How GenAI Reignites the debate on Cloud Agnosticism

The Shift in the Cloudscape: Navigating 2022's Economic Change and GenAI's Rise in 2023. At first glance, major cloud vendors appeared unchanged, continuing their operations as in previous years. Yet, the landscape underwent a significant transformation. The fading of 'quick money', coupled with soaring data traffic fees and an unprecedented demand for GPUs, marked a pivotal moment. Suddenly, the emphasis on running cloud operations with high efficiency resurfaced. In this talk, we'll explore the strategic adjustments a forward-thinking GenAI startup has implemented towards achieving cloud agnosticism and the tangible outcomes observed.

7 habits of inclusive & diverse engineers

During the last few years, I've had the chance to work with a diverse team of engineers. Brillant people from all across the world, with different backgrounds, ideas, talents and shortcomings have been part of my teams. Working in such an inspiring environment is inspiring but also demanding. Often I've asked myself whether I do it right, and frankly, I failed a lot.
I'd like to share my lessons so we all become a tiny bit more welcoming. And yes... I do this as a privileged white middle aged male in management... Probably my biggest lesson...

Beyond Platform teams, Value Streams and Continuous Delivery... It’s time to relax and shift down!

We've tried it all: Agile, Scrum, SAFe, Less, Kanban and Continuous Delivery. We've even setup Platform teams, are actively practicing TDD, apply DDD and deploy every day to production. Still we feel overwhelmed and not productive.

The above is a common thing I'm experience across companies I've worked with and spoken to during the last few years. Effectively they've done everything right and innovated well, but they missed a single aspect: how to make it easier for themselves? A typical habit for organizations is to not make software delivery easier, but bigger, more enhance and more complex.

Nope, this was never the intention of any of the techniques mentioned above... but how did we end there? This talk will not tell you what you should start doing, but rather what you should stop doing. Or like Google calls it: Shift Down. Hit the break. And decrease your load, rather than increase it with another gimmick.

The talk can be delivered as a short lightning talk or a more in-depth one. It's also possible to focus more on a managerial or engineering audience.

Rethinking databases... let's go serverless all the way!

For years we have accepted the position of databases in your infrastructure / cloud landscape: our big solid but expensive heart of our precious application. While the economy started to cool down, some interesting happened... We started to look at our bill again How can it make sense that my high traffic (serverless) application runs for 5 euros a month and my databases costs me 1200 euros? Can't we do this cheaper?

The database vendors responded and many innovations are hitting the market currently. Let us look at infinite scaling options, branch schema's, new data storage patterns and optimized compute. As a bonus, let's look how this all positively affects the AI use-case where I inject knowledge from one database vectorized into a LLM...

Depending on the audience and the conference, this talk can be delivered showcasing other cloud+database-vendors / implementation technologies.