Registration and Networking

INTRO and Welcome

KEYNOTE: Open Source 2.0: The Text Editor’s Last Laugh

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: AI

In this conference talk, we explore the future of programming and open source in the age of Large Language Models (LLMs), where text editors may become as extinct as the dodo.

Imagine a world where software development is more like a casual chat with a clever AI assistant than a tedious typing marathon. New programming languages and frameworks will emerge, optimized for LLM generation and large-scale testing.

We will also cover the inevitable, revolutionary new path of open source in an AI world. With a sprinkle of humor and a dash of optimism, our talk will discuss how we can help the community transition towards a more efficient, streamlined, and dare we say, amusing future of software development.

Cycleops Platinum Sponsor Speech: Automate deployments on top of bare metal

Friday 10.Nov

A live demo and presentation of Cycleops about the deployment software landscape

The work of delivering software products to end customers is the core business of an increasing number of companies around the world. At the same time, the process of developing software applications calls for a larger set of skills from the engineering teams. This skillset is missing from the market. That's why many companies are actively searching for DevOps engineers to hire, but having trouble finding them.

Automation is the response of the engineers to the need for delivering more features to a wider audience, while eliminating human error and increasing quality and efficiency. DevOps is the culture of collaboration between teams involved in different stages of the software development lifecycle. However, even in the simplest of cases, DevOps processes still claim the precious time of DevOps engineers.

Cycleops offers the solution to automate deployments in a simple, fast, and accessible manner that align with the current working environment of software vendors. Today, we will demonstrate how to use Cycleops to deploy your Docker-based applications to bare metal servers. This will enable you to reduce costs while benefiting from the automation capabilities you would expect from a cloud platform. Additionally, we will provide a comparison of various deployment solutions in the industry to help you understand how Cycleops fits in the market.

#DevOps, #SoftwareDelivery, #DeploymentAutomation, #BareMetal, #SoftwareDevelopment, #AutomationSolutions, #Cycleops, #Docker, #DeploymentSolutions

BREAK

NOPASSWD: Building a Passwordless Cloud Infrastructure

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: DevOps, CYBERSECURITY

Passwordless systems are fast becoming a reality as many of the big players (Microsoft, Google, Okta, AWS Cognito) implement support for FIDO2 and related technologies.

Although developers are making great progress in using these technologies to implement new passwordless architectures for the users of their products, we are years behind in doing the same for our own internal infrastructure. Tokens, passwords, and other secrets that are shared internally among developers are a major security risk, yet are extremely common among companies of all sizes.

This talk gives an overview of the current situation and associated security risks, a review of FIDO and FIDO2 standards, the options we have to improve our designs, and a case study of a sample passwordless infrastructure stack. We'll also discuss things to look for and avoid when selecting vendors and development tools to greatly improve security posture.

Learn how your team, regardless of size, can put all of the pieces together to implement a more secure, passwordless infrastructure.

XM GOLD Sponsor speech: Building detection analytics for AWS Cloud logs

Friday 10.Nov

A brief walk-through of how we used Splunk to build detection analytics and respond to threats within AWS Cloudtrail logs

AI Capabilities, Ethics, Limitations, and Potential

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming our world, from the way we work and communicate to the way we make decisions and interact with each other.

As AI systems become more advanced, they raise complex philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and ethics.

In this talk, we will explore these questions from a scientific and philosophical perspective, examining the latest research on deep artificial neural networks and their implications for our understanding of cognition, ethics, and safety.

COFFEE BREAK

In AI We Need To Trust; Not There Yet

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: AI

Back in 2018 in his book “21 lessons for the 21st Century”, historian Yuval Harari emphatically noted that “Already today, ‘truth’ is defined by the top results of the Google search.”. The recent developments and disruptions caused by foundational AI models (to put it simplistically) such as ChatGPT denote the gravity and criticality of integrating the AI technology in every aspect of our lives. However, how feasible is it to trust AI systems? In 2022, journalist Karen Hao’s article about Facebook’s AI systems, reveals an interesting truth; tech organizations may not be in control of their AI systems. What seems to be even more worrisome, is that tech organizations may not want to be in control of their AI if this impedes their growth, or profits (or both).

AI systems tend to be highly dependent on data, so their error-proneness and potential impact rely on how they treat those data. If we consider that data are socially constructed or simply put, data reflect how we, humans, live, then this means essentially two things:

• AI systems need to be designed in a way that ensures they can be trusted,
• The organizations that own and operate AI systems should be mature enough for governing them responsibly.

All these beg several questions such as: What are the best practices when evaluating how an organization governs an AI system? What are the upcoming regulations dictating how we can audit AI systems? What are the essential aspects of an AI system that we as engineers need to test? How is it possible for an organization to find a balance between building Trustworthy AI versus optimizing for efficiency and for maximizing their business profits?

In his speech, Yiannis Kanellopoulos will elaborate on the above mentioned questions in a practical way and provide real-life examples on how an AI system can be tested in terms of its Performance, Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Safety/Security.

Optasia GOLD Sponsor Speech: TALOS: End-to-end functional testing in the world of microservices

Friday 10.Nov

Optasia-owned and developed, TALOS is an internal framework which enables automated testing across the set of involved microservices by providing our QA engineers the ability to write small test scripts for every step of the test cases while managing all the fuzz.

Having transitioned our core platform from the monolith, we now live in a world that has a continuously increasing number of evolving microservices and new features. With TALOS we seek to address the increasing complexity as our end-user services are adapting to our clients' setup, local legislation, and other specific needs.

Green Software: Rethinking how to develop software to save our planet

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: GreenTech

Do you know that the greenhouse gas emissions from software applications surpassed those of the aviation industry in 2021? As our reliance on technology continues to grow worldwide, so does the environmental impact of software applications. But as software developers, we have the power to make a positive impact in the fight against climate change.

This session revisits the established development practices, providing practical guidelines that developers and architects can follow to measure and reduce the environmental footprint of software applications.

The focus is on practices requiring a minimal development effort, still providing the maximum savings in carbon emissions. At the same time, most of these practices will help reduce the costs of your cloud applications because they minimize the consumed resources (CPU, memory, storage, network). It is assumed you are involved in building software applications and aspire to help prevent climate change.

LUNCH BREAK

Quantum technologies in European Space Agency

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: Cybersecurity, Quantum Tech

Quantum technologies use the quantum properties of physical objects (e.g. photons, atoms or more macroscopic objects) for both practical purposes and scientific experiments. In the last century, these effects have been mostly studied in academic settings, but recent years have seen an increasing development towards real-world applications.

In general, quantum technologies can enable measurements with higher precision (e.g. gravity & accelerations, time & frequency, electromagnetic fields, etc…), that are leading to new type of devices (quantum computer, quantum cryptography) or enable fundamental physics science experiments (e.g. exploring limits of quantum theory, quantum gravity).

In many of these applications, space plays an important role. Additionally, new concepts such as the rising performances of quantum computers, the quantum internet or quantum sensing devices offer many opportunities for being used either in space or being beneficial for the space industry in general. In this talk,

I am going to present the status of European Space Agency in view of space technologies and payloads in relation to satellite quantum optical communications and Cyber security.

Lack of knowledge is not the users’ fault!

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: Cybersecurity

Evangelizing the importance of Security Awareness, not only for End Users, but for Tech People as well (ICT & IS).

Proving via real-life paradigms that EVERYONE could potential fall for something rogue and make, vendor independent, suggestions on how to make the whole Sec Awareness Life Cycle (SALC; resembles to SDLC - right?!) more effective. Combating every user's FEAR and/or BOREDOM is key to a safer world...

Tight Genes: Intro to Genetic Algorithms

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: AI

"Yes, that's right, genetic, not generic. Genetic algorithms are shortcuts to ""evolve"" solutions to problems, similar to real-world biological evolution. They find a ""good enough"" solution more quickly than precise calculation or brute-forcing through all possible options. The randomness often reveals great solutions that humans probably would never have thought of, such as NASA's twisty ST5 spacecraft antenna, developed by a genetic algorithm in 2006!

This talk will explain the general concept, and then walk through a few examples, explaining terms and pointing out tradeoffs and nuances along the way. It will show creating genetic algorithms to solve two different problems, extracting a simple generic “evolver” from the code for those, and using that to supply the common parts for a third problem.

You will come away equipped with a powerful technique for solving problems in ways no human would probably ever think of directly!"

COFFEE BREAK

Postmortem Culture at Google: How do we learn from failures and how can you too?

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: DevOps, Tech Leadership

Writing postmortems after incidents and outages is an essential part of Google's SRE culture. They are blameless, widely shared internally, and allow us as an organization to maximize the insights from failures.

We touch on how postmortems are written and used at Google, as well as how they can help in making decisions and driving improved reliability. We also show how you can get started with your own lightweight postmortem process.

GWI GOLD Sponsor Speech: Observability and synthetic testing with Grafana and K6

Friday 10.Nov

Earlier this year at GWI, we identified a gap in our efforts related to observability and testing. The DevOps team was passionate about their Grafana dashboards, and the QA team was occupied with their K6 testing suite, however, we found ourselves in need of better proactive uptime and transaction monitoring.

To address this, we decided to collaborate and embark on a pet project that would enable us to achieve synthetic monitoring. Our plan was to leverage K6, our existing LGTM Grafana stack, and a plethora of Kubernetes best practices and automations.

During this presentation, we will share our journey in creating “Wakeup,” our internal solution for synthetic monitoring, so join us as we delve into the details of how we merged our expertise to create a robust monitoring experience using Grafana and Kubernetes.

KEYNOTE: How AI is part of every industry

Friday 10.Nov

THEME: AI

Focus will be to describe how Data Science and AI can support every industry and how we are embracing new and innovative technologies to better address clients' challenges.

AFTER PARTY

Friday 10.Nov