We are just a few days away from gathering for ONUG Fall 2022, at Center415 located at 415 5th Avenue (between 37th & 38th Streets) in Manhattan; hosted by Daniel Conroy, Raytheon Technologies Corp VP, Enterprise Infrastructure Services. The theme of ONUG Fall is Enterprise Computing Is Multi-Cloud Computing. There will be plenty of lessons learned, best practices, training, and most of all, a message to the ONUG Community that this is the time to pause and consider how we want the multi-cloud era to unfold.   

Multi-Cloud Future: Do we want the multi-cloud era to be marked by vertically integrated lock-in strategies or one that is more open with a wide range of disaggregated solutions? Is there a role for regulation?  Is there too much concentration risk as more and more workloads shift left?  For example, one of the large banks processes one-third of Global GDP every day and has a 100% public cloud strategy; that’s pretty consented risk!!  As concentration risk increases so does the risk of congressional inquiry that is just one incident away. With an ONUG Board that boasts a $1.4T market cap and over $200B annual IT spend, there is influence. How do we use that influence to gain a future that benefits all will be the main topic in the hallways at ONUG Fall.

Getting Started with CSNF: We have so much to be proud of…each and everyone of us. At ONUG Fall, we’ll deliver our first Cloud Security Notification Framework (CSNF) Starter Kit to help consumers get started with CSNF. Much thanks goes to Triggermesh, Oracle and Gluware plus the entire Automated Cloud Governance (ACG) Working Group for all their hard work to deliver this CSNF milestone. A big shoutout to Jennifer Slawson of FedEx for her leadership and strong voice of the multi-cloud consumer in the AGG Working Group. The ACG Working Group is working hard to have three to four CSPs’ telemetry and logs mapped into the CSNF Canonical Data Model; this is a huge achievement for the members of the working group and industry contribution. There are multiple CSNF sessions throughout the two-day program; please see the agenda

DevSecOps @ONUG: For the second time, the DevSecOps track is included at ONUG. Much thanks to James Wicket at Dry Run Security and Verica for their support and development of this important set of sessions that go hand-in-glove with the CSNF work.

Live Demonstrations: There will be two large pavilions showcasing network cloud and hyper-automation solutions that were defined by the Network Cloud and Orchestration & Automation Working Groups. These demonstrations are multi-vendor and multi-cloud. Their intent is to show consumer-side community members realistic design/build options and choices to connect, secure, observe and automate their multi-cloud infrastructure. A shout out to Dale Smith of Orchestral for taking the lead on the hyper-automation demonstration.

Policy as Code: The new Policy as Code Working Group will share its approach to this important space that brings risk management and control automation of multi-cloud infrastructure to the consumer. The main message here is “get involved” to define this space.   

The New MultiCloud WAN:   Special thanks to Nokia for sponsoring the “New MultiCloud WAN” track at ONUG Fall.  Enterprises and governments have shifted to a cloud-first approach. Using multiple cloud providers and external SaaS platforms blurs the boundary separating internal and external data and applications.  The challenge now is to implement broad, consistent connectivity and defense in depth across multi cloud and hybrid environments.  Three important sessions that talk about how to connect to CSPs for IaaS/PaaS and SaaS are covered in these sessions.  You’ll hear from Raytheon, S&PGlobal, WWT, Cigna, Nokia and many others..   

At ONUG Fall, aspects of multi-cloud complexities will be addressed and commercially available solutions will be presented in proofs of concept, showfloor sponsors’ booths, live demonstrations, sessions and networking. A large focus will be on operationalizing the NOC and SOC for the cloud era. To that end, a shoutout to Broadcom for delivering NOC engineer training at ONUG to automate playbooks and upskill personnel.

The above is only one part of an expansion program at ONUG Fall that dives into connectivity, observability, automation and security of multi-cloud architectures and their associated operating models. There are over 30 sponsors and two live multi-vendor/multi-cloud pavilions featuring the ONUG Collaborative Working Groups taking place.  

Live demonstrations are to arrest some of the complexity associated with multi-cloud by providing consumers with solutions they can build today. The slogan You Know It Works Because You Saw It at ONUG is now a major theme at all ONUGs, having just started last Spring.  

If you have not registered yet, you can do so here. Please feel free to invite colleagues who would gain from participating.