Episode Details

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• The challenges that CERN was facing when storing, processing, and analyzing data, and why it pushed them to think about containerization. 
• CERN’s evolution from using mainframes, to physical commodity hardware, to virtualization and private clouds, and eventually to containers. Ricardo also explains how the migration to containerization and Kubernetes was started.
• Why there was a big push from groups that focus on reproducibility to explore containerization. 
• How end users have responded to Kubernetes and containers. Ricardo talks about the steep Kubernetes learning curve, and how they dealt with frustration and resistance. 
• Some of top benefits of migrating to Kubernetes, and the impact that the move has had on their end users. 
• Current challenges that CERN is working through, regarding hybrid infrastructure and rising data loads. Ricardo also talks about how CERN optimizes system resources for their scientists, and what it’s like operating as a public sector organization.
• How CERN handles large data transfers. 

Links:

• Email:ricardo.rocha@cern.ch 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ahcorporto
• CERN

Transcript

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to the Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I'm here with Ricardo Rocha. Ricardo, thank you so much for joining us.

Ricardo: It's a pleasure.

Emily: Ricardo, can you actually go ahead and introduce yourself: where you work, and what you do?

Ricardo: Yeah, yes, sure. I work at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. I'm a software engineer and I work in the CERN IT department. I've done quite a few different things in the past in the organization, including software development in the areas of storage and monitoring, and also distributed computing. But right now, I'm part of the CERN Cloud Team, and we manage the CERN private cloud and all the resources we have. And I focus mostly on networking and containerization, so Kubernetes and all these new technologies.

Emily: And on a day to day basis, what do you usually do? What sort of activities are you actually doing?

Ricardo: Yeah. So, it's mostly making sure we provide the infrastructure that our physics users and experiments require, and also the people on campus. So, CERN is a pretty large organization. We have around 10,000 people on-site, and many more around the world that depend on our resources. So, we operate private clouds, we basically do DevOps-style work. And we have a team dedicated for the Cloud, but also for other areas of the data center. And it's mostly making sure everything operates correctly; try to automate more and more, so we do some improvements gradually; and then giving support to our users.

Emily: Just so everyone knows, can you tell a little bit more about what kind of work is done at CERN? What kind of experiments people are running?