Join us at the DPG Media offices in Antwerp on 18 June to meet the Belgian-Dutch AWS community and hear three massively interesting stories about building and running on AWS! Gert Leenders (DPG Media) will illustrate how DPG Media went all-in on single-cloud AWS, Nico Krijnen (Luminis) will analyze the trade-offs of different cloud strategies, and Evelien Schellekens (Elastic) will show how to optimize systems using observability data and how to leverage the Elastic Platform on AWS.
Information before you register
The main entrance of the DPG Media is located right across Antwerpen Central Station. When signing up, please provide your full name (first name + last name) to ensure smooth access to the building.
Agenda at a glance
- 17:00 — Doors open, walk-in 🚶🏾
- 17:30 — Dinner 🍴
- 18:00 — Welcome by our community leaders 👋🏼
- 18:05 — Talk 1 by Gert Leenders 🎙️
- 18:40 — Talk 2 by Evelien Schellekens 🎙️
- 19:15 — Short break 🧘🏻
- 19:30 — Talk 3 by Nico Krijnen 🎙️
- 20:15 — Drinks and networking 🍺🥤🍷
Sessions
Craft, Draft, and Sustain: The AWS-First Strategy to Security, Resilience, and Cost Efficiency
Gert Leenders, DPG Media
Beginning in 2016, DPG’s strategic shift toward Cloud was driven by the need to innovate and increase overall velocity. As the organization expanded, the necessity to decentralize infrastructure became evident, prompting a transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservices model. This architectural transformation, coupled with shifting infrastructure ownership to the teams, enhanced scalability and led to the adoption of ‘You Build It, You Run It’. This approach also facilitated the formation of cross-functional teams capable of managing the complete lifecycle.
Over the next years, there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of enhancing our security posture. This awareness prompted the evolution from DevOps to SecDevOps practices, emphasizing security integration at every stage of development and operations. Our SecDevOps community plays a pivotal role in ensuring that security, resilience, and cost efficiency are not just considered but prioritized. This presentation will explore the strategies and outcomes of our AWS-First approach, demonstrating how it supports our security, resilience, and cost-efficiency goals while maintaining the agility needed to thrive in a competitive landscape.
Gert Leenders is Enterprise SecDevOps Lead at DPG Media.
Doing Multi-Cloud the Easy Way… But should you?
Nico Krijnen, Luminis
In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, organizations are increasingly adopting cloud computing as a means to enhance scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. However, with the advent of multi-cloud environments, the decision-making process becomes more complex, with challenges in managing different infrastructures, APIs, and service offerings. You have to come up with a solid multi-cloud strategy.
Luckily, there are many tools that make it easier to run multi-cloud, we’ll look at some of these, like Kubernetes, Terraform, Dapr and Wing lang. These tools act as a middleware layer that abstracts away cloud-specific complexities. They enable developers to build distributed applications that can run consistently across multiple cloud providers. They simplify the development and deployment of multi-cloud applications by providing a unified programming model and a set of building blocks that work seamlessly across different clouds.
That sounds great! But should you do this? What are the trade-offs that they bring? Do they truly prevent vendor lock-in? And what are you loosing by not making full use of what your cloud vendor has to offer?
An explorer at heart, Nico loves to navigate the ever changing technology landscape and find practical solutions to complex problems. For a big chunk of his career, he disrupted the DAM space by building an innovative file management solution called Elvis, which is being used by media organizations all over the world. Besides leading and supporting teams and giving direction, he likes to roll up his sleeves and experience first-hand how (and whether) the latest technologies work in the real world. He is never shy of making unconventional choices to achieve radical results.
Effective Observability: Best Practices with Elastic
Evelien Schellekens, Elastic
Having full visibility across all your environments is critical to ensure smooth operations. In this talk we will explore best practices for achieving effective observability using Elastic. We will cover dashboards and alerts, centralizing and analyzing data, and the benefits of using machine learning. You’ll gain insights on how to proactively monitor, troubleshoot and optimize your systems using observability data and how to leverage the Elastic Platform on AWS specifically.
Evelien Schellekens is a Senior Solutions Architect at Elastic. Evelien enjoys sharing knowledge through public speaking and interacting with the technical community. She’s passionate about observability and open source technologies like Kubernetes.
