Cloud Native Cloud Native Mauritius — March 2025 Meetup

The meetup was scheduled at 10 a.m. in Helvetia. We reached there on time, despite the battling rain. However, due to some logistics issues, we quickly had to decide whether to postpone the meetup or to move to another location. We pondered over the ideas and then finally decided to go to Kuumba Coffee at Telfair, Moka. Delphine, suggested the idea and we all agreed to it.

I didn't know about Kuumba Coffee, haven't been there before, but Neil vouched for the place. After all, everybody could fit in the three cars that we had. S. Moonesamy, on the other hand, got delayed and when he called, we suggested him to go directly to Kuumba Coffee and we would meet there.

We had three talks scheduled and a short demo of Vroume to be done by Mervin, in between one of the presentations. We did not have a screen/monitor to cast the presentation, so we decided that we'll share the slides and everyone can open the slides in their own laptop, and follow from there.

The talks were as follows:

More YAML with Talos Linux
by Alex Bissessur, the Kubernetes Face of La Sentinelle

Alex talked about Talos Linux, an immutable, API-driven, minimalist operating system that has been designed from ground up for Kubernetes nodes. It is extremely lightweight, with no ssh, no systemd, no package managers — everything is controlled through a secure API. Talos is managed using the talosctl CLI tool, which interacts with the Talos API — similar to how you would manage your Kubernetes cluster using the kubectl CLI tool. The entire Talos node config is one big YAML file that describes everything from provisioning, networking, cluster config, etc.

ClusterAPI in Action
Simplifying Multi-Cloud Kubernetes deployment
by Prashant Ramhit (a.k.a CookieMonster), Senior DevOps Advocate at Mirantis

Prashant spoke about ClusterAPI — a Kubernetes project that provides declarative APIs for the provisioning and management of multi-cloud k8s clusters. He did a demo, explaining through his YAML config — showing a MachineDeployment on the AWS infrastructure. He explained that ClusterAPI supports various types of cloud infra — from baremetal to major private/public cloud providers, like VMware, Azure, AWS, GCP, etc.

Prashant briefly mentioned k0S (a certified Kubernetes distribution), k0SMOTRON and k0RDENT — three open source projects by Mirantis. I was immediately impressed. I didn't know about Mirantis before but right there when checking these projects, I was glad to learn about those. I made some mental comparison of k3s vs k0s in head — but I'll run some lab experiments for a more proper education on the tools.

Cloud Native, Chance of Rain
by S. Moonesamy, IANA Trusted Community Representative (TCR)

S. Moonesamy (SM), as cryptic, as his presentations can be, he engaged everyone to discuss what does the term "cloud" denote in Mauritius. Does a multi-tenant WordPress in Dubai constitute of cloud for Mauritian businesses?

SM mentioned the paper on The Intergalactic Computer Network by J.C.R. Licklider, 1963. This was even before ARPANET — the birth of the Internet.

He mentioned other attempts by service providers to cajole local businesses into believing what is cloud. Yet, in 2025, we could be saying this is cloud or that is cloud but... in the end we only are sending our data in foreign jurisdictions. As example, he asked me whether I use Apple Cloud, (I replied affirmative), and then asked where is the data stored. See, questions like these make you think.

He mentioned a letter from Anatoly Kitov in 1959. We talked about Broadcom's purchase of VMware. The discussion ended with the Chance of Rain, another cryptic question from SM, saying that his weather app showed that it would be partly cloudy on Saturday — however, heavy rain was battling against the asphalt as he was presenting. He talked about outdated software still being in use, as some might be forced to continue using it, if moving away deems unpractical.

He shared his views on k8s — saying it's an open source system for automating deployment, and management of containerised applications, where the containerised applications could be regarded as « gato pima ».

Meetup ended by 14h30. Some among us left for home and a small band headed to Flying Dodo where the geek talk continued.

Visit cloudnativemauritius.com to learn about future meetups of the Cloud Native Chapter of Mauritius.