Building DevOps Community in Kathmandu
With the motive to start building DevOps community here in Kathmandu for having a common ground to share , we had two community building focused meetings at Pagevamp office in Nepal at 2018 and two online meetings this year with participation of DevOps people from various tech companies in Kathmandu valley. Covering cultural impacts to aha ! and horror stories before and during DevOps transformation.
On the first meeting, we had a very good discussions on the need of a DevOps community, a common ground to share cool things we are building, learn new tech stack, discuss on problems along with sharing stories of cultural impacts with local as well as global open source communities around the world.
“Be transparent. Let’s build a community that allows hard questions and honest conversations so we can stir up transformation in one another.”
― Germany Kent
We all came into a line to strengthen the platform and organize few more invite-only meetings to build a strong base for community and share responsibilities on the go. Beside that, we reach out to contributors and personalities of global communities and cloud solutions not only for empowering us but also to gain exposure in the world map whether it be by organizing community chapter events, contributing for open source community, spreading awareness, collaborating with different people.
After going through the motive of the meeting and community, we did brief introduction of all attendees including cool things we are doing, stacks we are using and cultural impact, problems and opportunities we got during DevOps transformation.
Communication Channel:
For online communication, we start using slack which can be joined through this link.
Second DevOps Community Meeting
We had 2nd DevOps community meeting of the year on Thursday, 27th December where we included talk & sharing sessions along with community update and explore more on enhancing growth through learning sessions as well as having online meetings.
The agendas were:
1. Community buildup progress, reach-outs since first meeting
2. Feedbacks and suggestions to get in effective communication
3. Discussions on possible online meetups/webinars involving global community
4. Future meetings plan
We had many new faces in the second round of meeting and its awesome to have such an energetic people in the community.
I gave a brief introduction about the motive, our discussions of past meeting and experience throughout to the new attendees. Then, sharing of the community updates, reach-outs to various people created excitement for all. Brief introduction of each attendee along with sharing of cool things, challenges and achievements got us all on same line with friendly casual discussions.
About talks
1. Anup Karmacharya talked about power of CI/CD pipeline & optimizations. He highlighted on the serverless deployment using AWS codebuild, codecommit and pipeline. Some of us were using codebuild not only to build docker image but also to create AMI along with include it on the deployment pipeline because of its pay-as-you-go pricing and on-demand compute.
2. Sabin Ranjit shared about managing Debian package security in DevOps way highlighting the architecture he’s using at his company. The flow from scanning of OS & packages to find out vulnerability to patching & testing by using stack like: Vuls, Jenkins, Ansible etc. In about half an hour of his sharing from start to building an automated flow, it made us to keep eye on OS & package level security on priority which we often don’t care about.
3. And finally, I shared about service mesh concept by highlighting on the problems we face in microservice architecture in terms of handling configurations, service discovery, observability, inter-service communication in distributed environment. Giving example of Istio service mesh with its architecture of control plane & data plane, load balancing, concept of circuit breaker, routing, telemetry and fault injection.
Though the cold was getting scary, we feel the need to organize online meetings also and look forward to organizing one soon. Also, we decided to be active on Facebook group also alongside slack to share interesting discussions and resources, ask questions and keep on communicating.
We officially ended the meeting but Sabin shared his experience of attending Regional Scrum Gathering 2018 in Kathmandu which was organized from December 8 to 9. He was one of the panelist also in the gathering. He also shared about the sessions he attended and how we can use Agile methodologies along with DevOps team to create better impact with innovation. We expect to share his words in upcoming meetings too.
Got any idea or interesting topic to share, stay connected on meetup page and twitter.
