Preview of the Deploy Track at Cloud Engineering Summit 2021

Cloud Engineering Summit 2021 is almost here! We’ve got a great line up this year.

Our tracks are built around the three pillars of cloud engineering: Build, Deploy, and Manage. I’m your track chair for the Deploy track, the track focused on automating and managing infrastructure. Deploy is all about unifying systems so everything in a cloud-based system is shipped together from the same automated, auditable process, reducing human error and improving quality across the board. That could mean focusing on automated testing and linting of infrastructure as code, providing shared services platforms for others to use in their pipelines, or exploring how unified and automated infrastructure changes engineering culture in an organization.

In no particular order, let’s go explore the Deploy track lineup.

Trying to get a handle on way too many environments across your pipelines? Adora Nwodo, Software Engineer at Microsoft, will explore bringing standard software engineering practices to solve the problem of maintaining many environments and configurations in a repeatable fashion. Adora has a very accessible way of explaining complex concepts in her blog and videos (find her at AdoraHacks), and I’m really looking forward to getting her perspective.

How can we improve the security of these unified processes? Alyssa Miller, Business Information Security Officer (BISO) at S&P Global Ratings, will discuss how threat modeling can improve CI/CD pipelines and general security. I’m excited to have Alyssa join us to help us understand how security should be part of the Deploy pillar; her Pitmaster’s Guide to Security is really good and I recommend watching it!

When you’re trying to share what you’re doing, you could share your code, but how do you share your infrastructure? Peter McKee, Head of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Docker, will demonstrate how to build into pipelines the ability to share features and changes in applications with others as a continuous preview. Peter’s a fantastic teacher who always has a great hands-on presentation in his back pocket, so I’m really looking forward to finding out what he has in store for us.

Data builds up while you’re building out, deploying, and managing cloud-based systems. How can you manage data while deploying your cloud infrastructure? Andy Dang, Co-Founder and Engineering Lead at WhyLabs, will talk about data integrity, observability, and monitoring with an open-source project called whylogs. Always love having a preview of an open-source project in the program, and I think data’s going to continue to be a big question for cloud engineering, so Andy’s talk was very welcome!

What about ARM-based systems? Apple certainly got into the game with their M1 chip, so it’s a platform you have to consider when doing deployments. Angel Rivera, Senior Developer Advocate at CircleCI, will explore how to make pipelines and workloads ARM compatible and capable of supporting ARM on various products. ARM-based systems are some of my favorites (yay Arduino and Raspberry Pi!), and they’re also really important considerations if you’re in the mobile or embedded space, so I can’t wait to hear Angel’s take.

How about some focus on doing all of this at scale? Jenna Pederson, Developer Advocate at AWS, will explore how bringing all of the best practices from software development to pipelines will help make working with cloud-based resources consistent and secure. I’m so happy Jenna could join us! Her content is wonderfully accessible and really explains technical concepts and complex systems clearly for all levels (which is my jam!). You don’t want to miss her talk!

Finally, how does all of this stuff work in a real life team? Evan Bradley, Software Engineer, and Tom Carrio, Senior Software Engineer, from Dynatrace are going to take us through bringing it all together with a real-life team, discussing the experiences they’ve had over time as they’ve implemented everything. I’m really excited to have folks bring their stories of what it’s all like so we can share pitfalls and solutions to move forward together. I think you’ll enjoy Evan and Tom’s talk, too!

Explore all the sessions, and don’t forget to register for Cloud Engineering Summit. I can’t wait to chat with you virtually at Cloud Engineering Summit 2021!