Speaker

Michelangelo van Dam

Michelangelo van Dam

Veteran Web Application Architect, Azure Expert & Community Enabler

Mechelen, Belgium

Michelangelo is a passionate IT professional relying on over 10 years of experience with Azure Cloud Technology, Infrastructure, Networking, Security and Compliance. He has over 20 years of experience in Web Application Development & Architecture, Automated Testing, Continuous Integration and Deployment Strategies (CI/CD). A natural-born community enabler, coach and mentor. Azure MVP Reconnect.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology
  • Transports & Logistics

Topics

  • Web Application Development
  • Testing Automation
  • DevOps Transformation
  • Azure
  • Community Building

Testing cloud infrastructure as code

In DevOps everything is code and in my world code needs to be tested and validated. But how do you test infrastructure as code, especially when you’re dealing with cloud infrastructure?

You want to ensure you are configuring all components correctly, all required fields are filled out and that you’re not exposing systems publicly that contain sensitive information. As cloud infrastructure becomes more mature, so have become the tools for testing.

In this session I’m going to discuss what are common testing design patterns for cloud infrastructure as code. I will also give examples on how you can test and validate infrastructure as code manually or in an automated CI pipeline.

Cloud Native by Design: how to build applications that benefit directly from native cloud solutions

The "cloud" has been available to developers for over a decade with exciting services that really boost your applications to the next level. Why is it that the majority of applications running on these cloud platforms are still built as though it's 1990's with complex infrastructures? Today there's no longer a need to build tightly integrated applications.

In this talk I will discuss 15 years of cloud development showing examples of old-fashioned application architectures that are still being produced today. To counter these examples I will also show you how easy it is today to build applications cloud-native so they are outperforming the competition, are easily maintainable and are resilient against failures.

The goal of this talk is to have you rethink the way you develop for the cloud and how you can adopt my approaches in your own architectures.

Adopt chaos engineering techniques in your daily work

What happens when your database server runs out of disk space? Will your customers still be able to purchase on your webshop when your web server is at max capacity? Are your surveys still valid after a bot has filled out a couple of thousand times your forms?

These are just a few of the many things that can and will go wrong in your production environments. Are you confident your systems are still delivering value to your customers when the worst possible thing happens? The only way to know for sure is to adopt chaos engineering techniques. As popularised by Netflix with their open sourced Chaos Monkey and Simian Army tools, we should put our system under constant stress to ensure that we can face disruptive disasters at any given time.

In this talk I walk through some of the disasters we faced in the past decade and how we learned how to build resilience by design in all of our projects. We'll also share with you our learnings and our successes when Armageddon takes place. It will be an exciting experience that makes you become Dr. Evil in your own company.

Michelangelo van Dam

Veteran Web Application Architect, Azure Expert & Community Enabler

Mechelen, Belgium