Abstract

During incident response, every second counts. As a leader, you're expected to have all the answers, and that pressure can make it very tempting to play the hero and take control of the response process. While "I'll just do it myself" may seem faster on occasion, this instinct can hinder your team's effectiveness and actually slow down resolution.

We'll explore how you can evolve from a command-and-control manager into a genuinely empowering leader. You'll learn how to maintain composure under pressure while creating space for your team to shine. We'll cover essential frameworks, usable by new managers and individual contributors building incident response processes from scratch as well as experienced leaders looking to level up their approach.

Key takeaways will include:

• How to recognize when you may be over-managing during an incident… and how to empower your team to help you recognize these moments.
• Building team confidence and ownership in crisis situations.
• Clear guidelines for when to step in versus step back.
• Establishing and maintaining clear communication channels.

Whether you're establishing your first incident response playbook, fine-tuning an existing process, or managing up to help your leaders help you do your best work, you'll leave equipped to help your team handle incidents more effectively – and help you sleep better at night knowing they've got this.

Bio

Kat leads the Developer Advocacy and Community team at PagerDuty. She enjoys talking and thinking about incident response, customer support, and automating the creation of a delightful end-user and employee experience. She previously ran Global Customer Support at PagerDuty, and as a result, it’s hard to get her to stop talking about the potential career paths for tech support professionals. In her spare time, Kat is a mediocre plant parent and a slightly less mediocre pet parent to her two rabbits, Lupin and Ginny.

Abstract

Platform engineering is the art of building and managing the infrastructure that powers your applications: a mix of cloud, a handful of DevOps, a pinch of SRE, and a thick glaze of product management. While it’s “nothing new,” many organizations are just starting to practice it—and for good reason. But what happens when your platform is running on private cloud?

With around 50% of enterprise apps still running on private clouds, platform engineering for private platforms is surprisingly under-discussed. This talk dives into real-world examples and stories from large organizations tackling this challenge. The hurdles often lie in adapting platform engineering to existing IT stacks and processes—most organizations can’t simply start from scratch, nor would they want to abandon what’s currently driving revenue.

If you support your organization’s apps, platform engineering is something you’ll probably be doing soon. Come learn how your peers are navigating these challenges and share your own experiences.

Bio

Michael Cote studies how large organizations get better at building software to run better and grow their business. His books Changing Mindsets, Monolithic Transformation, and The Business Bottleneck_ cover these topics. He's been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451 Research, done corporate strategy and M&A, and was a programmer. He also co-hosts several podcasts, including Software Defined Talk. His daily-ish newsletter is at newsletter.cote.io.

Abstract

This session derives Dos and Donts from very large setups. It aims to draw a thin line between DevOps and SRE, defines those two concepts and offers practical guidance how to leverage both. We discuss how to bring together the communities of DevOps and SRE. This interactive session is based on both, good practices from the field and insights from academic research.

Bio

Dr. Michael Hüttermann is a Principal Delivery Engineer. Michael supports large enterprises implementing DevOps. He has written a couple of books including "DevOps for Developers" and "Agile ALM" and has given talks at leading conferences (e.g., JavaOne, Devoxx) since the early years of this millennium. Michael is "Java Champion" since 2006. More details here: http://huettermann.net.

Abstract

SRE teams often face challenges with a high volume of routine tasks and requests, making it difficult to focus on critical, high-priority issues. At Electrolux, we faced the same challenge, which led us to develop InfraAssistant —a multi-agent AI-powered solution designed to automate key operational tasks such as infrastructure management, user onboarding, and responding to internal requests.

This shift reduced our manual workload and significantly improved operational efficiency.

InfraAssistant is built on specialized agents that coordinate to autonomously manage complex tasks, reducing the need for continuous manual involvement. This session will cover the design and orchestration of these agents, showcasing how InfraAssistant helps SRE teams by automating day-to-day operations, minimizing repetitive tasks, and enhancing the management of complex infrastructure.

Bio

Alina Astapovich is a Site Reliability Engineer with a strong background in IoT development. Holding a master's degree in 'Neurotechnologies and Software Engineering,' she excels in designing and architecting backend platforms and microservices. Her experience goes beyond, she has a strong background in building scalable and robust solutions. With a Solutions Architect certification, Alina leverages her expertise in cloud technologies to optimize system performance and reliability. She is dedicated to continuous professional growth, always exploring the latest innovations and trends in technology. As a skilled public speaker, Alina regularly shares her insights at industry events and conferences, contributing to the broader tech community.

Abstract

There is a sea of tools one can use for the critical phase of Deployment during your SDLC. To keep our environment secure and reliable, ING chose to work with Kubernetes and Azure DevOps. In this talk, we will share the success story of how 1200 in-house developed APIs reached 10 000+ Production deployments in half a year, using one single pipeline. In order to stay in control, we use Open Policy Agent. To ensure the reliability and the resilience of the APIs, we use tools like: QuotaAutoscaler (ING open source CRD) and HorizontalPodAustoscaler, native rollback mechanisms with Helm, automatic certificates using CertManager and Prometheus monitoring. The pipeline deploys code in Azure Kubernetes Service and on-prem Kubernetes clusters. This solution was built as a platform, designed to be agnostic to the target system, reducing the cognitive load on the teams and allowing them to focus on the application development. We call this The Kingsroad.

Bio

Andrada Răducanu is an Operations Engineer, with 7+ years of experience in IT infrastructure and cloud operations. Previously, she worked at VOIS as a System Engineer Specialist and taught programming to children at Edusfera Association. She combines technical expertise with a passion for IT education.

Abstract

Imagine a self-healing system that handles surprises, letting you sleep peacefully. If that sounds appealing, chaos engineering could be the answer. Trusted by Netflix, LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook, it's key for business resilience. In this session, we'll explore its history, learn how to apply its principles to stress-test applications, and review tools for fault injection in real-world scenarios.

Bio

Agnieszka is a dedicated engineer specializing in cloud solutions, with expertise in cutting-edge technologies such as Kubernetes and Terraform. She also brings valuable insights from her experience in testing activities. Agnieszka is passionate about enhancing people’s wellbeing and promoting a healthy work-life balance. Outside of her professional endeavors, she is a sports freak, board game lover and owner of two adorable cats.

Abstract

This hands-on workshop guides engineers in developing cloud infrastructure using AWS CDK to make a web application public. Participants will learn how to spin up, deploy, and tear down cloud resources with a few console commands. Key technologies include AWS (CDK, S3, Lambda, RDS) and Ruby on Rails with PostgreSQL. Attendees need AWS and GitHub accounts, CLI tools, and specific runtime environments. The session balances interactive deployments with insights into cloud architecture and best practices.

The Github Repo is available here

Bio

I'm Bohdan from Lviv, Ukraine and I love to learn new things. In my carrer I've had a chance to wear different hats - from an Engineer up to C-level and to work in different companies - from a startup to an enterprize. My solutions aren't perfect, but I'll give you something to work with.

Abstract

Learn to navigate database benchmarks wisely! From crashing managed instances to skyrocketing storage costs, I'll share hard-earned lessons from a decade of managing production databases on the cloud without DBA expertise.

I triggered storage autoscaling during maintenance, crashed my first managed instance on ARM due to a suboptimal configuration, and ran out of IOPS multiple times. While attempting to autosmart the automated backups, my storage costs skyrocketed, surpassing any other expenses associated with the instance. Sometimes things fall apart, and sometimes I succeed. I experimented with various methods to optimize the storage of fragmented tables. Here are a few lessons from managing dozens of production databases for over a decade, without DBA expertise.

Bio

Renato has extensive experience as a cloud architect, tech lead, and cloud services specialist. He lives in Berlin and works remotely as a principal cloud architect. His primary areas of interest include cloud services and relational databases. He is an editor at InfoQ and a recognized AWS Data Hero.

Abstract

Explore how AIOps, combined with Observability and Chaos Engineering, is empowering SREs to transform IT operations into a strategic driver of business value. This session delves into strategies for achieving end-to-end visibility and resilience—from infrastructure and applications to business processes. Learn how advanced analytics, AI and automation can optimize the user journey, enhance customer experiences, and drive measurable business impact. Through real-world case studies and a zero-touch AIOps demo powered by GenAI, gain actionable insights to predict failures, address vulnerabilities, and ensure seamless system performance across the entire operational stack.

Bio

Michele is an SRE Solution Architect at Accenture, where he helps large enterprises integrate Observability and AIOps into complex, hybrid environments. In addition to designing technical solutions, Michele is an active member of several SRE and DevOps communities. His focus is on promoting SRE principles, practices, and culture to support organizations in improving reliability and operational efficiency. Michele also shares his insights as a public speaker at conferences like All Day DevOps, Conf42, Splunk .conf, Dynatrace Perform, DevOpsCon, ChaosCarnival, and others.

Abstract

Whether you are just starting your journey as a DevOps Engineer or already an expert SRE, you need to use Git (e.g. GitHub, GtlLab) to maintain your code and track issues, PRs, commits, etc. You start with a few repositories but then it becomes difficult to get visibility into what's going on in a complex app when it's scattered across 20 different GitHub repos.

In this talk, we will demonstrate an example of how to monitor your GitHub repo using the GitHub Data source plugin that allows you to represent data e.g. open/close issues, Pull n Merge requests, and other various statuses visually in Grafana dashboards and gives a dynamic and interactive view to monitoring for a more adaptable and user-centric dashboard experience either for your personal projects or for the entire team. Later, we see more advanced features to get better observability.

It will be an introduction to the Grafana Dashboards, and also an excellent opportunity to learn more about utilizing advanced visualization options to effectively represent complex data.

Join us to learn more about Grafana dashboards, community contributions and share your feedback and suggestions!

Bio

Usman is a Staff Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs from Nuremberg, Germany. He works with the Open Source community on the community forum, GitHub and Slack.

He has over 15 years of experience in IT and Cloud Support where he served multiple customers all over Europe, US, Japan, etc.

He is an active international public speaker participating in multiple conferences and events.

In his free time, Usman likes to spend time with his family, go out on occasional traveling and play games or read comics.

Abstract

AI agents are transforming incident management by automating detection, diagnosis, and response. This keynote explores how intelligent systems can reduce downtime, enhance decision-making, and streamline operations, offering a glimpse into the future of autonomous incident resolution.

Bio

Birol Yildiz is the Co-founder and CEO of ilert, adeptly steering the company with a rare combination of technical and product expertise. His prior experience includes a significant role as Chief Product Owner for Big Data products at REWE Digital. With a strong foundation in computer science, Birol bridges the gap between developer and product strategist, constantly striving to innovate and provide customer-centric solutions at ilert.