Cloud Engineering Summit Build Track

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The Cloud Engineering Summit 2021 is coming up fast, and the speakers are out! To get you ready to attend, let’s take a look at the sessions for the Build track.

The Cloud Engineering Summit’s three tracks are built around three concepts: Build, Manage, and Deploy. I’m Kat Cosgrove, and I was responsible for selecting your speakers for the Build track! For us, that means building cloud applications and infrastructure with Modern Infrastructure as Code using general purpose programming languages. We embrace the fact that modern cloud applications have blurred the lines between the application and the infrastructure, and that success requires at least some level of proficiency in both. Whether you’re full stack or lean more towards one area, all cloud engineers apply a software engineering mindset and practices to building and testing applications and the underlying cloud infrastructure. This includes using standard programming languages, applying software principles such as reusability and abstractions and testing, and leveraging the rich ecosystem of software development tools.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at each of the talks I’ve selected for you!

Starting us off is the inimitable Kris Nóva with Infrastructure as Software. She’s going to be talking about why Turing complete config management is an antipattern, and why we should be putting the Dev back in DevOps. Nóva is an incredible speaker and engineer. Any talk she gives promises to be hot fire, so I wouldn’t miss this one.

Don’t like repeating yourself? Yeah, me neither. Fortunately, we have Sam Cogan to present his talk, Reuse, Don’t Repeat - Creating an Infrastructure as Code Module Library. Personally, I’m a huge fan of reusable modules for any purpose, when they’re built in such a way that it reduces overall toil and makes your codebase easier to understand. This talk should be useful for everyone.

Helping us ask and answer the right questions to make organizational and technological decisions is Joep Piscaer, presenting Kubernetes isn’t the answer, but what was the question again? I love Kubernetes, but it can be complex, and sometimes that complexity means it’s not the right solution for you (yet.) If you struggle with finding the right questions to ask about your tech needs, this talk could help.

I’m kind of nosy. I like knowing as much as possible about what’s going on inside of my applications and infrastructure. It’s hard to present all of that data in a way that’s easy to consume rather than overwhelming, though. Fortunately, we have Liz Fong-Jones to help out with her talk, What is OpenTelemetry? Don’t miss this one if you’re curious about a better way to gain insights into your distributed systems.

You’d think that when a particular tool is widely accepted as the industry standard for accomplishing a task, there’d be a wealth of information out there on how to accomplish most important tasks in an accessible, actionable way. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. Fortunately, we have Steve Giguere presenting Hands-on: Taking a K8s Deployment from Default to Secure, wherein he’ll take us through securing an NGINX deployment!

Curious about how a big product gets built? Rahul Sharma is with us to talk about How AWS architects APIs for hyper scale. He won’t just be talking technology; we’ll also hear about the cultural changes required internally to launch a product, and how engagement with customers and partners helps shape the course of development.

Last but certainly not least is Heidi Waterhouse presenting The Future Should Be Uneven, a talk about personalization and accessibility in web design. Accessibile design benefits us all, whether we actually need the accomodation or not. The sooner we all understand and embrace that, the better, so Heidi will walk us through some common accessibility settings that are really just good design for everyone.

Explore all of the rest of the great sessions, and don’t forget to register for the cloud engineering summit!