Stratosphere2020

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207px Stratosphère 2020
The Government of Canada Online Event for Cloud & DevOps




Overview
Connect, Share, and Learn From Your Peers

This year we're going online to bring you Stratosphere 2020. Join us on October ?? and ?? to find out what your colleagues across the Government of Canada are doing to adopt Cloud services and DevOps methodologies. This year's event will have over X breakout sessions broadcasted with live chats with the presenters and attendees.

Some of this year's themes include:

  • Application Modernisation & Migration
  • Cloud-powered Collaboration (Office 365)
  • GitOps/DevOps
  • Delivering Programs and Services with the Cloud
  • Demos and Tutorials



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.

Please see our steps to prepare for the event.


Session 1: Whitelist App: First to the Cloud (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Jayson McIntosh, Omar Nasr
Employment and Social Development Canada
55 minutes, English
Coming soon

Blog: https://sara-sabr.github.io/ITStrategy/2020/05/20/Team-Topologies-Whitelisting-app.html
Presentation: https://sara-sabr.github.io/ITStrategy/presentation.html?markdown=en/2020-06-03-Whitelist-Showcase.md



Session 2: Journey to the Cloud on Boats, Automobiles, Trains, and Planes - Part 2: We have lift-off! (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Kofi Arthiabah, Joyce Lee
Transport Canada
55 minutes, English
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!



Session 3: High Performance Computing in the Cloud (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Greg Cormier
Department of Fisheries and Oceans
25 minutes, English
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.



Session 4: TBS adoption of Agile, DevOps, and Cloud (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Paul Girard, Sevac Eskibashian
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
25 minutes, English
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.




Session 5: Cloud Service Offerings and Workload Migration at ISED (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Houda Hamdane, Artur Przybylo
Innovation, Science, and Economic Development
25 minutes, Bilingual
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




Session 6: Integrating custom applications into Microsoft Teams platform for interoperability with on-premise systems (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Chang Shu
Public Services and Procurement Canada
55 minutes, English
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. Interoperability between SaaS-based solutions and GC internal resources in accordance with the security standard; 2. Exposing on-premise data and business logic through APIs; 3. Hosting a custom application in Azure; 4. Integrating a custom application with Teams; 5. Live demonstration to show how it works.




Session 7: “Hello Pro-B World” (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Gray O'Byrne
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
25 minutes, Bilingual
Thought experiment: 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 not there yet. This is unfortunately a near insurmountable burden for experimental projects that will greatly limit innovation in the GoC if it persist.




Session 8: Building for Automation (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Mike Williamson
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
55 minutes, English
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.





Session 9: Can a ‘horizontal cloud’ approach leveraging leading edge geospatial technology revolutionize the way departments and agencies respond to future emergencies? (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Janice Sharpe, Executive Director, FGP. & Chris Melnick-MacDonald, Enterprise Architect, COVID-19 Cloud, FGP
Natural Resources Canada
25 minutes, English
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.




Session 10: From communications systems research to public health: pivoting in the cloud to address Covid-19 (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Neil O'Brien, Sarah Dumoulin
Communications Research Centre
55 minutes, English
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.





Session 11: DAaaS: Data Analytics as a Service using CNCF technologies (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
William Hearn, Zachary Seguin
Statistics Canada
25 minutes, English
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)




Session 12: Learning from failure while innovating (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
William Hearn, Zachary Seguin
Statistics Canada
25 minutes, English
Cloud technology is quicky 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.




Session 13: Advanced Analytics Workspace: Rapidly Deploying Data Science Capabilities in the Cloud (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Brendan Gadd, Christian Ritter
Statistics Canada
55 minutes, English
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.




Session 14: Fold The North - How the GC public servants mobilized. Grass roots style (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
John Bain
Shared Services Canada
25 minutes, English
How the group formed using cloud apps.

How we self organized and collaborated using cloud apps. How we used social media platforms to get our message out. How we selfserved purchased our own infrastructure. What we're trying to do related to Protein Folding and our recruitment message.




Session 15: Cloud adoption: accomplishments and lessons learned (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Ari Rizvi, Scott Levac
Shared Services Canada & Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
25 minutes, Bilingual
Discuss the accomplishments on cloud adoption across the GC (brokerage, intake, auditing, accelerators, etc.) and the lessons learned.





Session 16: Azure Landing Zone and Guardrails Compliance Testing (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Gerald Hill, Tarek Ali
Shared Services Canada & Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
25 minutes, English
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.



Session 17: Tirelessly Advocating for Change (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Keith Colbourne
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat - Canadian Digital Service
25 minutes, English
Change from within, Product Mgmt as a dev, Design Research. Multi-departmental and civic tech experience



Session 18: Evaluating Technical Lock-in (Join session)
October 6th ?h00 to ?h00
Scott Levac
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
25 minutes, Bilingual
With increased reliance on commercial cloud services comes increased fears of risking technical lock-in. This fear, however, can unjustly lead organisations to ?? the opportuntity gained from platforms services that offer a lower operational burden, increase cost control, and short lead times. ???







Call for Presenters
Without presenters, Stratosphere is a platform without content.

Last year, over 25 presenters came forward to share with their peers across the GC. We need your help again. This year, we will be asking presenters to record and submit a video of their session. Your video will be scheduled to stream at a designated time on the Stratosphere YouTube channel. While streaming, we are asking presenters to participate in a live chat with viewers.

Presenter Schedule

  • Call for presenters opens (June 15th)
  • Call for presenters closes (August 7th)
  • presenters notified of selection results (August 14th)
  • Session schedule published (September 1st)
  • Deadline for presenters submit a recording (September 7th)
  • Event takes place (October 6th & 7th)

links:


About

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