous deployment process, speeding up delivery and freeing up capacity for our security team.
While you may have heard of Compliance Masonry, this solution is novel in that it leverages Kubernetes in the cloud to run a container-based, programming language agnostic, suite of security checks which gets aggregated into a GraphQL API on every release. The resulting report can then either be viewed on a website or emailed to stakeholders in a convenient PDF format.
Public source code: https://github.com/cds-snc/security-goals
Screenshot of website report: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/867334/56310152-20919800-6119-11e9-86a0-23d7ab75ef7d.png
Presenter(s): Max Neuvians
Department(s): Canadian Digital Service
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: Enforce ULL/PBMM on IaaS using Ansible
Description: This is a technical presentation covering the use of Ansible to deploy ULL/PBMM controls to IaaS in a cloud agnostic manner - we are also seeking contributors and members in the GoC to join
Presenter(s): Greg Cormier
Department(s): Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: Jumping into the cloud - falling through or a solid landing?
Description: When cloud strategy is the priority and plan...what do you do when the unexpected happens and you have to jump into the cloud before you are ready? Under what circumstances would you do this? How would you respond? And will you land in order to continue moving forward or do you fall through? This interactive seasion will describe the PSC’s story of cloud adoption and responding to the unexpected. This session will bring together a diverse panel to share the good, unexpected and unknown that was and is before us....in the cloud.
Presenter(s): Elizabeth Rhodenizer Panel format of those who were key cs2- cs5
Department(s): Public Service Commission
Language: Bilingual / Bilingue
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: Accessibility Matters: Effective testing gives you back a lot of time later
Description: Accessibility has a reputation for being hard and sometimes even unobtainable. But building inclusive services that work better for everyone isn’t about perfection. The Canadian Digital Service (CDS) is using a variety of accessibility testing tools. We use a combination of automated testing, assistive technology, manual and testing with users with disabilities.
At CDS, we design for accessibility early and often. We are able to flag issues in our daily stand-ups. Discuss approaches and requirements in our sprints. This allows us to track outcomes like lessons learned on what did and didn’t work in our retros. Champions are integrated into teams, and they navigate doing the right thing first as opposed to fixing the wrong thing later.
We have made strides towards better accessibility practices at CDS, and we learned a lot along the way. Here are our plans for the future for an open and collaborative approach to accessibility. We have a long way to go and we’ll iterate along the way.
Takeaways that the audience will learn from your talk
Start with research with persons with disabilities
Automated testing tools: how can I automate all the things?
Manual testing, how do I do that? Doesn’t my automated testing do that work for me?
Learn how to test for accessibility collaboratively: How to Conduct Paired Accessibility Review
Why is usability testing important?
Do I need an accessibility audit?
Github repo: Accessibility Handbook
Presenter(s): Julianna Rowsell & Bethany Dunfield
Department(s): Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: Panel Discussion on WLM to Cloud
Description: Discuss strategy development, change management, and execution issues/success when workload migrating legacy workloads to cloud
Presenter(s): Michael Goit
Department(s): Statistics Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: GCdocs Program Journey to DevOps (with COTS and SSC constraints)
Description: Journey from 2015 to 2019 about how the GCdocs Program evolved our delivery pipeline from manual work to fully automated releases including testing, security and compliance. Loose agenda is looking like:
In 2015 (program infrastructure landscape);
In 2016 (automation experimentation); Health Check Tool;
In 2017 (scripted releases);Different COTS features;
In 2018 (fully automated releases);Agile (team organization and SCRUM);Splunk for monitoring and alerting;
In 2019 (CI/CD with Gccode);CMDB;Cloud;Fully developed Devops Pipeline; Scaling Agile in the GCdocs Program
Presenter(s): Marshall Rowlandson Guy Moreau
Department(s): Public Services Procurement Canada
Language: Bilingual / Bilingue
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: The Journey to Protected B Cloud
Description: The presentation is a joint effort outlining the GC team (TBS/CCCS/SSC) efforts to bring Protected B Cloud to the GC.
Presenter(s): Tyler Moule Po Tea-Duncan, Patricia Nadarajah
Department(s): Canadian Centre for Cyber Security/Shared Services Canada/Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
+
Session Title: TBS Journey - Making ''Cloud first'' a reality
Description: This presentation will focus on the TBS journey to cloud, including how the department will have 100% of their services on the cloud by the end of the calendar year 2019. It will also focus on the interdependencies of Agile, DevOps and Cloud and highlight some of the lessons learned along the way.
Presenter(s): Paul Girard
Department(s): Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
+
Session Title: Creating and operationalizing a cloud only organisation in GC - Lessons learned 20 months on
Description: Invest in Canada has adopted a cloud only solutions approach. This small organisation has benefited from being a O365 PBMM pathfinder, as well as a implementing salesforce CRM and MSFT Azure data lake. IIC has recently obtained Authorization to Operate its O365 environment at PBMM.
This talk will provide the story of IIC, from initial ideation of business needs, iterative user centred solutions development in a live environment and obtaining and operating a PBMM environment for O365.
Presenter(s): Gary Devis
Department(s): Invest in Canada
Language: English / Anglais
+
Session Title: WORKSHOP: Help Build DevOps Practitioners for the Digital Age – Skills, Competencies and Curriculum
Description: The Digital Academy wants to hear your views! Through this interactive, hands-on workshop, you will help us to identify the skills, competencies, and curriculum needed to create strong DevOps practitioners to work effectively in this digital space.
Presenter(s): Digital Academy
Department(s): CSPS
+
Session Title: Architecture in an Agile/DevOps Enterprise
Description: In this session participants will hear from 2 leading Industry experts on how Enterprise Architecture is evolving as a result of adoption of Agile/DevOps processes. Participants will have the opportunity to work with their colleagues in breakout sessions to contribute to identifying how the Government of Canada needs to change.
- 9:30-10:30, 2 presentations from Industry Experts
- 10-30-10:45, breakout
- 10:45-11:45, breakout group sessions to discuss and identify how the GC needs to change
- 11:45-12:15, each breakout group presents there top 2-3 findings,
- 12:15-12:30, summary of key findings and wrap up
Presenter(s): Floyd Pushelberg, Cole Cioran and Ross Castillo
Department(s): TBS OCIO, Info-Tech and Gartner
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 3 hours
Event Floor Plan
The event is spread out over the second and third floors of the Shaw Centre in downtown Ottawa.
Canada Hall 3 will host the vendor exposition, the opening session, the keynote, and coffee breaks.
Break-out sessions will occur on the second floor. Room numbers are indicated on the event schedule.
Contribute to the Panel Discussion
From June 14 - 19, 2019 you can contribute a question or vote on other people's questions.
Step 1: Go to https://slido.com
Step 2: Enter event code #stratosgc1
Step 3: Suggest a question for our panelists or vote on others' questions
We will use the results of your suggestions to help build questions for our panelist.
Stay Connected
Wifi info for Stratosphere is:
SSID: Stratosphere
Password: DPI-2019
Social Media
Join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #stratosgc
Follow us on twitter @stratospheregc to get last minute schedule changes occurring throughout the day.
Vendor Exposition
The following vendors will be participating in the exposition:
| Vendor Table Floorplan | ||
|---|---|---|
| ACT Inc. | 7 | 
|
| Amazon Web Services | 35 | |
| Appian | 13 | |
| Britesky | 32 | |
| Carahsoft | 8 | |
| CGI Information Systems and Management Consultants Inc. | 36 | |
| Cisco | 37 | |
| Cistel | 20 | |
| Click Networks | 11 | |
| CloudOps | 15 | |
| Dell | 2 | |
| Docker | 34 | |
| Dynatrace | 21 | |
| GC Ask Me Anything | 24 | |
| GC Ask Me Anything | 30 | |
| GitHub | 3 | |
| Google Cloud | 5 | |
| Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 42 | |
| Horizant Solutions | 29 | |
| IBM Canada | 4 | |
| IMP Solutions | 6 | |
| Infosys Public Services | 16 | |
| Info-Tech Research Group | 33 | |
| KPMG LLP | 38 | |
| L3 Prime Inc. | 31 | |
| McAfee Canada | 40 | |
| Microsoft | 41 | |
| NetApp | 22 | |
| ONX | 9 | |
| Oracle | 39 | |
| SailPoint Technologies, Inc. | 10 | |
| Salesforce | 1 | |
| ServiceNow, Inc. | 27 | |
| Slack | 19 | |
| Splunk, Inc. | 26 | |
| Talend | 25 | |
| Technology Integration Group (TIG) | 17 | |
| Tenable, Inc. | 12 | |
| Teramach | 28 | |
| Turbonomic | 23 | |
| The Planet Group for VMware Canada | 18 | |
| ThinkOn | 14 | |
Ask the Expert Booth (Office Hours)
We’ve assembled subject matter experts to answer your most pressing questions about cloud adoption. Visit us at booth #2. The schedule of experts is as follows:
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| 9:30 – 10:30 | Shared Services Canada *Enabling cloud services *Buying Protected B brokered cloud services *Strategy for platform services |
| 11:30 -12:30 | Public Services and Procurement Canada *Buying Protected B SaaS services |
| 14:30-15:30 | Canada School of Public Service *Digital Academy skills development *DevOps stream |
| 15:30 -16:30 | Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat *Policy and strategic direction |
Code of Conduct
This is a Government of Canada event. You will be expected to conduct yourself in accordance with your organization's code of conduct.