In these uncertain times, a little bit of goodwill goes a long way. Whether it’s a friendly wave, an expression of gratitude, or a generous tip, small acts of kindness and generosity can be surprisingly impactful–that’s why one of SADA’s core values is Do the Right Thing. In the spirit of this, we created Containers and a Cause, an interactive workshop series with a charitable spin. The hands-on, educational series gave participants the opportunity to build microservices in Kubernetes, and SADA made a $100 charitable donation to select nonprofit organizations on behalf of each attendee. Participants were able to choose which charity to contribute to, and a total of $7,800 was donated across the following organizations:
- Girls Who Code: A nonprofit whose mission is to close the gender gap in tech
- Feeding America: A nonprofit organization that is a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks that feed more than 46 million people through food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, and other community-based agencies
- American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): A nonprofit organization whose mission is to realize the promise of the United States Constitution for all and expand the reach of its guarantees
- Food Banks Canada: A national charitable organization dedicated to helping Canadians living with food insecurity
- Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA): A human rights organization that fights for the civil liberties, human rights, and democratic freedoms of all people across Canada
- INROADS: An organization dedicated to developing and placing talented minority youth in business and industry and preparing them for corporate and community leadership
The impactful event, led by Michael Masaaud, Manager, Infrastructure Modernization, SADA and Ala Raddaoui, DevOPs Architect, SADA, delved into Kubernetes, an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Participants included innovative leaders and IT professionals across industries interested in learning how their organizations can leverage these technologies.
In addition to becoming heros for a great cause, attendees gained a high-level understanding of containerization and Kubernetes, learned typical use cases and got hands-on experience in the form of two labs: 1) Introduction to Docker and 2) Kubernetes Engine: Qwik Start. Continuing the goodwill theme, Google Cloud generously provided attendees with free access to QwikLabs, enabling them to train in a real cloud environment.
Containers have formalized the contract that was previously implicit between servers, VMs, configuration management, and application code. By bundling the application and all of its dependencies, organizations now have one tool to define what an application (written in any language) actually needs in order to build and run. However, it’s not enough to simply run containers; they have to be orchestrated and managed to ensure that applications run properly. On a small scale, manual container orchestration isn’t a big deal, but a typical enterprise production environment holds hundreds or thousands of containers.
Originally developed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes was designed to alleviate the problems caused by container sprawl. It quickly became the de facto standard for automating container orchestration at scale; a recent survey by Stackrox found that Kubernetes adoption grew by nearly 50% in the first half of 2019 alone.
