Getting Started with Multicloud Data Management

Kristu Jayanthi College, Bengaluru, India
25th February 2023

An in-person meetup on Getting started with Multicloud Data Management
by SODA Foundation.

The in-person meetup, Getting Started with Multicloud Data Management, was organised by SODA Foundation on 25th February 2023 at Kristu Jayanthi College, Bengaluru. This meetup was aimed at beginner developers and newcomers to open source. It is part of the SODA Foundation’s “From Container to Multicloud” series. Over 350+ participants attended the 4-hour-long event, including a few professional developers and academicians.

The event covered the basics of cloud and multicloud technologies, with a panel discussion on data management of cloud. The audience also learned about the SODA multicloud data management project, Strato.

Dr. Kalaiselvi of Kristu Jayanti College welcomed all the attendees and invited Dr. A.L. Calistus Jude (Dean, Faculty of Sciences, KJC) to address the attendees.

Sanil Kumar (Chief Architect, Huawei Technologies, India & Co-Chair, Technical Oversight Committee at SODA Foundation) introduced the SODA Foundation and talked about new projects and the foundation’s direction. He set the context for the meetup and spoke on the overall trend from container to multicloud.

The first session of the day was Cloud 101 by Gulshan Karmani (Senior Engineering Manager, Juniper). Gulshan covered the basic uses of cloud and reasons for its high prevalence, with five key takeaways.

To keep the audience engaged we also had some quizzes based on the sessions. Anvith KS, conducted the quizzes and gave away some T Shirts, chocolates and bottles as prizes.

The second session of the day was Paradigms of Multicloud by Dr. Shridhar Domanal (Enterprise Cloud Architect, Accenture). This session built on the basics of cloud from the first session and gave the attendees insights on the rise of multicloud and how the current offerings leverage the multi-cloud in an optimised way. Dr. Domanal shared many anecdotes and easy-to-follow examples.

Next was a lightning talk, Cloud Vendors and Use Cases, by Vivek Shridhar (Senior Cloud Advocate, Microsoft & Member of the India Outreach Committee, SODA Foundation). The attendees actively participated in the Q&A session following Vivek’s talk.

The panel discussion Let’s talk about Data Management was moderated by Sanil Kumar D. (Co-chair, Technical Oversight Committee, SODA Foundation). The panel consisted of Gulshan Karmani (Sr. Engineering Manager, Juniper), Sushanth Shetty (Lead Architect, Huawei), and P. Sainath Mathur (Independent contributor, SODA India OC Lead). The discussion touched on the need for data management and current trends.

Anvith KS kept the audience engaged with quizzes based on the sessions and gave away T-Shirts, chocolates and bottles as prizes.
Attendees met and networked with each other over coffee and sandwiches during our short break.

After the break, Pravin Ranjan (Senior System Architect, Huawei Technologies, India & Maintainer, SODA Projects) introduced the SODA Foundation Data Management project in Getting Started with Strato. Pravin explained the need for a vendor-agnostic solution and how Strato aims to solve the issues that plague users of multicloud architecture. Joseph Jacob (Technical Project lead, Huawei Technologies, India) demonstrated using Strato APIs to create buckets, upload objects and perform migrations.

The final session was a discussion with new open source contributors in How to Contribute to Open Source – Experience Sharing by Contributors. With their Associate Professor from KJC, Dr. K. Kalaiselvi, students Shambhavi Vijay and Abhiram US shared their experiences with Anvith K.S. (System Architect, Huawei Technologies, India & Member of India Outreach Committee, SODA Foundation) on selecting open source projects, the key challenges and how they overcame them to start contributing.

Associate Professor Sevuga Pandian of KJC closed the event by emphasising the importance of such meetups, thanking the speakers and attendees. Lunch followed.

This meetup was aimed at beginner developers and newcomers to open source projects. The speakers covered all the basics of cloud and multicloud technologies. The panel discussion enabled the attendees to get an insight into the data management aspects of cloud and finally the session on Strato project gave them an opportunity to learn about the SODA multicloud data management project. The audience was primarily made of beginner developers and students and few professional developers and academicians.