REVIEW THE TALKS 2023 IN VIDEOS AND SLIDES

DevOps has always been about dramatic changes to improve IT. You don’t only need to use a different set of tools, you need to change your entire IT culture! It’s all exhausting, really. Worse, this imperative to change never goes away. Will we ever actually be done and “be like Google”? Instead of carrying the flag of “change or die,” this talk proposes an alternate, more practical, sustainable, and comforting approach to improving: IncrativeOps.

Images account for 42% of the LCP Element of all websites. But in 2023, still, we are seeing too large images delivered on websites – even on the Stackconf speakers page, I currently see 15 MB size and one 5 MB Image. Even if the techniques to resize and optimize images are available for quite some time – they’re still not used everywhere. In this talk I’ll give you an overview of the capabilities of the open source image optimizer imgproxy. At Schwarz we’re using it a dynamic image optimization engine for our Digital Leaflets delivered in all Lidl & Kaufland countries. Imgproxy is not only resizing images, but also delivering modern image formats like WEBP and AVIF. Ironically, the app itself is scaling up and down as well in STACKIT Appcloud.

We are heading into a world where the files of most users are hosted by 4 big companies in the US. This is the case for most home users, companies but also education and research institutions. If we want to keep our sovereignty over our data, protect our privacy and prevent vendor lock-in then we need open source self-hosted and federated alternatives. The internet and the web use a distributed and federated architecture. Now we have to make sure that cloud services follow the same model. This talk will cover how this can be implemented in a real world example. It covers how a 20 million user instance of Nextcloud can be scaled across different hosting centers and continents. It will cover high level concepts but also concrete Kubernetes, Ceph and MariaDB clustering setups.

In this talk, we will build “Choir”. An OSINT (Open-source intelligent) project focused on gathering context-based connections between social profiles using AI models like LDA and topic modeling, written in Python to explain what the world discusses over a specific domain and by high-ranking influencers in that domain and focus on what’s going on at the margins.

Choosing the right open-source project to use can be quite challenging – not knowing if it’s going to be the right fit, how it will behave, and if you end up wasting time trying to make it all work. We’ve all been there. But what if I told you there’s a practical way to have a clear understanding of how to incorporate an OSS project in your environment? In this talk, I’m going to speak about the DevOps perspective on open-source and the challenges Infra-focused engineers have with choosing the right project for their environment. As a DevOps Engineer, I’ve seen a lot of things, stumbled upon a lot of non-based decisions, and so will present practical advice on how to choose an OSS project for your dev/prod environment and will talk about the business mindset you should have to evaluate the key indicators based on your needs and specific pain points.

A must-have for an incident strategy is blameless collaboration. Tooling and wording are a great start, but people’s mindsets must also be adjusted. Although no one points with the finger officially, we all carry our own history and experience with errors. The presentation outlines key elements to create a blameless and collaborative culture and also tells you  why it is not so easy after all.

This talk covers why ethical, open source and local AI systems are needed and how  Nextcloud is able to build and ship several innovative AI features that run completely on prem.

Did you spend hours finding production issues on your Kubernetes environments? Were you really upset when you found out that it were trivial things which held you back? In this talk, you will learn about some common issues you find in Kubernetes clusters and how AI can help you troubleshoot them. Finally, you will learn how to gain SRE superpowers with your AI-driven troubleshooting-buddy K8sGPT, who helps you to find problems in your K8s environment and solve them.

Releasing small, incremental updates to production multiple times a day is the pinnacle of productivity that a software team can achieve. In this talk, I present the main advantages of continuous deployment over traditional release processes, explain the essential components of a continuous deployment infrastructure, and discuss typical challenges as well as strategies to overcome them.

Measuring Reliability in Production uses an example application to describe how to define SLIs and SLOs. It includes an overview of application architecture, a how-to for developing SLOs, and suggestions for implementing SLOs in Cloud Operations. There’s also a focus on how to identify CUJs (Critical User Journeys) and recommendations for implementing metrics to use as SLI and SLO targets.

Feature flags allow you to enable and disable code without changing or deploying any source code and selectively route traffic to certain users or a percentage of certain users, along with other great tricks. It’s powerful stuff … but when you combine it with observability (the ability to understand the inner workings of your complex systems and other unknown-unknowns), what you get is a supercharged, superpowered version of both. With o11y and feature flags, you and your teams get deep technical and business insights in real-time about how your code is working, what changed with your last deploy, and how changes are impacting different users, apps, or groups in fine-grained detail. This is the best, easiest way to understand your systems as never before. You’ll have to see it to believe it. 👀

Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, has grown in popularity over the years and so have the configuration options. As of now, we are mostly focusing on Terraform while we have given up on Ansible and others. This talk dives into the “why” and how we are splitting up our providers to give our large user-base the best possible experience. While also retaining our own sanity.

Cloud Computing sneaks into our daily business more and more. This brought some changes to the ops role as well. Is it even needed at all? Even after years of cloud computing defining the scope of the ops role, and even more the identification of its demand, seems to be a topic of relevance. I’ll share my experience coming from classical ops, following our customers into the cloud. I’ll explain our main challenges and how the scope of our tasks has shifted as part of this process, which finally led us to a well working collaboration between dev and ops.

Chaos Engineering is a new approach that helps identify & address weaknesses in software systems by intentionally introducing controlled failures. This talk covers principles & practices of chaos engineering, using real-world examples to show how it has improved resiliency, performance & saved costs. You’ll learn how to design & execute chaos experiments, interpret results, and implement chaos engineering within your organization. The goal is to create highly resilient systems that can withstand any challenge in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.

Public clouds were initially popularized under the premise that workloads are dynamic, and that you could easily match available compute resources to the peaks and troughs in your consumption, rather than having to maintain mostly idle buffer capacity to meet peak user demand. However, what has become more apparent is that this isn’t necessarily true when it comes to storage. Typically what is observed in production environments is a continual growth of all data sets, across those that are actively used for decision making or transactional processing, those maintained as training data for AI/ML, or kept for archival purposes, and simply just backups of critical data. During this talk we will discuss how Ceph can be deployed in a cost effective manner adjacent to public clouds, and investigate the financial implications of both approaches.

Tongue in cheek talk about the virtues but mainly vices of microservices. And why we should be discussing more interesting topics than the unit of deployment.

Multi-tenancy plays a fundamental role in delivering your applications to customers, especially when building SaaS Environments. In this Ignite Talk, you will discover architectural considerations from IaC to GitOps, benefits, and real-world use cases when building such platforms. We will also delve into some challenges and discuss strategies for how to conquer them. Join me for a quick, insightful journey into the wonderland of cloud-native multi-tenancy.

Telemetry is a technology that enables remote data collection and transmission from sensors or instruments, facilitating real-time monitoring and control across diverse industries. In this short session, we will demonstrate how we built a telemetry pipeline in a few hours using Memphis.dev.

Sometimes when one has to restore a database from backup it occurs that backups were not created regularly or available backups are corrupted. To avoid this issue every service owner has to restore from backups on a regular basis. But what if you provide a managed database service in the cloud with automated backups? How can you guarantee that backups of your customers’ databases are restorable? In this ignite talk we will share our experience in automated backup and restore testing.

In this talk, we’ll explore how Kubernetes Operators are revolutionizing the way we manage and deploy database infrastructure in modern, cloud-native environments. During this session, we’ll delve into the key features and benefits of using open source Kubernetes database Operators, such as their ability to automate tasks like backup and recovery, scaling, and monitoring. We’ll also discuss how Operators provide a standardized approach to managing different types of databases, from traditional relational databases to newer NoSQL and cloud-native options.