We did it; it was nail biting, but we came together in numbers at the Meadowlands of New Jersey over a few brisk spring days in late April. I was nervous when I sent the first invitations for speakers to present at ONUG Spring back in January. If speakers were not able to attend in-person then community members wouldn’t be able to either. We just didn’t know if the community was ready to meet in-person. Well, we had over 50 speakers present in-person, over 500 attendees in-person and thousands online!  ONUG Spring, by all measures, was a huge success! Most of all, it felt great to see so many community members and have in-person 1:1 conversations where people shared news, concerns, opportunities and stories of how they and their companies managed through the pandemic. Here are a few of my highlights of ONUG Spring:

“I know it works because I saw it at ONUG.” This tag line came to life at ONUG Spring when we launched live demonstrations of the Cloud Security Notification Framework or CSNF and the Orchestration & Automation Working Group’s work.  These demonstrations on the show floor are multi-vendor and multi-cloud. They provided a reference solution for IT consumers to see how multi-cloud infrastructure can be built. For ONUG Fall, hosted by Raytheon Technologies in NYC on Oct 19th and 20th, we’ll do bigger live demos and add the Network Cloud Working Group’s work. I Know It Works Because I Saw It at ONUG is now a rallying cry or motto for the community to gather at ONUG events. It’s only going to get bigger and better.

Two New ONUG Collaborative Working Groups: Use case voting was back at ONUG this past spring. The Policy as Code and Edge Computing use cases received the most votes. ONUG staff is now operationalizing these working groups within the ONUG Collaborative. You can get involved here.

CSNF Pilots: The Automated Cloud Governance Working Group that is building CSNF is now developing a starter kit and reference architecture for members to conduct pilots of this cloud security normalization open source code during the summer. The starter kit includes the canonical data model, which is a dictionary of standard cloud notifications, an ingestion and output engine, instructions, etc. Once you have a dictionary, you have a language and are able to communicate. That is, CSNF is providing a communication language that security devices can use to share information. The new language enables existing security infrastructure products to add new features and functions that reduce SOC toil and move them to operationalizing cloud security. If you want to get involved in being part of the reference solution and starter kit that will be part of the pilots that will be used by Raytheon Technologies, Cigna, FedEx, Goldman, Intuit, Fidelity, et al., then go here and become a member of the ONUG Collaborative.

Automation: The community is now focused on automating their NOCs and SOCs while at the same time operationalizing cloud security and cloud networking. So many conversations and presentations on this one topic at ONUG Spring promises that it will be a hot topic this fall in NYC.

Multi-cloud is here to stay. It’s complex and hard but it’s so worth it as you will get options and choices for infrastructure and developer teams. At ONUG, we’ll help you navigate your multi-cloud journey with live demonstration, sessions, and topics from experts, private communications with peers, and a wide range of technology supplier options.  

ONUG Fall will bring together between 700 to 900 community members and 50 sponsors. You can be a part of ONUG Fall by going here to register and going here to join peers in the ONUG Collaborative Working Groups. Technology suppliers can sponsor and demonstrate their multi-vendor offerings at ONUG Fall by reaching out to paul@onug.net or tim@onug.net.

I Know It Works Because I Saw It at ONUG. See you at ONUG Fall; have a great summer everybody.