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F5 NGINX Sprint

Agenda & Labs

The NGINX Sprint agenda was designed with your busy day in mind. Each day is designed with short sessions that will cover an array of technical topics and hands-on opportunities.

All times are in PDT | Virtual Session Types: Communication/Break Keynote Breakout Session Labs

August 23, 2022

Day 1

8:00 AM|Welcome

Welcome to F5 NGINX Sprint!

Join Hannah Ouellette, Senior OSS Community Manager for NGINX, on this adventure and dive into NGINX Sprint 3.0 together. Hannah spares you some ocean-inspired puns while you learn about technologies, navigate the waters of open source, and gather as a community.

Speakers:

Hannah Ouellette

Duration: 5 mins

8:05 AM|Keynote

NGINX, Open Source, and You – Another Decade of Innovation

As NGINX approaches the end of its second decade, we believe it's just as powerful and relevant to running the Internet as when it was first released. But we're not resting on our laurels. In this keynote, Rob Whiteley, General Manager for NGINX, outlines our vision for how NGINX will continue to be the reliable, secure, and scalable stack of technology tools that power your modern applications. He reviews our progress since Sprint 2.0 and shares a new set of commitments from F5 that will ensure NGINX remains open, innovative, and community driven.

Speakers:

Rob Whiteley

Duration: 15 mins

8:20 AM|Keynote

Inspiring the Journey: From Open Source to Scale Out to Self Service

NGINX is amongst the most ubiquitous open source software powering the Internet, which speaks to its value, simplicity, and elegance. Nonetheless, we believe that you deserve far more as you journey with NGINX from cradle to infinity and beyond. In this keynote, Eric Braun, VP of Product Management for NGINX, and his teammates Mona Khabazan and Nina Forsyth take you on a tour through some of our latest investments and commitments which take you from download to configuration to deployment to scale-out operations to self-service offerings. They further introduce you to a special destination where all of this magic will take place surrounded by your fellow practitioners and inspirational community.

Speakers:

Eric Braun

Mona Khabazan

Nina Forsyth

Duration: 20 mins

8:40 AM|Keynote

Fireside Chat: The Importance of an Ecosystem

Open source powers the world. But as software architectures and production systems advance from on premises to cloud, few projects are completely self-contained. The ecosystem is increasingly important and need to select the pieces that best contribute to your overall goal. Come join our panel of experts who have helped drive this model of ecosystem collaboration as thought leaders, partners, and developers.

Speakers:

Dave McAllister

Matt Butcher

Robert Sirchia

Stephen Chin

Duration: 40 mins

9:20 AM|Keynote

NGINX Unit: Rebooting our Universal Web App Server

The NGINX Unit project team has been quietly making progress on our universal web app server. Unit can serve static files, proxy to backends, and run application code – all as a single component of your stack. In this keynote, Liam Crilly, Senior Director of Product Management for NGINX, updates you on what's new with Unit, explains the fundamental differences between NGINX and Unit, and shows how Unit simplifies the application stack.

Speakers:

Liam Crilly

Duration: 20 mins

9:40 AM|Keynote

It’s 2022 – What’s the State of Open Source?

Organizations of all sizes and industries are using more open source than ever before: 77% of organizations increased their use of open source in 2021, 41% of small organizations have an open source strategy, and open source security is top of mind. These are just some of many findings revealed in the 2022 State of Open Source report, a collboration between the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and OpenLogic by Perforce, where 2,660 industry professionals around the world responded to a comprehensive vendor-neutral survey. What open source technologies are the most used today in organizations? What are industry professionals looking for when they select open source software? What are the support and security challenges for organizations using open source? How mature are organizations in their use of open source? In this session, Javier Perez, Chief Evangelist for Open Source and Security at Perforce, reveals the answers to those questions and more. Learn about the latest trends and challenges in today’s popular open source software, from infrastructure and programming languages to data technologies, AI, and DevOps tooling.

Speakers:

Javier Perez

Duration: 20 mins

10:00 AM|Break

Break

Speakers:

Duration: 10 mins

10:10 AM|Breakout Session

Best Practices for Getting Started with NGINX Open Source

You already use NGINX, but can you take its performance "over 9000"? Alessandro Fael Garcia, Senior Solution Engineer for NGINX, describes best practices for configuring NGINX as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and cache, and how small adjustments with NGINX directives can improve performance.

Speakers:

Alessandro Fael Garcia

Duration: 20 mins

10:30 AM|Breakout Session

Deployable API Infrastructure with NGINX

The industry presents us in terms of API management solutions with a hard trial, and always promises holistic ("full lifecycle") solutions. But an important component for a successful API, in the sense of fast and high-quality time-to-market, is often left out and usually dismissed with a simple sentence such as: "We'll take care of that via a CI/CD pipeline". In this presentation, I would like to show how nginx can be a part of infrastructure to send APIs that meet the respective guidelines of a company on their way to rapid deployment, supported by CI/CD pipelines with a certain degree of automation. In order to create a certain value for the company.

Speakers:

Daniel Kocot

Duration: 20 mins

10:50 AM|Breakout Session

Scripting NGINX with njs for Fun and (No) Profit

Take a mental break from security, scaling, and best practices! Javier Evans, Solutions Engineer for NGINX, invites you to walk through some fun and likely inadvisable ways to script NGINX using the NGINX Javascript module (njs). Javier shows how to generate QR codes, pass off a doggy daycare application for a childcare app, and implement WBA (weather-based authentication). And who knows? You might just learn something and make lifelong friends along the way.

Speakers:

Javier Evans

Duration: 20 mins

11:10 AM|Breakout Session

Unit Rebooted – Real World Use Cases and Success Stories

A lot has changed since the initial release of NGINX Unit. New features have created new opportunities and ideas about how to use Unit, and more importantly for what use cases and on what platforms. Join Timo Stark, Product Management Engineer for NGINX, to learn more about the latest success stories and real-world use cases for Unit. He takes you on a journey about modernizing legacy applications, a new HTTP stack for Scala, and lots more.

Speakers:

Timo Stark

Duration: 20 mins

11:30 AM|Breakout Session

Future Things: What's Coming Next And What You Need to Know Right Now

From Java to Jenkins to Kubernetes to OpenTelemetry, the world of technologies impacting our development and delivery is constantly changing. While not every technology makes it to the big show, recognizing which ones will have an impact on you is key to keep your technology knowledge sharp. Dave McAllister, OSS Technical Evangelist for NGINX, dive into some nascent technologies that are very likely to have near- and long-term impact on the way he approaches code and operations. Providing insights and opinions on the direction of Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry, he also look into cool stuff like WebAssembly and eBPF, and touch on how development has to change to create the future.

Speakers:

Dave McAllister

Duration: 20 mins

11:50 AM|Breakout Session

OpenTelemetry 101 FTW

It's been said that open source software is eating the world. In the observability space, the project making this possible is OpenTelemetry. It's quickly becoming the standard for instrumentation and data collection of observability data. Understanding what data to collect and how to collect it properly is fundamental to ensuring users can quickly address availability and performance issues. Steve Flanders, Director of Engineering at Splunk, discusses the components of the project, its current status, and how you can get started integrating it into your modern app infrastructure.

Speakers:

Steve Flanders

Duration: 20 mins

12:10 PM|Breakout Session

Why and How to Run Your Own Gitlab Runners as Your Company Grows

In this session, Casey Zednick, Senior Software Engineer for NGINX, tells you everything you need to know about GitLab Runner, an app for running jobs in your CI/CD pipeline. Using your own runners gives you full control to meet your service level objectives (SLOs), increase security, and save money at scale. It's notoriously difficult to forecast costs for dynamic cloud services like an autoscaling fleet of runners, but Casey demos a tool from the NGINX tools team that calculates your costs based on a handful of numbers. He also shows how to clone our GitLab repos to set up a production-grade fleet in Azure and monitor its performance.

Speakers:

Casey Zednick

Duration: 20 mins

12:30 PM|Breakout Session

Open Sourcing NGINX Agent and Demo

The NGINX Agent is a lightweight piece of software that can be installed next to NGINX OSS and/or NGINX Plus that provides local interaction with NGINX instances to allow administrative actions to be carried out. The NGINX Agent provides a secure entry point for managing NGINX instance configurations, collecting metrics, and gather a set of events on a NGINX instance.

Speakers:

Oliver O'Mahony

Duration: 20 mins

August 24, 2022

Day 2

8:00 AM|Welcome

Welcome Back to F5 NGINX Sprint

Welcome back! Let’s dive into NGINX Sprint and navigate the waters of open source technology. Hannah guides you through the conference, explaining how best to find the information you need and avoid pitfalls along the way.

Speakers:

Hannah Ouellette

Duration: 5 mins

8:05 AM|Keynote

F5 Open Source: A Tale in 3 Parts

Since NGINX joined F5 in 2019, the focus on open source has accelerated across the entire company. Come hear from Christine Abernathy, Senior Director of Open Source for F5, about what we’ve been working on to build an open source culture and drive innovation.

Speakers:

Christine Abernathy

Duration: 15 mins

8:20 AM|Keynote

Fireside Chat with Capital One: Building API Infrastructure at Scale

An API gateway is a core component of any modern architecture, how ever securing APIs not only implies securing the infrastructure but also the APIs themselves. In this fireside chat hear from two industry leaders and why they chose NGINX to secure external traffic in a reliable, scalable fashion.

Speakers:

Kevin Jones

Rohit Joshi

Vikash Tiwari

Duration: 20 mins

8:40 AM|Keynote

The Future of Kubernetes Connectivity

As organizations deploy production-grade Kubernetes across hybrid, multi-cloud environments, they recognize the need to streamline the processes used by their diverse development and operations teams to establish and manage connectivity to Kubernetes services and applications for external clients and within clusters. In this session, Brian Ehlert, Director of Product Management for NGINX, discusses the history of Kubernetes networking along with the latest developments and trends, and offers a glimpse into the future around providing client access to the applications in a shared, multi-tenant Kubernetes environment.

Speakers:

Brian Ehlert

Duration: 10 mins

8:50 AM|Keynote

MARA: Scaffolding for Modern Applications

MARA is an reference architecture for Kubernetes that aims to be as production ready as possible. The MARA team created it to showcase the open source underpinnings of modern applications in an easily deployable, modifiable, and shareable fashion. As a framework, MARA focuses on protocols over products, enabling users to add and remove components to meet their specific needs. In this session Jason Schmidt, Solutions Architect for NGINX, discusses the MARA design philosophy, the progress that has been made over the past year, and the project roadmap. He focuses special attention on both expected and unexpected challenges encountered on the way, and explores key real-world use cases.

Speakers:

Jason Schmidt

Duration: 20 mins

9:10 AM|Keynote

A Journey Through NGINX and Open Source with Kelsey Hightower

Kelsey Hightower has been in the forefront of new emerging technologies for years. Back in 2015, Kelsey joined us for nginx.conf and talked to us about bringing Kubernetes to the Edge with NGINX. Since then his multi-faceted journey in tech has given him a perspective unlike others. Hear about his experience with NGINX and watch as he roles up his sleeves and demos the latest open source projects.

Speakers:

Kelsey Hightower

Rob Whiteley

Duration: 45 mins

9:55 AM|Break

Break

Speakers:

Duration: 10 mins

10:05 AM|Breakout Session

MARA: The Journey to OpenTelemetry

Jason Schmidt and Elijah Zupancic, Solutions Architects for NGINX, dive deep into the work behind adding OpenTelemetry to the MARA project. They describe how to add instrumentation to a legacy microservices application, integrate a microservices application with existing OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and deploy a collector architecture in a way that balances flexibility, ease of management, and future upgrade paths. The session is designed to help demystify OpenTelemetry and provide working examples that illustrate best practices within the MARA framework.

Speakers:

Elijah Zupancic

Jason Schmidt

Duration: 20 mins

10:25 AM|Breakout Session

An Open Source Community Behind Your Firewall – Improving Developer Productivity with InnerSource

As we continue to shift to a more remote-friendly work world with contributors located across the globe, there are lessons we can learn from a community who's been "working remotely" since its inception: open source. You can increase collaboration, communication and productivity by embracing some of the core tenets of the open source community. Join Christopher Harrison, Enterprise Advocate at GitHub, in an exploration of how an InnerSource approach to development brings the best practices and benefits of open source to improve the development process even at organizations working on proprietary software.

Speakers:

Christopher Harrison

Duration: 10 mins

10:35 AM|Breakout Session

Software Delivery and the Rube Goldberg Machine: What Is the Problem We Are Trying to Solve?

The software delivery life cycle (SDLC) can be complicated. Depending on your architecture and your particular deployment environment, your team may find themselves cobbling together numerous different tools and frameworks, each with its own history and a particular set of challenges it's designed to solve. Sometimes teams find creative ways to use tools outside of their original purpose. It’s a cycle of continuous improvement (secure, deliver, monitor, reflect, make changes, and repeat) with the end goal of easing the process. In this session Melissa McKay, Developer Advocate at JFrog, discusses some of the common problems that teams face during the development and delivery process, and how organizations come together to address them. You will leave empowered and with a call to action to become part of the solution.

Speakers:

Melissa McKay

Duration: 20 mins

10:55 AM|Breakout Session

A Guide to Adopting Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a core component of most modern app delivery strategies because it helps organizations deliver apps faster with more agility and avoid costly downtime. But adopting Kubernetes is far from easy for organizations that are used to delivering three-tier apps. How do you decide which apps to refactor and which to build from scratch? What kinds of processes and tools can help you avoid common challenges around security and complexity? Join this session led by Rey Lejano, Kubernetes Field Engineer at Racher, for answers to these common questions.

Speakers:

Rey Lejano

Duration: 20 mins

11:15 AM|Breakout Session

Zero to Hero in Kubernetes-Native Java

More than 10 million Java developers are currently working to realize business requirements, spending a ton of time and effort to optimize application performance for a variety of workloads (web, mobile, AI/ML, edge) in the cloud. A big issue for developers is how the lack of compatibility between Java and Kubernetes forces them to adopt unfamiliar programming languages and runtimes. Daniel Oh, Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat, walks you through how to scaffold a Java project from scratch and then build it as a Kubernetes-native application with a tiny memory footprint and milliseconds-fast startup time. He also discusses how to continue testing and debugging the application while it’s already deployed to the remote Kubernetes in a way that duplicates the local developer experience of inner loop development.

Speakers:

Daniel Oh

Duration: 20 mins

11:35 AM|Breakout Session

NGINX Service Mesh Observability with the LGTM Stack from Grafana

Ward Bekker, Senior Principal Solutions Engineer at Grafana, offers a short-and-sweet live demo of observability for NGINX Service Mesh using the popular open source "LGTM" stack: Grafana Loki for logs, Grafana for dashboarding, Grafana Tempo for traces, and Grafana Mimir for metrics.

Speakers:

Ward Bekker

Duration: 10 mins

11:45 AM|Breakout Session

Sumo Logic <3 Open Source

In this session, Melissa Sussman, Lead Technical Evangelist at Sumo Logic, explores the company's contributions to open source projects. Sumo has made a serious commitment to OpenTelemetry (OTel), OpenSLO, and open core solutions. Melissa also discusses data collection and how open source tooling (such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, Fluentbit, and Fluentd) are used with Sumo Logic products.

Speakers:

Melissa Sussmann

Duration: 20 mins

August 25, 2022

Day 3

9:00 AM|Labs

NGINX 101: Get Up and Running with NGINX

In this 101-level lab we’ll take you from a “”blank”" LINUX system to a full-featured NGINX application delivery configuration for serving web content, load balancing, TLS decryption, and content caching. You will install NGINX from our repo, configure NGINX to serve static content, and load balance traffic to multiple upstream servers.

Speakers:

Robert Haynes

Duration: 60 mins

9:00 AM|Labs

NGINX 101: Lightweight and Open Source Universal Web App Server

Getting started with NGINX Unit! In this Session we will take you on a wild journey about all things NGINX Unit. We will learn how to install and setup Unit on a Linux based system and apply our first configuration. At the end you will be able to host a single page application along side with a python based API on Unit. Last but not least we will talk about the main security concepts in Unit and how easy it is to turn http into https for all applications and services installed on Unit. Are you ready for something really cool? Join our hands on Lab.

Speakers:

Timo Stark

Duration: 60 mins

9:00 AM|Labs

NGINX 101: Reduce Kubernetes Latency with Autoscaling

Your organization built an app in Kubernetes and now it’s getting popular! You went from just a few visitors to hundreds (and sometimes thousands) per day. But there’s a problem…the increased traffic is hitting a bottleneck, causing latency and timeouts for your customers. If you can’t improve the experience, people will stop using the app. You – the brave Kubernetes engineer – have a solution. You deploy an Ingress controller to route the traffic and set up an autoscaling policy so that the number of Ingress controller pods expands and contracts to match traffic fluctuations. Now, your Ingress controller pods seamlessly handle traffic surges – "Goodbye, latency! " When traffic decreases, the pods scale down to conserve resources – "Hello, cost savings!" Well done, you.

Speakers:

Jenn Gile

Duration: 60 mins

Time Zones based off the 8:00 AM start time:
  • AMER: August 23rd, 8:00 AM PDT
  • EMEA: August 23rd, 5:00 PM CEST
  • APCJ: August 23rd, 11:00 PM SGT