In data projects, DevOps practices often take a backseat at the start. Concepts like IaC, CI/CD, or branching strategies are seen as obstacles and pushed to a later stage.

Initially, everything seems to flow smoothly, but soon enough, issues start creeping in - code conflicts, pipelines running with user permissions, undocumented & unapproved changes etc. These all come back to us when it's time to migrate to production - often ending in sleepless nights or a weekend spent with colleagues at work.

In this session, I want to show that adopting DevOps from Day 1 not only saves you from these headaches but can actually speed up development in a well-functioning team rather than slowing it down. We’ll go through a session-long live demo mixed with theory slides, where we’ll build a simple (but complete!) platform project from scratch, fully equipped with the right tools so that even our very first print("Hello World!") is deployed through a complete CI/CD pipeline.

We'll cover:
> Automated project setup in Azure DevOps (repos, policies, environments)
> Deploying the initial cloud infrastructure with Terraform
> Provisioning Entra group hierarchy and technical accounts (SPNs)
> Initializing a Databricks project using Asset Bundles
> Setting up and configuring a dbt project
> Creating CI/CD pipelines for all components and deploying our final print("Hello World!")

Can we prove in 60 minutes that DevOps is an accelerator, not a roadblock? Let’s find out!