Most Active Speaker

Marcel de Vries

Marcel de Vries

Global MD & CTO Xebia Microsoft Services

Zutphen, The Netherlands

Marcel is the co-founder and Global MD & CTO Xebia Microsoft Services. Xebia Microsoft Services started as an individual company under the Xebia group in 2014 and provides high-end consulting services to companies on Microsoft Azure, DevOps, Cloud Native Software Development, and Managed Services.

Marcel spends most of his time working with organizations to deliver software to production multiple times a day in a secure and compliant way! He helps organizations and leadership teams move to become high-speed, innovative, and productive while still being secure and compliant.

Marcel loves to learn new technologies and use this to advance his customers. He shares his learnings at conferences and training. Marcel has the conviction the CEO title in technology companies should have a second meaning: Coding Executive Officer. This is driven by his strong belief that great leaders in tech need to be technical! Only by staying on top of technology, you can lead the way going forward.

Marcel is a frequently asked public speaker at well-known industry events like Microsoft //Build, Microsoft Ignite, Azure Lowlands, Visual Studio Live!, Techorama, and KCDC, to name a few.

Marcel is part of the Techorama board and helps organize this event in Europe. In his spare time, he also builds online courses for Pluralsight. You can find his courses here: https://app.pluralsight.com/profile/author/marcel-devries

Marcel has been awarded by Microsoft the Microsoft MVP award for more than 17 consecutive years and has been a Microsoft Regional Director since 2008. You can always contact him to talk about subjects like Cloud Adoption Strategies, Business Development, DevOps, Cloud Computing, Microservices, Containers, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Awards

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • Azure
  • Software Architecture
  • Solution Architecture
  • Appium
  • DevOps
  • Azure DevOps
  • Soft Skills
  • Keynotes
  • IT Career Motivation
  • Kubernetes
  • Containerization
  • GitHub
  • Cloud Native
  • Cloud & DevOps

Building, Running & Continuously Deploying Microservices with Docker Containers on Azure

You are a (lead-)developer or architect who wants to design and implement a modern Microsoft based microservices architecture using Microsoft technologies.
You want to transition from a monolithic architecture to an architecture that consists out of small and independent services that you can scale independently on your different develop, test and production environments.

In this one day Workshop we will guide you through the concepts behind Micro Services, Containers and Containerized delivery to help you build and manage MSA based systems.

We will show how to build services and deploy them to different hosting environments like Azure ACS (with either Kubernetes, DC/OS or Swarm), Service fabric or on your own on premises container environment.
Topics that will be covered:
- Microservice architectures on a Microsoft Stack
- Containers & Docker on Windows
- Continuous delivery with VSTS of containerized applications
- Setting up ACS clusters with Kubernetes, DC/OS or Swarm
- Deploying to different environments including clusters
- Adding Telemetry to your system to find issues in the constellation of services
- Zero downtime deployments of new versions of your application, including the database!

Hands-On Lab: Secure and Compliant Cloud Delivery Embracing DevOps

In this Hands-on Lab we will teach you how to use all the great features GitHub has to offer. We will start with an overview of how to come from Idea to Code by using GitHub Discussions, Issues, Pages and Wiki. Next, we will move the ideas to code and start using the Git features. From here, we dive into the use of Branch Protection Rules, Code Owners, Actions for CI, CD, and Deployments to the Azure Cloud. We will also have a look at how GitHub can help you in your Secure Development Lifecycle with Credential scanning, Package Vulnerability Scanning, and Code Scanning to expose programming mistakes that might lead to vulnerabilities in the future. After this hands-on workshop, you know what GitHub offers you and your organization to easily implement Secure and Compliant DevOps.

Hands-on workshop GitHub Code to Cloud

In this Hands-on workshop we will teach you how to use all the great features GitHub has to offer. We will start with an overview how to come from Idea to Code by using GitHub Discussions, Issues, Pages and Wiki. Next we will move the idea's to code and start using the Git features. From here we dive in to the use of Branch Protection Rules, Code Owners, Actions for CI, CD and Deployments to the Azure Cloud. We will also have a look at how GitHub can help you in your Secure Development Lifecycle with Credential scanning, Package Vulnerability Scanning and Code Scanning to expose programming mistakes that might lead to vulnerabilities in the future. After this Hands-on workshop, you know what GitHub has to offer to you and your organization to implement Secure and Compliant DevOps with ease.

Microservices made easy with DAPR

In this session you’ll learn why you want to use the Dapr to simplify the development of a microservices application. I will discuss common challenges when building microservices and how Dapr can simplify many of these challenges by providing building blocks that implement industry best practices to the problems without any hassle and how dapr makes this all possible.
After this session, you’ll have the knowledge to decide if you want to use dapr to build your next microservices application, and how dapr works. You can then use this to incorporate dapr into an existing microservices application, or to use it for a brand new solution.

Workshop: Dapr for Building Distributed .NET Applications

Modern distributed applications require much more than just application logic. Features such as state management for services, communication using publish/subscribe messaging and event-driven binding to cloud resources might be needed. Dapr introduces a runtime to offer such building blocks, and is less invasive in your application, allowing you to pick and choose what you need. In this workshop, we will look at the approach that the Dapr runtime takes with a sidecar architecture, separating application logic from the Dapr runtime components. You learn to develop distributed applications in .NET using Dapr's features and, how to bind to messaging infrastructure and cloud resources.

Azure And GitHub the big picture

Continuous delivery is essential for modern businesses and projects. In this Session, you will get an overview of how to use the GitHub tool suite to implement continuous delivery and DevOps for your projects or organization.

First, we start with the exploration of GitHub Repositories and how to set up your your repository to deliver compliant software. We create new repositories, push to the GitHub cloud-based
service, set up branch policies, and use GitHub pull requests to ensure a "four eyes" principle for all code changes. This will help you satisfy a very important requirement for most enterprises. Next, you'll learn how you can use GitHub Issues, projects, and pages to support your team in their agile way of work and the way this integrates with the repo to provide end-to-end traceability from requirement to code change. Then, we look at automation and how we can use GitHub Actions to automate everything, how to build a pull request verification, and how to deploy the software to the Microsoft Azure Platform so you can implement continuous delivery. Finally, after you know how to automate everything, we go into the use of package management and the use of the supply chain tools to ensure you scan your code for known vulnerabilities, and the scanning of packages that also can contain known vulnerabilities. we include with the use of Codespaces, which provides a cloud-based Integrated Development Environment for your team members and enables remote work from anywhere without the need for any installation of software on your local computer. At the end of this session, you will have a clear overview of what the GitHub tool suite can do for you and how you can use it to implement continuous delivery and DevOps in your organization to deliver software to the Azure Cloud.

CodeToCloud with GitHub and Azure DevOps Hands-on Workshop

This workshop focuses on the Code to Cloud journey. The journey includes the integration with Azure Boards, working with GitHub Codespaces, the GitHub Flow, and the GitHub Container Registry. Students will learn to use docker and docker-compose and deploy their solution to an Azure Web App using GitHub Actions, and Azure DevOps pipelines.
To make it challenging for the students, the workshop contains challenges that can also be done individually. To make sure students do not get stuck, there are scripts available with instructions to "automatically" fix a challenge, so students can continue. The workshop also contains extensive Step-By-Step videos and written instructions. There are also videos that explain the concepts that are used in the exercises.

We will cover the following modules:
Module 1: improving the Developer Workflow
Learning Objectives
In this module your students will learn to:
• Create a backlog of work with Azure Boards and relate that to your code
• Use Docker to containerize your code, to enable a consistent environment
• Use the GitHub workflow to work together on the same codebase
• Use Pull Requests to improve the quality of your code
• Set up a Continuous Integration build to quickly get feedback
• Use GitHub Security scanning tools to shift left security issues
• Use Docker Compose to create an environment that consists of multiple components

Module 2 - Moving to the Cloud
Learning Objectives
In this module your students will learn to:
• Use Infrastructure as Code to set up idempotent infrastructure in the cloud
• Set up a resource group in Azure and assign permissions
• Set up a CosmosDB via automation scripts
• Set up an Azure Web App that runs a multi-container application via automation scripts
• Set up a pipeline that deploys the infrastructure on demand

Module 3 - Closing the Feedback Loop
Learning Objectives
In this module your students will learn to:
• Implement Application Insights in the application
• Monitor the containers and the platform
• Implement Continuous Delivery in GitHub Actions
• Set up a CI/CD pipeline with Azure DevOps to automatically deploy containers
• Set up a manual and automatic approval gate in the release pipeline, to control the release of new versions

DAPR the big picture

You might have heard of DAPR a microservices application framework. In this session, I will give you insights into what DAPR is, why you would like to use it and why it is smart to keep an eye on this technology and start applying it in your solutions now.

Deploying ASP.NET Core Microservices on Azure Kubernetes Services

It can be useful to deploy your Microservices using containers and run them on a Kubernetes cluster that runs in Azure as a managed PaaS service (better known as AKS). In this session, you’ll learn to deploy your Microservices using containers and run them on a Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services provided Kubernetes cluster.
First, we explore why we want to use containers to deploy microservices and run them on a Kubernetes cluster. Next, we discover what a Kubernetes cluster offers and how to set it up in the Azure cloud. Then, we will automate the deployments to minimize downtime and outages. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge of containers, Kubernetes, and deployment automation with Azure DevOps or GitHub needed to deploy ASP.NET microservices to a Kubernetes infrastructure available in the Azure Cloud as AKS.

Design, Build and Deliver a Microservices solution the cloud native way

In this workshop, we will take you from start to finish if it comes to building a Software As A Service solution based on a microservices architecture in a cloud-native way. In this workshop we start with the foundation for success and that is designing the microservices architecture. How do you define service boundaries, what are smells of wrong boundaries and how do you replicate data in a system that is inherently eventually consistent?
Next, we show you how you can translate a microservices design into actual services that you then can run in the Azure Cloud. We will go through the creation of the services, the containerization of these services and the trade-offs when to use containerization or e.g. an alternative delivery using serverless infrastructure like azure functions.
Once we have our initial set of microservices up and running, the next step is to deliver new features in a cloud-native way. This means we run a 24x7 operation and we take a DevOps and SRE approach to the delivery of the software to production. We then look at the development process, how we automate everything and how we are able to deploy new features also when they involve database schema changes.
At the end of this workshop, you have combined many things that you could see in individual sessions throughout the conference, but here we combine them all and make all pieces of the puzzle fit into place. You now know how to build and deliver a world-class SaaS solution on the Azure Cloud.
What you will learn:
Microservices design
Implementing microservices with ASP.NET core and DAPR
Containerization of the solution and deployment to Azure Kubernetes services
Continuous Delivery of a SaaS solution in a cloud-native way
SRE practices to ensure we meet our SLO’s

The Future of IT

What is the future of IT? That is a fascinating question to ask,
but extremely hard to answer. Confucius said: “you need to
study the past to define the future.” So let's ask ourselves the
question first, what has changed our industry in the past
decades? To simplify things, let us take the perspective of
writing software and see what has changed. As Marc Andreessen
described in his article in The Wall Street Journal in 2011:
“Software is eating the world,” and by looking at software,
we might be able to see what is changing the most and see what
lies ahead of us. Nowadays, software is everywhere. It is not only
at the places you expect it, like your laptop computer or your iPad, but it is in our cars, our refrigerators, the toys we buy for our kids, our home, our washing machine and, it sounds scary, even in your toilet in the future. So software is everywhere. But how do we build software? Has that changed significantly?

The knight of NIH ... a developer tale

Once upon a time, our industry was based upon innovation and renewal. Where brave developer knights built upon the ideas and dreams of others. But as it goes in every tale, we were struck by a curse. The curse of stubbornness... in this session, I will take a look at the history of our industry and how we have evolved in the field of software development. I show based on historic examples where we as an industry could have been and where we have chosen to be the knights of Not Invented Here making us build software over and over again while we could have advanced instead. This lightweight talk gives a perspective on our profession and hopefully will make you think twice next time when you think you need to build something yourself instead of looking at what is already out there and build on the shoulder of giants instead.

Learning Experience - DevOps Engineer for a day

In this 1 day workshop we give you the opportunity to be a true DevOps engineer for a day! The theme of the day is:
"You build it, you run it"

During the day you and your team will be responsible to keep a webshop up and running. Of course, this will not be easy. In a gamified simulation you will face a number of challenges that will disrupt your site. You will work together to first detect the disruption on the web shop we provisioned for you. Next you respond with a quick fix to get your shop up and running again. After that you need to take the time to figure out a permanent solution to automatically recover or prevent the disruption from happening in the first place.

You will be provided with a fully provisioned infrastructure in Azure, operation pipelines in Azure DevOps and a functional application. This way you can focus on the real work !

You should come prepared with a laptop but most importantly curiosity and a mindset to learn and improve. We'll apply tool agnostic practices so regardless whether you develop in c#, deploy with Jenkins or operate with Kubernetes this will be a great day to get into DevOps and SRE.

Patterns and Tools for Parallel Programming

Isn't it great that we have so many cores in our computers today? But how can you as a software developer maximize the benefits from this phenomenon? In this session, I will take you on a tourney through .NET and the patterns you can apply in your software and the tools you have at your disposal to maximize the utilization of all your CPU cores and make your software perform the best possible way.

Secure and Compliant cloud delivery embracing DevOps

One of the most common challenges, when organizations move to the cloud, is getting an answer on how to do this in a secure and compliant way. This involves ensuring you set up your azure landing zones in such a way that you enable teams to deliver their solutions secure and compliant by default.
The cloud requires a completely different security model than what we are used to in the on-prem world. One important concept here is ensuring we build our cloud using a zero-trust model.
If it comes to compliance, there are many things to discuss. What does it mean to be compliant? In my work as a CTO, this is often covered by smoke curtains and vague use of terminology. But what are the fundamental concepts behind compliance and how do you achieve this in such a way you can still ensure maximum performance of your teams in delivery? This involved a high degree of automation and empowerment of your teams.
I will share what we learned over the years ensuring secure and compliant delivery for our customers. Many of those customers work in highly regulated environments like government, banks, and pharma.

Exploring Microservices in a Microsoft Landscape


Session Description: During this session, you'll have a look at how to realize a Micro services architecture (MSA) using the latest Microsoft technologies available. You'll discuss some fundamental theories behind MSA and show you how this can be realized with Microsoft technologies such as Azure Container services and Service Fabric. This session is a real must-see for any developer that wants to stay ahead of the curve in modern architectures

Architecting systems for DevOps and Continuous Delivery

You build it, you run it!” It is a great DevOps tagline, but how can you make this work in practice?
In order to “run” the software you need to have insights in how your application is doing in production.
You need insights into the performance, usage, infrastructure utilization and new releases that are deployed and their impact.
In this session I will provide you with practical architectural principles that will help you:
Separate deployment from release so you can deliver your software any time you want, without downtime
Get telemetry and insights on product usage, Performance and infrastructure utilization.
In DevOps you also strive for autonomy. You just don’t want dependencies on other teams. How do you design your system to be independent of other system, while still integrating?
I will talk about: how to gather telemetry and performance data, deployment techniques, development techniques that prevent downtime.
After this talk, you will have new insights how to build a system that you can build and run without losing sleep when you are on pager duty.

Workshop Growth Mindset

The world around us is changing faster and faster. The only constant is change. But how well are we as humans with coping with change? Your mindset is a significant factor in you succeeding or failing in adopting change. What is your response to change? What is your response to failure? What is your response to others who succeed?

In this workshop Rene and Marcel will take you on a journey discovering your mindset. We will show you how you sometimes have a fixed mindset and when you have a growth mindset. What is the difference between these mindsets and why are they important for you to discover and when understood, change based on the situation so you can program yourself to be successful in adopting or even leading in change.

After this workshop you will know that the different mindsets are, how you can detect them and how you can influence your mindset so you can adapt better in an ever changing society.

Implementing Zero Downtime Application Deployments on Azure PaaS

How can I deploy my applications to Azure PaaS like Azure Web Apps and AKS without having any downtime? How can I automate this and how can I ensure my customers won't notice changes are happening, even when you need to update your database schema? In this session I will show you how to use Azure DevOps Build and Deployment pipelines to deliver your application to production many times a day while not interrupting your users.

Pure Consultancy: Mastering your fears like a Jedi

During my career in IT, I always thought that being a consultant meant having to know everything, look smart, walking around in an expensive suit and write thick reports. And of course, charge a high hourly rate, after all, expensive smart looking consultants wearing tailor-made suits must be good, right?
When I started our new Consulting firm a couple of years ago, this scared the crap out of my team and me because a) we didn’t know everything and b) we were developers damn it, with our feet firmly on the ground.
It turns out, a mix of humbleness and a practical attitude made us way better consultants than we thought possible. In this session I will take you along on our journey, our learnings and our “rulebook” to become a great person, consultant, and coach. Based on a set of simple discoveries about your fears and how they drive you every day, I will learn you how to feel them and how you can address them in such a way that you are in constant dialog with yourself and your customer, colleague, spouse, etc. I will take you on our journey from apprentice to Jedi. No code, no demos, just sharing what we learned!

From one release per quarter to 30 times a day

In this session I will take you along a journey where we have an existing legacy application that we will enable to be released multiple times a day.
I will teach you how to apply modern release techniques that enable you to move from long and tiresome release cycles to releasing multiple times a day. I will cover the fundamental concepts of DevOps that will enable multiple releases
a day. think of concepts like: Feature Toggles, Red/Green Deployments, Telemetry, Cloud technologies, deployment automation, etc. This session will learn you how
to release quality software any moment you want.

Using feature toggles to separate releases from deployments

Feature toggles can help you running a 24x7 operation and implement continuous deployment. In this session we look at what feature toggles are, how can we use them to separate releases and deployments and how can we implement this in our software using existing frameworks

Introduction to Windows Containers and Docker

You probably have heard of the term Docker and you might have heard that a lot of developers think it is the next big thing since sliced bread. In this session I will introduce you to what containers are, what Docker is, how you can run your existing application on Docker and explain why this has so many advantages. I will demystify terms like Docker for Windows, Docker on Windows, Docker Swarm, Container services, etc. After attending this session you have a full understanding on what container technology is, what Docker brings to the table and how it can revolutionize the way you do software development in the future!

Building, Running & Continuously Deploying Microservices with Docker Containers on Azure

You are a (lead-)developer or architect who wants to design and implement a modern Microsoft based microservices architecture using Microsoft technologies.
You want to transition from a monolithic architecture to an architecture that consists out of small and independent services that you can scale independently on your different develop, test and production environments.

In this one day Workshop we will guide you through the concepts behind Micro Services, Containers and Containerized delivery to help you build and manage MSA based systems.

We will show how to build services and deploy them to different hosting environments like Azure ACS (with either Kubernetes, DC/OS or Swarm), Service fabric or on your own on premises container environment.
Topics that will be covered:
- Microservice architectures on a Microsoft Stack
- Containers & Docker on Windows
- Continuous delivery with VSTS of containerized applications
- Setting up ACS clusters with Kubernetes, DC/OS or Swarm
- Deploying to different environments including clusters
- Adding Telemetry to your system to find issues in the constellation of services
- Zero downtime deployments of new versions of your application, including the database!

Writing Maintainable Test Automation

How well do you test your application or Web site? Are you still testing your applications or sites manually and does that take a lot of time? Do you find it hard to create and maintain automated tests for your applications? Have you created automated tests but do you find them hard to maintain? This session will teach you how to build maintainable automated test suites using various technologies like Selenium or Appium and integrate it with Microsoft Azure DevOps to give you a holistic view of your current sprint in terms of test completion and coverage.
In this session you'll learn to build test suites in such a way that they are maintainable by default. This session will introduce the concepts like: Page Objects, DRY and DAMP tests.

Azure Cloud Transformation done right

The past years we have been involved in many so-called cloud transformation projects. Many of those projects had big issues, and we learned a ton of things how not to do the transition! Think about things that will cause problems like: A cloud Competence Center, A Cloud Platform team, Asking the operations team how to move to the cloud, etc. These are common mistakes made every day that prevent you from gaining traction and speed. You might succeed, but you will go through a lot of pain and suffering. In this session, I will share an approach that we build based on our mistakes and learnings that will help you move to the cloud at speed. I will share the organizational, human an cultural side of things, a strategy on how to onboard teams and how to avoid common mistakes that are even promoted as best practices by high paid cloud consultants! I will also cover some technical details like setting up subscriptions, permissions and tools in the right way, so it won’t hurt you after your 10th team is onboarding! This session is all about what we learned and how you can avoid these issues yourself.

An Introduction to Service Meshes on Kubernetes

A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that allows you to manage communication between your application's micro services. As more developers work with micro services, service meshes have evolved to make that work easier and more effective by consolidating common management and administrative tasks in a distributed setup.

In this session I will show you how you can set up a Service Mesh on Kubernetes and run a Micro Services application written in .NET and C#. You will discover how we can utilize the service mesh to have different deployment strategies and ways to secure your communication between micro services.

KCDC 2023 Sessionize Event

June 2023 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

Live! 360 Orlando 2021 Sessionize Event

November 2021 Orlando, Florida, United States

Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas & Austin 2020 Sessionize Event

March 2020 Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

Visual Studio Live! New Orleans, Boston & Microsoft HQ 2019 Sessionize Event

August 2019 Redmond, Washington, United States

KCDC 2019 Sessionize Event

July 2019 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

NDC Minnesota 2019 Sessionize Event

May 2019 Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States

Marcel de Vries

Global MD & CTO Xebia Microsoft Services

Zutphen, The Netherlands