Infrastructure as code is still code, why don’t we treat it that way?

Infrastructure management has shifted dramatically. In today’s era, it’s no longer just about provisioning servers—it’s about operating complex, distributed systems at scale. Validating changes, avoiding risky deployments, and coping with long feedback loops when something goes wrong has become increasingly difficult to do.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the standard for managing these complex environments, and Terraform is the language of choice for defining infrastructure across clouds. But here’s the key insight: IaC is still code. That means we can—and should—apply proven software development practices to make infrastructure management safer, faster, and more predictable.

In this talk, you’ll learn:
Why infrastructure teams need to think like developers.
How testing, CI/CD, and version control can reduce risk and accelerate delivery.
Practical strategies for validating changes before they hit production.
How to shorten feedback loops and bring agility to infrastructure operations.

If you’re a developer or an operations engineer navigating the complexity of cloud scale systems, this session will show you how to leverage the discipline of software engineering to master infrastructure at scale. Because when infrastructure becomes code, the rules of software development apply.

This talk will combine a slide deck with live demos showcasing Terraform testing capabilities. The target audience are platform, infrastructure, or devops engineers and software developers.

Target audience: infrastructure engineers, DevOps engineers, platform engineers, general operations personnel and software engineers with an interest in infrastructure.

The typical duration of this session is 45-60 minutes.

Performing databases migrations without overtime

Have you ever had a database migration fail on production because of a random NULL value somewhere? Ever had a hard time identifying all the possible scenarios in a database migration? Have you ever had to debug a database issue, without having access to the production database? Ever had to wait for a database copy of multiple terabytes worth of relation data? Validating that your database migrations work before running them on production databases should be a standard practice. However, writing test cases that cover all (or even most) cases isn’t easy nor feasible for a multitude of reasons. Data quality in production might not be 100% or not all data might have the constraints that are currently present due to previous migrations. Testing the migration on actual production (like) data is often a cumbersome and slow process, if it’s possible at all. Postgres.ai’s Database Lab Engine provides a way to quickly and easily create copies of PostgreSQL databases. In this talk we’ll show how this can be used to make sure your database migrations don’t fail.

How to be prepared for the next Log4J?

If you’re a Java developer or you use tools that are written in Java, you are likely familiar with the Log4Shell vulnerabilities of 2021. Due to the high CVE score and the widespread use of the dependency, virtually every IT company had to update some part of their stack to remediate the vulnerability.

During this talk, we’ll discuss how automation helped us in quickly and safely updating our Log4J dependencies. We’ll discuss how the automation works and how you can get started yourself! During the live demo, we’ll showcase the update process of a vulnerable component from making the required code changes all the way to deployment in production. Finally, some key takeaways will be shared on how to adopt this solution in your organisation.

Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/PieterVincken/join-2022-patching-3rd-party-software-like-a-boss
Talk JOIN 2022: https://youtu.be/fAEbRmD4-G0