Davide De Paolis
Engineering Manager @sevdesk
Hamburg, Germany
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Engineering Manager, AWS Community Builder, serverless aficionado, and outdoor freak. Originally from Italy, Davide de Paolis taught himself software engineering in his twenties after a life-changing sabbatical in New Zealand. With over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, he’s been living and working in Germany since 2013.
He began his journey building the both beloved and notorious Flash websites and expanded into Java, Unity3D/C#, TypeScript, Node.js, and React, before finding his passion in cloud engineering and platform work.
Since 2018, he has been leading teams that build strategic services and internal platforms to support scale and developer productivity. Obsessed with simplicity and effectiveness, he loves solving problems with code and at the bouldering wall.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Serverless vs Kubernetes: the final showdown
'There is no silver bullet!'—while true, that won’t stop us from stepping into the ring to argue over these two opinionated and polarising approaches to cloud computing.
In this lively, no-holds-barred debate, we’ll spar over complexity, scalability, costs, and real-world use cases.
Whether you’re Team Serverless, Team Kubernetes, or still undecided, join us as we wrestle with the tradeoffs that come with each model. Together, we’ll unpack the biases and prejudices we all bring to architecture decisions, challenge common assumptions, and dive into critical topics like security, legacy application modernization, and how each approach fits into event-driven architectures.
Who will be the winner?
Road to compliance: will your internal users hate your Platform Team?
Enforcing rules and best practices consistently while enhancing operational efficiency, reducing risks, and controlling costs is a tricky journey, that often leads to frustration, loss of productivity, and friction between engineering teams and yours because the challenge is not purely technical.
Empathy and a customer-focused mindset are crucial, and a suite of AWS services, including AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, Service Control Policies (SCPs), and Tagging policies, can greatly assist in automating compliance checks, enforcing governance, and managing access and costs.
In this talk, we will share our journey as a platform engineering team in achieving robust internal compliance and show how we implemented governance and FinOps initiatives in a way that kept everyone on board fostering a positive and collaborative environment.
It Works! Let's Ship It - DynamoDB Tips from the trenches
Let's face it: "Nobody cares about your code, as long as it solves your customer's problem and is shipped on time."
That's why often corners are cut and prototypes are shipped directly to production. If you are lucky and your product gains traction, you might start hitting some bottlenecks and you have to pay back some tech debt.
Let's explore some DynamoDB querying and modeling tips (that we learned the hard way) that will help you keep your code clean and simple, improve performance, and even reduce your AWS bill.
Figs and Canary Birds: how we reduced complexity (and costs!) by gradually switching to serverless
What is the strangler fig pattern?
What are canary rollouts?
How can you leverage Application Load Balancer Target Groups to migrate a PHP monolith into a serverless application - on a different account?
This session will cover all these topics and see how to deploy our application using AWS CDK.
Check your TCO: Escaping the self-managed trap on your path to scale
In the pursuit of speed and flexibility, many platform teams turn to open-source or “free” tools they can self-host. But as usage grows and complexity creeps in, that “simple” low-cost solution quickly becomes a burden - consuming precious engineering time, draining focus, and introducing operational risk. Sound familiar?
In this talk, we’ll share our journey out of the trap that our fear of vendor lock-in led us into, and how we leveraged AWS and other vendors’ managed offerings to build a streamlined infrastructure and observability platform.
We’ll explore the hidden costs of ownership - time, expertise, and security - and walk through real-world tradeoffs when deciding between DIY and managed solutions.
Whether you’re a startup scaling up or a platform team drowning in maintenance toil, you’ll learn how to make cost-aware decisions that align with your team’s bandwidth and your company’s growth trajectory. This talk will help you avoid, or escape, self-managed hell and give your engineers the time and energy to focus on delivering real value.
AWS Community Day Italy 2024 Sessionize Event
AWS Community Day DACH 2024 Sessionize Event
AWS Community Day Poland 2024 Sessionize Event
AWS Community Day DACH 2023 Sessionize Event
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