Speaker

Wesley Haakman

Wesley Haakman

Microsoft Azure MVP | Principal Azure Architect | Speaker | Author

Hardenberg, The Netherlands

Wesley is a Microsoft Azure MVP and is working as a Principal Azure Architect at Intercept. His day to day activities include designing, implementing and optimizing Azure solutions, focused on Cloud Native (Kubernetes) and platform engineering. When he’s not working on a project, he’s giving a workshop, training or test-driving new Azure features. As a big advocate of Cloud Native, Infrastructure as Code and DevOps you will probably hear him talking about any of these subjects at least a few times a day (or hour). If you want to talk Azure, get in touch!

Awards

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • Azure
  • Azure Functions
  • DevOps & Automation
  • Cloud Automation
  • Azure Governance
  • Cloud Native
  • Kubernetes

Provision smarter: AI Workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service

Containers are a good fit for tasks that require flexibility in resources, while AI models demand significant computational capacity. And managing that capacity can be a daunting task. Sounds like a partnership in the making! The challenge is to avoid upfront investments in expensive hardware or reserved capacity and instead deploy AI models and the required infrastructure capacity on demand. The Kubernetes AI Toolchain Operator (Kaito) on Azure Kubernetes Service offers a solution. In this session, we'll discuss the provisioning requirements, and demonstrate how to effectively run AI models on Kubernetes.

Scale before you fail

Containerized workloads can scale. In fact, they want to scale. But what’s the strategy here? Do we scale horizontally or vertically? And how does that impact our infrastructure? When we embrace software architectures that are fit for scaling, we don’t want the infrastructure to be a bottle neck. During this session Richard and Wesley will take you through the capabilities of Azure Kubernetes Service when it comes to scaling. First we’ll take a look at Node Auto Provisioning versus the Cluster Auto Scaler for our infrastructure and follow through with the Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaler (KEDA) for our workloads.

Please sign here

Container Images are everywhere, which ones do you use to deploy your containers, and do you trust them? Yes? You shouldn’t! By leveraging different Azure and Cloud Native technologies we can implement a process where trust comes first. From build and release pipelines to container registry and deployment on AKS, we’re going to implement container image signing and use Azure Policy to monitor our trust.

Platform Engineering <3 Azure

During this session we will take you on a journey to explore how Azure enables Platform Engineers to add value for developer teams and customers. We will touch upon the pillars of Platform Engineering and how these are reflected in both mindset and technology on Microsoft Azure. Practical examples and demos included!

Nobody is safe! Breaking the workloads

During this session we will discuss use cases, examples that have gone horribly wrong and, examples of how we can perform chaos engineering with surgical precision. We will set up chaos engineering experiments on Azure Kubernetes Service using Azure Chaos Studio and Chaos Mesh.

Great, you have a container. Now what?

A likely scenario: Your company decides to containerize their solution. You are tasked with finding the best fit for purpose solution on Microsoft Azure. But which one do you pick? Will you run containers on App Services, Azure Container Instances, Azure Container Apps or maybe even Azure Kubernetes Service? During this session we will discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of these technologies, present some use cases and help you in the decision-making process. And yes, we purposely left Azure Functions out of this list. We’ll even throw in some books!

Cleaning up the cluster!

During this session we will leverage Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Policy and Gatekeeper to implement a set of rules that help us identify everything that needs cleaning up in our Azure Kubernetes Service cluster. The best part? This will also help us to keep it clean! Until we mess everything up around xmas of course..

Containing the containers, scaling your Azure Kubernetes Service workloads

One thing we know that containers can do really well is scaling. Where platforms provided by public clouds provide a world of scaling options, we need to make sure we select the best possible strategy. Scaling only works if there is absolute harmony between workloads and infrastructure. With Azure Kubernetes Service we have a series of options, during this session we will look at the out of the box features for scaling the infrastructure, the workloads and discuss the requirements to successfully implement such strategies. We will take a look at built in features and popular solutions such as the Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaler (KEDA).

AKS and a Flux Capacitor: A GitOps Journey

Explore the thrilling convergence of AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), the Flux Capacitor, and GitOps in this captivating talk.

Discover how GitOps revolutionizes application deployment and management, and how AKS provides a powerful platform. Uncover the parallels between the Flux Capacitor's time travel and GitOps' rollbacks, canary deployments, and more.

Join us for a concise and engaging exploration offuture-ready application deployments.

Beyond the initial scare, your Azure Kubernetes Service expedition

Contrary to common misconceptions, Kubernetes is not a daunting task, containers aren't intimidating, and their utility extends beyond developers. Solutions like Azure Kubernetes Service simplify the platform and provide a world of out of the box features for you to kick start your journey. During this session we will go through different design patterns, best practices and deploy a production Azure Kubernetes Service cluster. Sample code included!

Container Image Security: Remedies against the security headache

Maintaining container images is often a task that is overlooked. And as containers provide excellent scaling capabilities, a small problem can escalate in a matter of minutes. A security nightmare in the making.

We write new code, build it and rebuild the container image containing our newly written code. But who's looking after the security of operating system components inside that image? Ensuring the security of your container image requires an approach that targets different parts of your build and run processes. During this session we will go through the steps of securing your container images as part of your build and run processes and use technologies such as GitHub Actions, Azure Container Registry and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

Developers on the loose! Platform engineering on Azure Kubernetes Service

Kubernetes is a platform, a platform that needs management and a platform that provides a world of capabilities to developers. Unfortunately, developers often find themselves allocating more time to the management of platforms like Kubernetes, affecting their primary focus on development.

During this session we will cover the responsibilities of Operations teams to facilitate our developers with the best experience and provide them with absolute focus on that what they love doing: development. It is up to us provide a reliable and secure platform that requires minimal maintenance from a developer perspective. Platform engineering to the rescue!

Azure & AI Lowlands 2024 Sessionize Event Upcoming

June 2024 Utrecht, The Netherlands

Festive Tech Calendar 2023 Sessionize Event

December 2023

EXPERTS LIVE NETHERLANDS 2020 Sessionize Event

June 2020 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands

Azure Thursday

Azure Thursday, delivering a session on Azure Blueprints as Code in combination with Azure DevOps

November 2019 Nieuwegein, The Netherlands

Microsoft Cloud User Group - Manchester

Meetup of the Microsoft Cloud User Group in Manchester. Delivering a session on Azure Lighthouse

October 2019 Manchester, New Hampshire, United States

Oktober 2019 Microsoft & Security NL meetup

Delivered a session on Azure Blueprints and using Blueprints to improve compliance, implement Guard Rails and work with Landing Zones

October 2019 Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Wesley Haakman

Microsoft Azure MVP | Principal Azure Architect | Speaker | Author

Hardenberg, The Netherlands