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
Registration Information
Link to Eventbrite coming soon
Event Schedule
| Parliamentary Foyer | Canada Hall 3
600 capacity |
Room 202
110 capacity Theme: Cloud Adoption |
Room 203
120 capacity Theme: DevOps |
Room 202
110 capacity Theme: Culture & Change |
Room 212
100 capacity Theme: Leading the Change |
Room 209
90 capacity Hands On Learning with CSPS’ Digital Academy |
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| 8:00 – 9:00 | Registration | Vendor Exposition | 8:00 - 9:00 | ||||||
| 9:00 – 9:30 | Opening Session
(Exposition closed) |
9:00 - 9:30 | |||||||
| 9:30 – 10:30 | Vendor Exposition | Invest in Canada's CRM Journey
Tracy Reid 001 |
CI/CD Pipelines
Calvin Rodo 013 |
Jumping into the cloud - falling through or a solid landing?
Elizabeth Rhodenizer 014 |
Leading the Change – "Real Time" Panel Discussion
Mike Murphy 023 |
Cloud Intake Process
Sean Kibbee) |
9:30 - 10:30 | ||
| Kubernetes + containers ecosystem, CNCF, Security with Istio Service Mesh, KNative and Serverless, Open Policy Agent
Willian Hearn 012 |
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| 10:30 – 11:30 | Coffee Break & Vendor Exposition | 10:30 - 11:30 | |||||||
| 11:30 – 12:30 | Vendor Exposition | A federal government in the age of Cloud Learning
Jean-Francois Goubet 002 |
Tools & Culture in Cloud/DevOps @ ISED
Mohamed Frendi 011 |
Accessibility Matters: Effective testing gives you back a lot of time later
Julianna Rowsell 015 |
The Journey to Protected B Cloud
Tyler Moule (CCCS) Pat Nadarajah (SSC) Po Tea-Duncan (TBS) 022 |
Automated Testing in Python
Calvin Rodo |
11:30 -12:30 | ||
| Bringing cloud deployment previews into your review process
Tim Arney 010 |
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| Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery in a Hybrid Cloud Environment
Erik Vollebekk 003 |
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| 12:30 – 13:30 | DevOps, Cloud and open source software - Pillars of a Digital Government
Guillaume Charest 004 |
GitOps for Infrastructure
Ross Clarke 009 |
Lunch Break (not provided) | Lunch Break (not provided) | Lunch Break (not provided) | 12:30 - 13:30 | |||
| Lunch Break (not provided) | Lunch Break (not provided) | ||||||||
| 13:30 – 14:30 | Keynote & Panel
(Exposition closed) Keynotes: Alex Benay, CIO Government of Canada Paul Glover, President, Shared Services Canada Panel: Arianne Reza, ADM Acquisitions Branch Luc Gagnon, CTO, SSC Marc Brouillard, CTO, GC Neil Bouwer - Vice-President, CSPS |
13:30 - 14:30 | |||||||
| 14:30 – 15:30 | Coffee Break & Vendor Exposition | Journey to the Cloud on Boats, Automobiles, Trains, and Planes - The Transport Canada Cloud Story so far
Kofi Aarthiabah 005 |
Just-in-time compliance - taking your security assessment process from six months to six minutes.
Max Neuvians 008 |
Panel Discussion on WLM to Cloud
Michael Goit 017 |
TBS Journey - Making ''Cloud first'' a reality
Paul Girard 021 |
Open Source - The Spirit of Sharing
Guillaume Charest) |
14:30 - 15:30 | ||
| GC Platform Strategy (Containers and Orchestration)
Jeff Barnes 020 |
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| 15:30 – 16:30 | Vendor Exposition | CRA Cloud Adoption, Chatbots and Performance Testing
Anik Egan 006 |
Enforce ULL/PBMM on IaaS using Ansible
Greg Cormier 007 |
GCdocs Program Journey to DevOps (with COTS and SSC constraints)
Marshall Rowlandson 018 |
Creating and operationalizing a cloud only organisation in GC - Lessons learned 20 months on
Gary Devis 019 |
Launch Your First Container
Will Hearn |
15:30 - 16:30 | ||
| 16:30 – 17:00 | Tear-down | 16:30 -17:0 | |||||||
Break-out Session Information
Session Title: Invest in Canada's CRM Journey
Description: As the first Salesforce customer in the Government of Canada, we would like to share our 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 we have learned.
Presenter(s): Tracy Reid Gary Devis
Department(s): Invest in Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
Session: 001
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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: 002
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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: 003
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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: 004
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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: 005
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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: 006
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Session Title: CI/CD Pipelines
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 as a way to fill the gap until their working groups/strategy/architecture folks come up with an "Enterprise" solution. Or you know just use free and open source tools and optimize for each teams workflow instead of just creating an enterprise solution but it's Government and we all know how well that stuff works.
I'm going to very quickly go over some free tools like Cypress.io and aXe-Core for e2e and a11y test automation, some Security tools from OWASP, and some other Open source tools for automating stuff.
I'm also going to show some graphs that show how spending a small amount of time right now will provide a big ROI especially when we look at GoC timelines (10+ years, maybe even 20+).
I was also thinking about talking super quickly about CI/CD pipelines and how they've become so commoditized that you should just pick one and start working with instead of spending so much time trying to pick the best one.
So if you are buying from a CSP just use their product (Azure DevOps, Google Cloud Build, AWS CodePipeline, etc....) or just some open source solution.
Presenter(s): Calvin Rodo
Department(s): Employment and Social Development Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
Session: 013
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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: 012
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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: 011
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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/elenchos
Presenter(s): Tim Arney
Department(s): Canadian Digital Service
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
Session: 010
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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: 009
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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/symmorfosi/
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: 008
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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: 007
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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: 014
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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
Department(s): Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 55 min
Session: 015
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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: 017
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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: 022
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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: 021
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Session Title: GC Platform Strategy (Containers and Orchestration)
Description: Title: GC Platform Strategy (Containers and Orchestration)
To meet partner demand for cloud native application deployment and workload migration, and to support recent current directives in the Government of Canada, such as the Directive on Management of Information Technology (C.2.3.10.4 Run applications in containers), the GC Digital Operations Strategic Plan: 2018-2022, GC Digital Principles and the Government of Canada Standards on APIs, SSC are provisioning platform services for partner consumption. SSC’s presentation will include a Platform Strategy overview and demo various cloud native application deployments
Presenter(s): Jeff Barnes David Frost (potentially)
Department(s): Shared Services Canada
Language: English / Anglais
Duration: 25 min
Session: 022
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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: 019
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 #stratosgc
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.
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:
(List to come)
Ask the Expert Booth (Office Hours)
As part of the Stratosphere conference, key subject matter experts in the areas of cloud adoption, policy, strategy, procurement, and security will be available on the vendor expo floor at booth X. The schedule of experts is as follows:
(list to be posted in June)
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.
