Join me for a workshop on INGenious Playwright Studio, a cutting-edge low-code open-source test automation framework developed by ING Bank.

This session will introduce you to INGenious’ core features and demonstrate how it leverages open-source libraries like Playwright to streamline the testing process. Learn how to design and execute UI, API, Database, Accessibility test cases through a user-friendly interface.

We’ll explore the framework’s three layers: Business Logic, Automation, and Integration, showcasing real-world applications and benefits. We will discover how these tests will run via a CICD tool like GitHub Actions. We will also see how practices like BDD can be implemented.

Perfect for developers, QA professionals, and business analysts looking to revolutionize their testing practices, this tutorial will equip you with the knowledge and skills to implement and benefit from INGenious in your organization. Dont miss this opportunity to elevate your QA processes with a proven framework that emphasizes sustainability and efficiency in software testing.

Participants will gain insights into integrating various open-source libraries, which promotes the adoption and improvement of these tools. By empowering developers, QA professionals, and business analysts with the skills to design and execute comprehensive business driven test cases, the tutorial helps create more robust, reliable software across industries.

The focus on sustainable, efficient QA practices will lead to higher quality software development, benefiting the entire open-source community and beyond. This shared knowledge can lead to broader community contributions, enhancing the overall quality and security of open-source projects globally.

Containers are a fundamental building block of DevOps operations, yet building them efficiently and securely can be a burden: Developers often don’t know about the platforms’ security constraints, baseline configuration, and expected behavior, while DevOps folks lack domain knowledge regarding the frameworks and languages in use. The result: insecure or bloated containers!

In this hands-on, 90 minute workshop, we will take a look at common scenarios for containerized applications, and improve them bit by bit, taking a good look at tools available to us in the cloud-native container world.

Participants can expect to get a good understanding of easily applicable actions to trim and secure container images, gain insights throughout the building process, and learn how to streamline the building process from the developer machines to production.

Workshop environments for each participant will be provided, and the workshop resources will be freely available on GitHub for further research and experimentation.

Our goal is to enable teams to maintain their flow of delivery, allowing them to focus on delivering continuous business value without being held up by dependencies on other teams. This requires teams to make decentralised architecture decisions whenever possible. However, decentralised decisions can have unintended consequences across the organisation. For example, a team’s decision to optimise for their specific user might negatively affect the resilience or user experience of another team downstream. To prevent this, teams are often forced to consider the wider organisational impact of each decision, which adds to their cognitive load and disrupts their flow. The challenge is: how do we foster alignment across teams so they can make decentralised architecture decisions without being overwhelmed by the complexity?

Join us for this hands-on session where you'll learn how to perform user needs mapping to enable aligned decentralised architecture decisions. User needs mapping is the value chain component of a Wardley Map, enriched with clearly defined team responsibilities. In this workshop, you'll work in groups, each assuming the role of a software team with its own unique context and landscape. You'll begin by mapping the user and their needs based on the information provided to each team member, then connect the software components required to meet those needs. As you outline your team's boundaries, you'll also uncover gaps in your team's knowledge. Once each team has completed its map, you'll collaborate with other teams to fill in those gaps—sharing insights, mapping inter-team dependencies, and refining your value chain to finalise your user needs map. By the end of the session, you'll have a solid grasp of user needs mapping, understand how it supports resilient and informed decentralised decisions, and learn how to keep these maps up-to-date and actionable.

Attending a conference can have many advantages. Traditionally, participants gain a lot of new ideas from the talks and benefit from the experience of the speakers. However, the greatest treasure of a conference—the collective knowledge of all participants—is often underutilized. Join me for an immersive and interactive session designed to maximize collaboration and connection among participants.

Session Highlights:
- Interactive Activities: We will use Liberating Structures, a set of simple but powerful interaction methods that boost collaboration and unleash creativity. These activities are specifically tailored to tap into the group's collective intelligence and foster a more engaging and productive conference experience.

• Collective Problem-Solving: You will work alongside fellow attendees to address real challenges and questions about software development contributed by the participants. This hands-on experience will provide practical insights and solutions that you can apply in your work.
• Networking and Connections: Through interactive engagement, you will expand your network and forge new connections. These relationships, built on shared problem-solving experiences, can lead to lasting professional connections and collaborations.

Takeaways:
- Expanded Network: Meet and connect with a diverse group of professionals in your field.
- Collaborative Experience: Gain experience in collaborative problem-solving and see firsthand the power of collective intelligence.
- Hands-On Learning: Experience the value of Liberating Structures and how they can be applied to your own projects and teams.

Don't miss this chance to actively participate, learn, and connect in a unique and enriching environment.

This hands-on workshop guides participants through building a complete ML pipeline using production-grade tools on Kubernetes. Starting with a Kind cluster, you'll implement each component of a modern MLOps stack: Airflow for orchestration, Spark for data processing, Ray for model training and serving, and MLflow for experiment tracking. Participants will create a pipeline that processes multiple dataset sizes, trains variant model architectures, and automatically deploys the best performer. Perfect for developers and data scientists looking to bridge the gap between ML experimentation and production deployment.

While cloud-native technologies have rapidly evolved over the past few years, databases often lag behind in the conversation. In this hands-on workshop, you'll learn how to deploy and manage a production-grade PostgreSQL cluster on Kubernetes using CloudNativePG—the only PostgreSQL operator in the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) ecosystem. We'll walk through how to apply DevOps principles to database operations, ensuring your data layer is just as agile, resilient, and scalable as the rest of your stack.

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) can sometimes be seen as simple, but realistically there is much you need to know, understand, and build in order to make an SLO-based approach to reliability work for you. How do you choose a good Service Level Indicator (SLI)? What can you do to ensure your SLO target is reasonable? How do you actually use your error budget data once you have it? It is one thing to understand the basics, but actually implementing SLOs takes a lot of work. Join Alex Hidalgo, author of Implementing Service Level Objectives for a workshop that will help guide you if you're just getting started, or help you refine your processes if you're already on your SLO journey.

Sometimes, when you are helping teams really adopt DevOps or agile, it feels like you are swimming against the current. It’s not just that you need to defend against those who have a clearly different worldview, but frequently you find yourself running into people who use all the right words, but in practice undermine all the values you are about.

Let’s explore how our ways of working can sometimes leave us vulnerable to attack, and how to defend against that. How do you actually implement DevOps and agile values in practice? How can those practices be subverted? And what, sometimes subversive, means do we have to stay our true course and, maybe, conquer a little more minds and territory?

Join this workshop to share your own stories, hear our and others’ solutions, and broaden your toolkit to influence without power.

Join us for a hands-on workshop where we’ll walk through how to deploy a full-stack development environment on the Akamai App Platform — all from just a laptop and a browser. Whether you're a seasoned developer or new to cloud platforms, this session will demonstrate how App Platform simplifies application deployment and streamlines the developer experience.

We’ll explore the power of Akamai’s cloud-native platform, built for speed, scalability, and simplicity. From Git-based deployments to built-in CI/CD workflows, you'll see how easy it is to get up and running with zero infrastructure setup. By the end of the session, you'll have a fully deployed demo e-commerce environment and the confidence to leverage the Akamai App Platform in your own projects.

Working as a Software, DevOps, Platform or Site Reliability Engineer nowadays means working with a lot of tools like an IDE, containers, version control and things like Infrastructure as Code. This workshop is aimed at those who are new to this world, but are curious to get their hands in the dirt!

To help you get off with a good start, this is a hands-on workshop that starts at the very beginning with just an IDE and step-by-step builds toward a real-world workflow with formatting, linting, testing etc. It will use tools such as VS Code, Git, Docker, Ansible, Bash and a bit of Python (all open source) all from a browser based lab-environment. So don't forget your laptop!

Is your team truly ready to handle mission-critical IT? Find out in this interactive workshop designed to combine serious insights with a touch of fun. Participants will dive into real-world-inspired scenarios, solve challenges under pressure, and evaluate their organization’s resilience across key areas like architecture, processes, culture, and incident response.

Through engaging activities you’ll gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to thrive in high-stakes IT environments. By the end of the workshop, you’ll walk away with a personalized readiness review, practical improvement tips, and maybe even a laugh or two.

This workshop is perfect for everyone who wants to strengthen their readiness for critical workloads while having a bit of fun along the way. Are you mission-critical ready? Let’s find out together!

Technology drives value and innovation in every organization. At Google Cloud, we have learned a lot about what it takes to build and scale high-performing technology teams. Our own lived experience combined with a multi-year research program by the DORA team can be used to help you and your team transform into a high-performing technology team.

This workshop will help you put the insights of the research framework into practice. Participants will:

1. Describe your team’s current software delivery process
2. Set baseline performance metrics
3. Compare your performance with your peers in the industry
4. Use DORA’s predictive analysis to identify where to make your next improvement
5. Set some goals

By the end of this workshop you will have one improvement story to add to your backlog as you take the next step toward becoming an elite performing team. And, you’ll be able to repeat the process with your own team in your quest to get better at getting better!

Download the slides.

You’ve been asked to add a new feature to an existing application. After some investigation, it turns out that the design of the code is far from optimal. There are also no automated tests to help you. Sounds familiar? So you set out to add some tests, but that requires refactoring the code. However, in order to refactor the code you need have tests in place. How do we break free from this cycle?

In this hands-on workshop you will learn how to use Approval Tests for testing legacy code using an outside-in approach. You’ll be able to practice how to safely refactor the code while also adding fine-grained unit tests and eventually introducing a new feature.

This workshop is for software developers who already have basic knowledge about writing automated tests and refactoring code. The code exercise used during this workshop is available in C#, Java, JavaScript and Python. Participants should bring a laptop with development environment preinstalled.

Having a good understanding of the following topics will definitely make the most out of this workshop:
* A decent understanding of an object-oriented programming language, preferably C#, Java, JavaScript or Python.
* At the very least some first experiences writing unit tests for production code.
* Basic or intermediate knowledge of an xUnit test framework.
* Basic or intermediate knowledge of a mocking framework.

This engaging workshop equips tech experts with practical techniques to deliver clearer, more impactful training sessions. Participants will learn simple strategies to break down complex concepts, engage their audience, and handle questions with confidence. Through interactive exercises, they will gain a framework for structuring training content and tips to keep learners engaged. By the end of the session, attendees will walk away with actionable insights and the confidence to elevate their next training session.

This hands-on workshop empowers you to build a secure, scalable software delivery pipeline with Harness.

In 90 minutes, you will learn how to:

• Implement continuous integration and delivery workflows, including advanced deployment strategies like Canary deployments.
• Automate security checks throughout your pipeline.
• Ensure deployments meet quality and performance standards with automated deployment verification.
• Learn to proactively identify weaknesses in your system through controlled fault injection and experimentation
• Enforce policies and compliance throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

At the end of this workshop you will leave with the more knowledge and skills to build high-performing, reliable software delivery pipelines.

Iterative delivery has always had friction with the need to present a plan that is easy to digest by those that stand a little further from the work: stakeholders and managers. In this workshop we present a way to seamlessly integrate the dynamic process of iterative discovery with the need to present A Plan.

We guide you through the process of planning and dealing with risk, using the familiar tool of Story Mapping, extended to create a natural fit between our way of working iteratively and incrementally and presenting a plan. You will learn how to easily create the type of roadmap view of a plan that shows expected timelines while keeping different options and variations on the plan open and transparent. Since we often need to plan in difficult circumstances, we show you how to deal with deadlines, risk and technical debt in your planning.

Talos as an operating system is currently hot and happening.
During this workshop, Jorian and Erwin introduce you to the declarative way of Kubernetes clusters and how to manage them with Talos.
What is an immutable OS? How do you bootstrap Talos? How do you upgrade your Talos? That, and more questions will all be answered during this hands-on workshop.
Supporting the theory, Jorian and Erwin will be giving demos, after which the hands-on part of the workshop starts. Here, you will define your own cluster, bootstrap and upgrade this. Along the way, there's room for questions about specific use cases.

Dutch Hacker Camp culture is deeply rooted in the ethos of openness, collaboration, and exploration. These camps are typically organized by volunteers from various hacker and maker communities in the Netherlands and attract participants from all over the world who are interested in technology, hacking, DIY culture, and digital freedom.
The most recent Dutch Hacker Camp is “MCH2022” (May Contain Hackers), which was organized by the Dutch Stichting IFCAT* in a colorful tradition of quadrennial hacker camps. The Dutch Hacker Camp is part of the larger series of international hacker camps, including the Chaos Communication Camp (Germany) and the Electromagnetic Field (UK).
These camps often feature a diverse range of activities including workshops, talks, hacking competitions, art installations, and social gatherings. Attendees can learn about topics such as computer security, hardware hacking, cryptography, privacy, and free software.
Over the years, Dutch Hacker Camps have evolved and grown in size and popularity, attracting not only hackers and tech enthusiasts but also artists, activists, educators, and others who are passionate about exploring the intersection of technology and society.
Overall, Dutch Hacker Camps play an important role in fostering a sense of community, promoting innovation and creativity, and advocating for digital rights and freedoms. They provide a unique space for people to come together, learn from each other, and collaborate on projects that push the boundaries of technology and imagination.
This talk will take you through the history of Dutch Hacker Camps, and prepares you for the next big one in 2025; WHY2025.

Yes, the famous Conway has two other laws that we don't talk much about... and what is the link with AI and sociotechnical systems? Let's see... :-]
This talk introduces the concept of "AI organizational debt", the hidden costs and constraints that emerge when organizations bolt AI capabilities onto existing team structures without considering the broader sociotechnical implications.
Through a blend of academic research, practical experience, and slightly desperate humor, we'll explore how traditional enterprise architecture patterns clash with the unique demands of AI systems. You'll learn why your carefully designed team boundaries might create unexpected AI bottlenecks and how to reshape your organization to better support human and artificial intelligence. Using real-world examples, we'll examine patterns and anti-patterns in AI adoption and propose a new framework for thinking about organizational design in the age of AI.

The biggest challenge of our generation: the Energy Transition. How does a grid operator tackle this enormous task, where all the work done in the past 100 years must be repeated in the next 8 years? Why is a DevOps mindset essential for nation-critical services?

In this talk, Willem Kuipers and Arjan Mossel from Enexis will demonstrate how the integration of DevOps culture is crucial for modern grid management. They will share insights into how digital transformation is becoming a necessity for grid operators and how DevOps practices drive innovations in grid stability. By the end of this session, you will discover how data-driven approaches are used to locate illicit cannabis farms and ensure city-grid reliability during extreme weather conditions, from freezing winter days to scorching summer afternoons.

Join us to learn how Enexis uses the DevOps culture to not only advance the energy transition but also enhance grid security and performance.

Platform Engineering is complex, new requirements and wishes come weekly, new platform tools popup like mushrooms. How to navigate this complexity? At RTL we follow 10 platform engineering principles to guide us in the platform development process. Let me take you for a journey through these principles and inspire you to develop your own.

Do you wonder why your developers are slow to deliver? Are you stuck in an ever-growing loop of Jira tickets? Does communication break down as you scale? If your company's org chart is more complex than your product architecture, this talk is for you.

Business and software development are governed by principles like Brook's Law, Murphy’s Law and Conway’s Law. In this talk I will show that we can break Murphy's law! Let's think outside of the box and inverse the communication patterns. Showing that Conway was right all along.

We’ll explore Conway’s Law and Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to bridge the gap between tech and business—and I’ll prove that we are not the problem, the org chart is.

TL;DR; Sit back and relax and let me explain how we can use Conway's law and DDD to optimise the developer experience.

Every DevOps setup is unique, with its own mix of tools and constraints, just like every backyard chicken coop has its own quirks. Orchestrating jobs effectively isn’t about forcing a one-size-fits-all solution, rather it’s about adapting to the environment and making the most of your toolset. After five years of raising chickens in a city, I’ve experienced how planning, scheduling, and automating can make—or break—a system, or a few eggs. Let’s explore lessons in job orchestration from the coop, covering dependency management, failure handling, and keeping workflows running smoothly, whether in the cloud or in the backyard.

Lean. It's been a buzzword since the '90s, and it's right in the middle of CALMS, the basic tenets of DevOps. At DevOpsDays we are Sharing plenty of discussions on Culture, and more than one sponsor can help you Measure your Automations. But sometimes I get the feeling that our interest in Lean starts and stops at having a KanBan board to track our work.

But is there more to gain from ruthlessly eliminating waste in our life? And what can we learn from Marie Kondo, the master of minimalism? Let's organize our desks, find out which of these agile ritual meetings actually spark joy, and discover the amazing benefits of not doing things.

At the end of 2024 my world changed in an instant: I was impacted by a layoff. I had always been a star pupil who gave her all at work and BAM, all of a sudden everything my team and I worked on was no longer important. After some emotional turmoil, I started hunting for a new job and actually landed a new role within a month after my contract ended. This wasn't smooth sailing per se as it took 36 applications, 17 recruiter calls, 12 first round, 9 second round and 4 final round interviews leading to 2 offers over a period of 4 months.

In this talk I will share my post-layoff journey covering the state of tech job interview processes in 2025, things I did during my job search that led to a crazy amount of interviews but also mistakes I made along the way, hoping to provide some comfort and insights to those dealing with a layoff past, present or future.

Most DevOpsDays events are a combination of curated talks and self organized conversations. The self organized content is known as “open spaces”. Open Spaces give attendees the opportunity to talk about anything they’d like. A person might suggest a topic they want to learn about, or one they feel like they can help others with. The topics range widely, from highly technical, to pure culture, to board games for networking.

Open Space is the simplest meeting format that could possibly work. It is based on (un)common sense of what people do naturally in productive meetings. Principles (from Wikipedia on Open_Space_Technology):

While the mechanics of Open Space provide a simple means to self-organize, it is the underlying principles that make it effective both for meetings and as a guidepost for individual and collective effectiveness.

The Law of mobility — a foot of passion and a foot of responsibility — expresses the core idea of taking responsibility for what you love. In practical terms, the law says that if you’re neither contributing nor getting value where you are, use your two feet (or available form of mobility) and go somewhere where you can. It is also a reminder to stand up for your passion.

From the law flow four principles:
- Whoever comes is the right people
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
- Whenever it starts is the right time
- When it’s over, it’s over

The Open Space rallying cry is: prepare to be surprised

Becoming a contributor to an open-source project is a transformative step in any developer's career. This session explores the journey from first-time contributor to active developer, covering best practices for navigating project communities, understanding codebases, and making meaningful contributions. Learn strategies for selecting the right project, mastering collaboration tools, and embracing the culture of open-source development. The audience will be inspired about my one year journey with the open source project OpenTelemetry and how I have built a proof of concept for it and achieved developer status for this project. By the end of this talk, the public will gain insights into the tools to become a better developer and how to build more engagement with the community.

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Open Spaces

Security isn’t just for security teams — it’s for everyone! But too often, security feels complicated, frustrating, and like a blocker to fast development. What if it didn’t have to be that way?

Enter OpenSSF’s Best Practices Working Group. We build clear, actionable security guides, tools like Scorecard, and free education to help everyone ship secure software without headaches. In this talk, we’ll explore practical security tips, automation-friendly tools, and developer-first resources that make security simple.

Whether you’re a developer, DevOps engineer, Data Scientist or leader, you’ll walk away with easy-to-adopt best practices and free resources to build security into your workflow, without slowing you down.
Let’s make security work for everyone!

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High-performing teams aren’t just about hitting targets. They’re built on trust, authentic connections, and a shared purpose that makes people feel fulfilled, valued, and empowered. Teams like Platform and SRE, or whatever you call them to embody DevOps culture, naturally drive change by breaking silos and fostering collaboration. But building and sustaining these teams is rarely easy.

In this talk, I’ll share personal stories and practical strategies to help managers and engineers build teams that thrive in both results and human connection. You’ll leave with actionable insights to:
- Identify what kind of support your team needs at certain stages.
- Build meaningful relationships with your team members beyond traditional 1:1s.
- Foster psychological safety and collaboration through team rituals.
- Use practical frameworks like career planning and skill matrices to empower growth.

A structured approach is key to solving complex problems in systems design. It acts like a magnifying glass, highlighting hidden details and patterns that might go unnoticed. Over the past few years, I have applied and refined this approach while designing and extending ATC simulators and operational Air Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) for Dutch air traffic control. In this talk, I will share the lessons I have learned - successes and failures - in applying systems design principles within the ATMS domain.

We can build a stronger healthier community by leveraging a little basic neuroscience. Oxytocin is the neurotransmitter of goodwill, love, and trust. It’s also the cause of a lot of toxic behaviors often encountered in unhealthy communities. Understanding the mechanisms of oxytocin in the brain can be a massive help in building welcoming, high functioning communities and help us proactively avoid toxic outcomes.

Most DevOpsDays events are a combination of curated talks and self organized conversations. The self organized content is known as “open spaces”. Open Spaces give attendees the opportunity to talk about anything they’d like. A person might suggest a topic they want to learn about, or one they feel like they can help others with. The topics range widely, from highly technical, to pure culture, to board games for networking.

Open Space is the simplest meeting format that could possibly work. It is based on (un)common sense of what people do naturally in productive meetings. Principles (from Wikipedia on Open_Space_Technology):

While the mechanics of Open Space provide a simple means to self-organize, it is the underlying principles that make it effective both for meetings and as a guidepost for individual and collective effectiveness.

The Law of mobility — a foot of passion and a foot of responsibility — expresses the core idea of taking responsibility for what you love. In practical terms, the law says that if you’re neither contributing nor getting value where you are, use your two feet (or available form of mobility) and go somewhere where you can. It is also a reminder to stand up for your passion.

From the law flow four principles:
- Whoever comes is the right people
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
- Whenever it starts is the right time
- When it’s over, it’s over

The Open Space rallying cry is: prepare to be surprised

Games 🎲

One day, a small single-person change caused an entire production environment to empty itself in mere minutes. While this wasn't great, we didn't have much of a business impact, and nobody got fired!

How does that work, and how did we get there? Due to the way we provision our systems, manage our environmental architecture and culturally look for solutions rather than playing the blame game, such mistakes haven't had the outsized impact they might have had a decade ago. This is the story about the indecent itself, and how we got to a DevOps and cultural state where we made it matter way less than it could have.

One of the biggest misconceptions about DevOps is that it’s a team or department. It’s not. DevOps is a culture—one that thrives when the entire organization is on board. But getting there? That’s a whole different challenge.

In this talk, I’ll share how we broke down silos across engineering, management, and beyond to embed DevOps practices into every part of the organization. I’ll walk you through the struggles: skeptical leadership, territorial teams, and the occasional “this will never work” attitude. And I’ll share the lessons learned from building trust, fostering collaboration, and proving that DevOps works better when it’s a mindset, not a job title.

Games 🃏

Come Talk about AWESOME career moments

Community Beyond Kindness & Respect

Good, Bad, Ugly of Platform Team Structures

January 17, 2025. A day feared by most fintech organisations. The day that the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) came into force. DORA, a new EU regulation targeting the financial sector, requires organisations to step up their game in operational resilience. Goal of the act? Making sure financial institutions do their best to protect our data and (for some more importantly) our money.

This presentation explores DORA through the lens of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, demonstrating how SRE practices can help organisations meet DORA's requirements.

The talk will provide a 101 on Risk, an overview of DORA, it will highlight other well known acts and frameworks (e.g. ISO, NIST, PCI, etc). I'll be focusing on IT risk management and the alignment with SRE principles. It will delve into how SRE practices, such as observability, incident response, release procedures and chaos engineering, can be leveraged to fulfil requirements for risk identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery.

The goal of this talk is to change view on risk management from red taping to reliability opportunities

Games 🎮

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DevOpsDays Ams Feedback and Content Ideas

On Call

Could accidentally spending 40% more on your cloud bill actually be a good thing?

A company with decent operational monitoring, with good coding practices, with everything-as-code approach discovered they had an outlier. This outlier, this single application, managed to inflate the monthly bill by over 40%. More importantly, it allowed us to reflect on the way we work, the way we react to incidents and allowed us to question, and redefine, several dogmas.

This is a story about ownership, about individual mistakes and organizational changes. It is a story about learning and improving yourself, your systems and your organization even from mistakes, because a mistake is truly a mistake only if you don't learn from it.

Share with me these costly learnings for free, and prepare yourself to turn mistakes into opportunities.

Chickens 🐓

It’s time for Day 2 Ops in the world of AI.

Building enterprise-ready AI poses challenges around data security,scalability, and integration, especially in compliance-regulated industries. Firms are increasing efforts to mitigate risks associated with LLMs regarding sensitive data exfiltration of personally identifiable information and sensitive company data. The primary mitigation strategy is to build guardrails around Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to safeguard data while also optimizing query response quality and efficiency. 

To enable precise guardrails, one must implement permissions systems with advanced fine grained authorization capabilities such as returning lists of authorized subjects and accessible resources. Such systems ensure that LLMs can access only authorized data while preventing exfiltration of sensitive information, making RAGs more efficient and improving performance at scale. 

This session will cover how modern permissions systems can safeguard sensitive data in RAG pipelines. We'll start with why Authorization is critical for RAG pipelines to protect sensitive data from potential vulnerabilities and also the various techniques for permissions-aware data retrieval. The talk will also include a practical demo implementing fine-grained authorization for RAG using Pinecone, Langchain, OpenAI, and SpiceDB.

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Values of DevOps Tooling in Tiny Companies

Building a data platform is not just about technology; it’s about adoption. In this session, I’ll share the hard-learned lessons from a failed data platform initiative, where the lack of engagement with business end-users led to its downfall. You’ll learn why selling the value of the platform to stakeholders is critical and how aligning with business needs can transform failure into success. Walk away with actionable insights and strategies to ensure your data platform becomes a cornerstone of business decision-making, not a forgotten project.

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Careers that are Good for the World

What is the MVP of Home Servers

As organisations grow, they need to be more nimble which leads to a desire to simplify, whether for developers or business. We typically see organisations stumble through accelerating development, implementing DevOps before pivoting to SRE. They copy what other organisations have done by implementing a Cloud Center of Excellence or adopting other models for merging development and operating functions. Eventually as the challenges around "You build it, you run it" become clearer a platform emerges.
But how do these chaotic transformations lead to this convergence? Whether your platform serves developers or customers the foundational concepts heavily align. In this talk we'll look at the ways platforms emerge and the key considerations necessary for one to succeed. As we go through time to understand how convergence happens we will examine carcinisation to understand how organizations unintentionally select for elements which converge towards a platform

Open Space:

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How to Deal with Obnoxious Recruiters

In mission-critical environments, technology is only part of the solution; the true differentiator is culture. A resilient DevOps team isn’t just technically skilled, they are prepared to handle pressure, adapt to change, and learn from failure. But how do you build a culture that thrives under these conditions?

In this talk, we’ll explore the core elements of a mission-critical mindset and how they shape high-performing DevOps teams. Drawing from real-world examples, we’ll discuss the importance of psychological safety, good communication, and shared ownership in creating a resilient team culture. We’ll also uncover the damage of heroism and reactive behavior, showing how proactive cultural practices can prevent burnout and build trust across the organization.

Whether you’re leading a team, working as developer or ops engineer, or collaborating across silos, this session will give you practical insights to help you foster a culture that can handle anything, without sacrificing collaboration, innovation, or team happiness.