Geert van der Cruijsen
Principal Consultant Cloud, AI & DevOps @ Xebia
Uden, The Netherlands
Geert van der Cruijsen is Azure AI Lead at Xebia in the Netherlands and works as a principal consultant with customers to help them build their engineering cultures. Geert specialises in modern software development, architecture, cloud, AI & DevOps and loves combining these areas. Geert is an active member of the community, Microsoft MVP and loves speaking at conferences & co-hosting the LEAD podcast.
Awards
Area of Expertise
Topics
Automating complex cloud test environments on demand at scale @ ASML
At ASML we build the most complex machine in the world. This machine also needs software to run and has a platform to communicate with the outside world. Next to hardware teams, we have hundreds of teams working on the software and we want to make their life easier in testing and qualifying their software for actual releases into the factories at customers where our machines run in production.
Managing these complex test environments can be a pain especially if you have to do this at the scale we operate on at ASML (Think thousands of devs and then thousands of VMs). In this session we’ll discuss some of the concepts of how we use the power of the cloud to dynamically spin up test clusters on demand at scale on multiple clouds meeting demands from both developers & our security department.
Join us to uncover the principles, strategies, and technologies that make it possible to automate and scale complex cloud test environments on demand. Discover how these advancements can empower your teams, streamline your operations even if you’re not working on the most complex machine in the world.
The AI Ensemble: Orchestrating AI Agents with .NET & Orleans
Building generative AI solutions can be split into 3 levels, starting with clever prompting to add some LLM magic to your application towards the second level where you add capabilities on your own data. The third level introduces the paradigm of connected agents - autonomous entities that communicate and collaborate to achieve complex goals.
This session will delve into the details of building AI applications at this advanced tier, utilising the robust capabilities of Microsoft .NET & Orleans. Microsoft Orleans, with its Actor model foundation, emerges as a particularly effective framework for orchestrating the interactions of these agents.
By leveraging the .NET ecosystem, developers can craft scalable, resilient AI-driven solutions that fully exploit the potential of connected agents, setting a new standard for intelligent applications.
The Secret Ingredients of a High-Performing Development Team
Ever wonder what brews behind the scenes of a high-performance tech team? Think of it as crafting a gourmet dish: it's not just about selecting prime cuts of talent but also about how you marinate them in culture, spice things up with innovation, and let them simmer together in a pot of collaboration. In this session, we'll whisk through the essentials of team dynamics, serving you the recipe for creating a team that's Michelin-star worthy. If you're hungry for success and ready to feast on the secrets of team synergy, join us in this session full of practical tips in building your development team into a well oiled machine.
Unleashing AI's Potential with Azure: A Hands-On Exploration for Software Developers
Dive into the world of Artificial Intelligence on Azure in this comprehensive, full-day workshop designed for software developers. Whether you're just starting out or looking to deepen your understanding, this workshop offers a unique opportunity to explore Azure's AI capabilities.
Participants will gain foundational knowledge about the vast possibilities within Azure's AI landscape. The workshop covers a range of topics including Azure AI Services (formerly Cognitive Services), Azure OpenAI, Azure Machine Learning, and Prompt Flow.
Topics covered:
- Azure AI Services
- Azure OpenAI Studio
- GPT 3.5, 4 and other models, which to use when
- Azure AI Studio
- Prompt engineering
- Azure Machine Learning prompt flow
- Azure cognitive search
- Azure Document Intelligence Service
- Azure AI Search
This interactive workshop combines theoretical insights with hands-on labs, providing a balanced learning experience while making a lot of fun!
Prerequisites:
- A laptop capable of installing software
- A GitHub account for cloning hands on labs
- Visual Studio Code pre-installed
- preferably bring your own Azure OpenAI Key
This workshop is designed for software developers of any skill level, although some prior experience with Azure will be beneficial.
Join us to unlock the power of AI with Azure and take your skills to the next level!
GreenOps: The Future of Sustainable Computing
In this session, we will explore the concept of GreenOps, which is an approach to cloud engineering that emphasizes sustainability and eco-friendliness. We will discuss the importance of sustainable computing in today’s world and how GreenOps can help organizations reduce their carbon footprint while still delivering high-quality services. We will also cover some of the key principles of GreenOps, such as energy efficiency, waste reduction, and renewable energy, and how these principles can be applied to cloud infrastructure.
Building AI first applications using Semantic Kernel & C#
Semantic Kernel is an open-source SDK by Microsoft to build AI First applications and AI agents. Enabling developers to seamlessly integrate existing code with AI models from OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, and Hugging Face.
This talk explores the role of Semantic Kernel in AI orchestration, giving you the capabilities to create copilot-like experiences. We will showcase how Semantic Kernel empowers developers to build intelligent agents effortlessly, facilitating the automation of complex tasks by combining AI-generated responses with diverse programming languages. With Semantic Kernel, you can even allow an LLM to create a complex plan that can be executed locally, going far beyond what you might think LLMs can do.
The talk also highlights Semantic Kernel's extensibility, allowing the integration of memories, AI models, and plugins, making it a key player in the landscape of AI development.
Sustainable Software Engineering; Coding For a Greener Tomorrow
In our increasingly digital era, the ecological footprint of technology and software development is a critical yet often overlooked concern. In this session, we will demonstrate how to redefine the paradigms of software engineering through the lens of sustainability & the impact software has on our world.
Attendees will gain insights into the principles of Sustainable Software Engineering, an emergent discipline that incorporates environmental thinking into each stage of the software development lifecycle. We will delve into practical, actionable strategies, demonstrating how to build greener, more energy-efficient applications without compromising functionality or innovation.
Join us to embark on a mission to save the world - one line of code at a time. Let's create software that drives human progress and respects and preserves our precious planetary resources.
Responsible AI: With great power comes great responsibility
AI is taking a larger footprint in our industry every day. It’s time to think about ethical considerations and the impact of AI done wrong or good can have in the AI landscape and on our society. In this session we’ll talk about AI decision-making processes and their broader impacts on individuals, society, and businesses.
With real-life examples and actionable steps, discover how to implement Responsible AI practices within your organisation. Explore the role of leadership in fostering a culture of Ethical AI and ensuring that the great power of AI is met with a heightened sense of responsibility. Join us in this session that equips developers and IT leaders to navigate the evolving landscape of AI with ethical clarity and strategic insight.
DevOps ❤️ Platform Engineering
Discover the synergy between DevOps and Platform Engineering in this session that explores their shared mission of accelerating business value delivery. Platform Engineering, the new kid on the block, aims to achieve similar outcomes as DevOps, often causing misconceptions of competition. This talk sheds light on the true nature & goals of Platform Engineering and how it can be the missing link in making DevOps teams even more productive. By seamlessly integrating Platform Engineering in DevOps and SRE practices, we unlock new dimensions of productivity, scalability, and reliability.
5 Common Platform Engineering Mistakes
Platform engineering plays a critical role in making developers more productive and delivering business value while maintaining security and compliance. However, it's not uncommon for platform teams to become bottlenecks that impede progress rather than driving it forward.
Join us for this session as we explore the top 5 common mistakes in platform engineering that can lead to inefficiencies and bottlenecks. We'll examine practical strategies for avoiding these mistakes and building a high-performing engineering department that delivers results while ensuring security and compliance. Whether you're an experienced platform engineer, just starting out or a engineering working with a platform team, you'll leave this session with valuable insights for enhancing your Organization’s productivity and effectiveness.
Azure Platform Engineering: What, why and how?
Platform engineering is a new hype in the software engineering landscape in the same space as DevOps, Agile & SRE. Is Platform engineering the new silver bullet to make everything work better?
In this session Geert will explain what Platform Engineering is, why there is a need for it and how it compares to DevOps & SRE. He'll give you a good overview and starters on how to implement this yourself in your organization to improve productivity, governance & security on Azure
Azure Container Apps: Advanced features
Kubernetes is a popular choice for building cloud-native applications, but managing it can be a challenge. Fortunately, Azure Container Apps offers a serverless PaaS abstraction over Kubernetes that delivers many of the same benefits without the hassle of managing Kubernetes itself.
Join us for this session as we explore the advanced capabilities of Azure Container Apps for building advanced cloud-native solutions. We'll cover essential topics such as zero downtime deployments, high availability, and dynamic scaling up and down to zero, among others. With practical examples and tips, you'll learn how Azure Container Apps can be a really good alternative to Kubernetes when building cloud-native applications.
WORKSHOP: Build the distributed apps of the future using Dapr
Building distributed application is hard… As developers we want to focus on delivering business value with new features but there are so much things to also take care of on the side, especially in a distributed environment. Things as pub/sub, state management, bindings & triggers, service discovery, distributed tracing etc. Dapr tries to solve this problem by providing all of this to you so you can mix and match what pieces you want to use and also pick between many implementations of for example state management like cosmosDB, redis or dynamoDB
In this workshop you'll get hands on experience in building your own microservice based application using Dapr. You'll learn the following features of Dapr:
• State management
• Service discovery
• Actor framework
• Pub/sub
• Distributed Tracing
We'll be building the application using multiple programming languages, Docker & Kubernetes. Basic knowledge of Docker & Kubernetes is advised to get the most out of this workshop.
Platform Engineering: The new thing to write software better, faster & cheaper?
Platform engineering is a new hype in the software engineering landscape in the same space as DevOps, Agile & SRE. Is Platform engineering the new silver bullet?
In this session Geert will explain what Platform Engineering is, why there is a need for it and how it compares to DevOps & SRE. He'll give you a good overview and starters on how to implement this yourself.
Building Microservice applications using .Net on Azure Container Apps
Kubernetes has all the hype but do you actually need all this complexity for your distributed application? There is a big trend happening by cloud providers to provide all the features Kubernetes brings without the complexity and Azure Container Apps is Microsofts take at this.
In this workshop you'll learn how you can build and deploy containerized applications using Azure Container apps from scratch using .Net.
It includes all the nice features it brings such as blue/green deployments, Dapr & autoscaling using Keda. Join this workshop to get ready to deploy your own microservice applications using Azure Container Apps
Azure Container Apps: The Future of Microservices in Azure
Kubernetes has all the hype but do you actually need all this complexity for your distributed application? There is a big trend happening by cloud providers to provide all the features Kubernetes brings without the complexity and Azure Container Apps is Microsofts take at this.
In this Session Geert will talk you through how you can build and deploy containerized applications using Azure Container apps from scratch including all the nice features it brings such as blue/green deployments & autoscaling. Join us to see if this can be the future of Microservices on Azure.
Building resilient cloud applications with Chaos engineering & Azure Chaos Studio
In the microservices and distributed systems era your complex landscape is never 100% up or is it? We build applications to be resilient, can handle failovers and have all kinds of patterns & practices to be high available. But do we also test these mechanisms?
Chaos Engineering is a practice that focusses on making sure your application keeps working under all kinds of stress factors like downtime, latency or failures. Chaos engineering does this by running experiments to see what happens in case of failure.
Geert will explain what Chaos Engineering is all about and will demo how Azure Chaos Studio is a new solution by Microsoft to help in doing Chaos Experiments.
Join this session to learn about starting with Chaos Engineering yourself or to learn more about creating high available, resilient applications using the cloud.
Azure cloud governance for DevOps organizations
Azure.. Often seen as just another layer of infrastructure where you can apply the same governance as you did for your on premises infrastructure.
In this session Geert will prove you that to use the full speed and agility of the cloud you'll require a completely different approach that embraces DevOps and autonomous teams. Does this mean it will be less secure? Join this session to find out why it doesn't have to be less secure and how to create a cloud environment that both DevOps teams and security officers will love.
Overcoming your fears as a developer
Being a software engineer can be a great job with often cool challenges that brings joy to many. But for many developers either junior or senior there are also many fears. Fear of not being good enough, Fear of not knowing everything about a new technology that your company just embraced, Fear of breaking production and gaining a bad reputation within the company and many other fears.
In this talk Geert will discuss these different fears with you, the developers to see how you can overcome these fears and things like imposter syndrome both from the developer side but also how you and your organisation can help your colleagues overcome their fears. Join us for tips and stories from junior to senior developers that should be relatable for your past, present or future.
Better architecture without architects
As a developer, have you ever had to implement an architecture thought up by an architect not in your team? Have you worked in an environment where you needed to propose changes in a CAB? Do you have architects in your organization who don't code? If you answer yes to any of the questions this session is for you!
In this session Geert will talk about how DevOps organizations with autonomous teams work faster and build better architecture without the need of enterprise architects or complex processes before decisions are made. Come discuss the future of architecture with us in this session. Architects & Developers are welcome!
Chaos Engineering: The fine art of breaking stuff in production on purpose
Have you ever been called out of bed because the high available system you run wasn't that high available as everyone thought? Or did you spend weekends doing manual fail over tests together with everyone in your team on standby?
These are things Chaos Engineering is trying to avoid. The idea of Chaos Engineering is that teams are in in control of their production environment. Being in control allows you to do experiments in production like killing servers, increase network latency or databases to see how your system is able to recover from it without impacting end users.
In this session we'll cover the basics of chaos engineering, practices of creating an architecture and system that allows for experimenting in production and how you can start doing this in your own environments.
A practical approach to Service Level Objectives
Service Level Objectives are a great way to embed quality & resilience into your software development lifecycle. But how do you start with this within your company?
In this session Geert will talk you through the why and what about Service Level Objectives (SLOs) & Service level Indicators (SLIs) and how you can start using them.
Come join this session to learn about making resilient & high available software products real & measurable!
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