Devopsdays Amsterdam 2023 Recap and Highligts
This week I was present as both attendee and speaker on 11th edition of Devopsdays 2023 Amsterdam. Devopsdays is a international conference with arround 500 attendees, a lot of vendors. It was an relaxed atmosphere, for sharing knowledge, a place to network and to be inspired. In this post I want to share my story and my personal highlights. The highlights include links to awesome talks, great tools and vendors talks and other impressions of Amsterdam Devopsdays 2023.
Devopsdays Session highlights
Some interested sessions that I had followed:
- [Keynote - Long live the imposter syndrome] - Julia Sullivan examines the thinking flaws that lead us into self doubt and loneliness. While most people spend years studying “hard” skills, Julia shows that the key to a successful, happy and fulfilled life lies in learning how to get better at maintain nourishing and resilient relationships.
- [The Art of Turning Incidents into Opportunities] - Busra Koken from Datadog spoke about providing you with a fresh perspective on these questions and give you a renewed sense of excitement for the opportunities these events present.
- [Planet Earth as our Stakeholder] - Marjolein Pilon was looking for ways to become more sustainable. She dove into the subject of sustainable IT and started with a ‘Planet as a Stakeholder Retrospective’ for my Scrum Team in which we went over the Principles of Green Software Engineering. We discussed what steps our team could take to reduce the carbon footprint of our services. In this talk she have shared her experiences: failures, challenges, successes, and examples of practical steps that teams have already taken to reduce their carbon footprint.
- [Full Lifecycle Security in your DevOps pipeline] - Anaïs Urlichs. The workshop had focus on a couple of core tools. Firstly understanding how Trivy, and similar security scanners, can be used to help secure filesystems, repositories, container images, Dockerfiles, Kubernetes manifests and IaC code such as Terraform. Then the workshop will move on to operationalizing security controls in your deployment pipeline, providing continuous security assurance of workloads.
- [Practical Guide to Distributed Tracing] - Dotan Horovits. This is a practical and fun workshop, that will give you the feel of distributed tracing and how it can help you to troubleshoot performance issues in production, using the popular Jaeger OSS. Learn how to effectively use it to monitor your microservices architecture.
- [Machine learning 101] - Lutske de Leeuw. This workshop has given the audience a good understanding of the basics of machine learning and the key steps involved in building an effective machine learning model. They will also have resources at their disposal to continue learning and exploring this exciting field.
- [There are no soft skills: making empathy actionable] - Sharon Steed. This talk has teached us to turn empathy into a behavior. She explained empathy’s importance in a corporate as well as team setting. She defined how empathy impacts team performance and productivity, turning empathy from an idea to an action.
- [The Dangers of Survivorship Bias in Tech] - Louëlla (Lou) Creemers. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, tech professional, or just a dreamer, this talk will provide valuable insights to avoid the pitfalls of survivorship bias. Learn how to navigate the tech industry with an unbiased perspective.
Personal contributions
This year twice I had the opportunity to provide my contribution to this valuable community:
- First contribution is being a part of the NL community talk. Live from the Devopsdays Online stage with my colleague Jurgen Allewijn, we shared our story our usecase story of the City of Amsterdam with Kubernete with the host Joep Piscaer.
- Second contribution is providing our talk we had on Devopsdays as a speaker, AKS unlighted, but what about Compliancy, cost and Multi-tenancy? which you can view by clicking on this link. The presentation can be viewed via this link.
Personal list of conversations
Conversations that still are on top of my mind.
- Isovalent about eBPF and Cilium. They will start an course on 16 August 2023.
- Github about Enterprise Security;
- WIZ who had given me a short demo how to put their program in action in a public cloud;
- and so many more ...
Wrapping up
Learned new things. Met a lot of old and new friends in person! Had a lot of fun! Did a lot of networking with people from Aqua, Isovalent, Sysdig, GitHub, and more.
If you missed it, you can view the sessions back via Youtube or click on one of the following links: Devopsdays Amsterdam 2023 - Day 1 or Devopsdays Amsterdam 2023 - Day 2.
If you have any questions, please contact me.
