Tech Tribes Talks

Erwin Verstraelen bekleedde voor zijn huidige functie, meer dan zes jaar de rol van Chief Digital & Innovation Officer bij Port of Antwerp-Bruges. Daar speelde hij een cruciale rol in de ontwikkeling van de haven zoals we die vandaag kennen. Bovendien werd hij eerder erkend als zowel CIO als CDO of the Year.

The Dutch Tax Office faces a massive hurdle: modernizing their legacy technology stack. HCS tackled this challenge head-on, not just by implementing OpenShift-based solutions, but by focusing on team enablement and scalability. The result was the birth of the PAAS Operator, a game-changer for self-service DevOps at scale.

Key Points:

- The Challenge: Bridging the tech gap for a complex, large-scale organization.
- The Journey: From hands-on enablement to streamlined automation and self-service.
- The Innovation: The PAAS Operator simplifies platform management, empowering DevOps teams with standard configurations for Tekton, Grafana, SSO, ArgoCD, and more.
- Demo Time: See the PAAS Operator in action!
- Community Call: We've open-sourced the PAAS Operator! Join us in building and extending its capabilities beyond OpenShift. (DISCLAIMER, by the time it is November it should be opensource)

Why Attend?

- Discover how to empower your DevOps teams for long-term - success.
- Learn best practices for scaling technology initiatives within large organizations.
- See how self-service can revolutionize platform management.
- Explore the PAAS Operator and contribute to its open-source future.

Let us know if you'd like any refinements!

Containers are weird, and I don't get them. Why perform some weird voodoo magic when you can simply install everything bare-metal like I've always been doing? Docker is a scary word that I tried to avoid as long as possible.

Until my parents-in-law asked me if I wanted to revamp their network. So I needed a controller for the hardware. They also wanted a Home Assistant install. And a PiHole to get rid of those pesky ads. And an NVR for the security camera they wanted to install in their shed... And who knows what else they want in the future?

The hardware? A simple Raspberry Pi.
The goal? All of the above requirements and more.

Embark with me on a journey where I went from skeptic to believer, and where I used Docker for the first time in my life with Portainer.

Setting up a hybrid environment presents its own set of challenges, with DNS serving as a cornerstone for infrastructure stability. Achieving seamless resolution between on-premises and Azure DNS zones is crucial. While historically, many applications were hosted on-premises, there’s been a recent trend of migrating them to Azure. Despite this shift, maintaining a standardized authentication method remains essential. Leveraging Entra ID authentication can provide a uniform login experience for both on-premises and Azure applications, enabling the implementation of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for on-premises applications as well. Entra-ID has it’s limitations with nested groups (enterprise-applications) what are the options and how can we get rid of this painfull issue?

Do you want your devs to be able to deploy and their own VM's?
Self service, yes, please. Time saving for ops, big yes as well.
Let's have an architectural dive into the effort that was put into creating a Platform for Automated VM Deployment and Configuration Management

De talk Comedians vs. Computers neemt je mee in de wereld van kunstmatige intelligentie en humor. Na het succes van de UICF-productie Comedy Chat GPT is het nu tijd voor versie 2.0, want ook A.I. blijft zich ontwikkelen. Naast teksten en afbeeldingen heeft A.I. zich nu op muziek en video gestort, wat verrassende en hilarische resultaten oplevert. In deze interactieve show schrijven zowel de comedians als het algoritme grappen en muziek op basis van suggesties uit het publiek. Wie wint de strijd om de lach?

Bereid je voor op een komische clash tussen mens en machine, waarbij ChatGPT steeds grappiger wordt – en dat is zowel fascinerend als een beetje eng. Lach mee om deze blik op de toekomst van humor, technologie en wat ons allemaal te wachten staat!

Complex software systems will fail, that’s not a threat, merely a reality. Building resilience into those systems is not about trying to avoid failure at all cost, but about embracing failure and learning to handle failure when it occurs.

This talk focusses on changing mindset from building systems that are highly available by design towards building systems that are capable of tolerating failure. We can achieve this by applying the discipline of Chaos Engineering to learn from failure and continuously improve your system’s reliability.

You will learn the basic principles of resilient applications, the best practices of Chaos Engineering and how to get started and identify weaknesses in your applications before you’re paged out of bed at 4 AM.

Giving consultants access to customers internal documentation, infrastructure and secrets is a sensitive matter that we deal with regularly. Consultants need to get access quickly to be able to get up to speed and become productive for any given customer. Customers want to know who their data and infrastructure is exposed, and ensure access is limited to those that need it.

We've solved this issue in true DevOps fashion by leveraging the mechanisms behind Ansible, GitLab and CI/CD. Our implementation provides for an auditable self-service process that allows consultants to onboard themselves, while still ensuring all access is traceable. GIT ensures all changes are always logged and can be limited through the use of pull requests and approvals. Ansible provides the configuration management that allows us to provision the access for a new user in an automated fashion for a wide variety of tools.

There’s a myriad of complexity involved in building systems. However, two decades in software engineering taught me what truly makes or breaks a system: decisions. It’s not the programming language, the data store, the deployment model, or [insert your favorite tech here]. It’s about the decisions made and the ripple effects they cause. We spend endless hours trying to keep up with the latest and greatest in an industry that sprints faster than a caffeinated cheetah... But how much time was invested in questioning, improving, or, essentially, debugging our thinking process?
 
How do you structure your decisions, and how do they affect the software you build? When suboptimal decisions occur, do you reflect on the decision-making process itself? I've spent the last few years debugging my decision-making thought process, placing breakpoints to inspect which assumptions got me here and what alternatives I may have missed. As a result, my thought process became much more structured and streamlined, leading to better-balanced decisions. Join me in this session to explore how critical thinking can transform our decision-making process and elevate the quality of the solutions we build for our users.