Devopsdays Amsterdam 2023

From the 21st of June till the 23rd of June the Devopsdays Amsterdam were held in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. There is a first time for everything and for me this I attended the Devopsdays in three roles:

• Attendee, for me this was the third time I attended the Devopsdays in Pakhuis de Zwijger.
• (Gold) Sponsor, Luminis was one of the gold sponsors. In 2019 the company I worked for at that moment was also a gold sponsor.
• Speaker, this was the first time for me to speak at Devopsdays.

Devopdays starts with a workshop day and after that two days of sessions. Next to that there is a lot of stuff going on what makes my Devopsdays in my opinion an conference everyone should attend. I will give a recap of some of sessions that I thought were interesting and also some focus on my different roles during the conference.

Workshop day (Wednesday, 21-06-2023)

There were a lot of workshops to choose from. I attended the following workshops:

• Domain Driven Devops by Andrew Clay Shafer. On paper this looked like a very interesting session. But as Andrew told us at the beginning, this workshop normally takes a whole day and now there were only two hours available. So there was no handson part but mostly sharing of knowledge and insights by Andrew.
• First Steps to Full Lifecycle Security in your DevOps pipeline with Open Source Tools by Anais Urlichs. Anais started her workshop with explaining how you could integrate security in your devops environment. In the hands-on workshop we used Trivy, an open source solution developed by Aquasec, to do all the excercises. If you want to play with Trivy you can find here a repo with some demo excercises.
• Machine learning 101: Where to begin? by my colleague Lutske de Leeuw. This workshop consisted of two parts. In first part, Lutske gave a presentation explaining the basics of machine learning. In the second part of the workshop, we could start with getting our hands dirty and start with exercises ourselves and start gaining a basic knowledge.

First day of sessions (Thursday, 22-06-2023)

This day started with the organisation from Devopsdays welcoming us to the event. After that we started with the Keynote - Long live the imposter syndrome! by Julia Sullivan. She started with explaining why imposter syndrome is really a wrong name. During the keynote, there was also participation part of the attendees. First excersise was to tell one of your (biggest) fears with your neighbour. The idea behind this is that talking about your fear(s) helps you and make you a stronger person. Second exercise was staring in the eyes of your neighbour for 30 seconds in silence. Very interesting keynote. Next speaker was Busra Koken with her talk The Art of Turning Incidents into Opportunities. Busra told about her oops moment in which you deploy something and it breaks. Important lesson is that you are not alone and that in devops team there is room for making mistakes, solving it as team and learn from it.

After the first brake it was also booth time. During Thursday and Friday is was also at the booth of Luminis to tell what Luminis is all about. A lot of attendees visited the booth. Had some good conversations with people. At the booth is was possible to build yourself as Lego mini figure. You could choose your own head(face), hairstyle/color, and the color of the pants. You could also add a laptop to your figure. This also was a reason for some people to vist the booth more then once. We also promoted our latest whitepaper on the Well Architected Framework.

During the lunch break, Dinant Paardenkooper and I, had our interview with Joep Piscaer for the livestream to promote our talk. Nice opportunity that was offered by the organisation. In the afternoon more time for networking with people and talking with other sponsors like Sysdig and Isovalent. Also spoke with some of my former colleagues from Cegeka. Thursday is also the day of the barbecue. The food was very good and also the Devhops beer, Gin Weizen, from Gebrouwen door Vrouwen was very good. After the barbecue there was a bingo organised where could win amongst other things boxes of Lego. The program ended with karaoke.

Second day of sessions and also closing day (Friday, 23-06-2023)

The second day started with the keynote - There are no soft skills: making empathy actionable by Sharon Steed. This was very powerful keynote in which Sharon shared some personal stories. I was really impressed by the presentation and I think that if I look at myself I can also have some actions to take as it comes to empathy.

In the afternoon around 15:00 it was our, Dinant Paardenkooper and me, turn to give our talk AKS Unlighted - but what about cost, compliancy and multi-tenancy. We spoke about how we have implemented a Shared AKS solution on the Azure cloud platform of the city of Amsterdam. We explained some of the challenges we faced on the road of delivering this solution. We also shared the reason why we developed a shared AKS solution. We talked about the pitfalls, the lessons learned and the takeaways. Thea Schukken sumarised our talk in the drawing below.

Conclusion

We had a lot of luck with the weather. Apart from some not worth mentioning raindrops around the barbecue the weather was great. The food and drinks were great and also Pakhuis de Zwijger is a real nice location. I want to thank the team of Devopsdays Amsterdam for organising such an inspiring event and also want to thank the community for making it possible to have such good time and have good talks. I also want to thank Megin Zondervan for the beautiful photo's. I have to say that speaking once at Devopsdays, tastes like more. Already thinking for topic to talk about next year or maybe submit a workshop. I can recommend to everyone to submit a talk to devopsdays. Doesn't matter if you are an experienced speaker or just starting. It is a safe and fun environment. If you can't wait until next year, you can always go to Devopsdays Eindhoven. If you want speak there, you can send in your cfp here.

If you were not able to attend Devopsdays of part of it, just missed it or want to see everything again, you can view both sessions days via Youtube. On the day 2 stream you can also view the presentation AKS Unlighted - but what about cost, compliancy and multi-tenancy? which I gave together with Dinant Paardenkooper. The links to the streams can be found here: day 1, Thursday 22-3-203 and day 2, Friday 23-06-2023 If you want to download the presentation, that can be found here.