MEET OUR SPEAKERS
DevOps Stage brought together experts to share solutions for strengthening the connection between development and IT departments. Attendees delved into discussions on managing Kubernetes clusters at scale, leveraging the cloud for large-scale game development, and exploring the captivating realm of chaos engineering.
Kieran Cornwall
Transformation Director
Kieran Cornwall is a Transformation Director with a strong background in software engineering and technical training. He's passionate about simplifying the complex and driving improvements through big-picture thinking and streamlined solutions. With a proven track record in leading digital transformations across media, broadcasting, and finance, Kieran excels at bridging the gap between IT and business, fostering innovation, and delivering tangible results. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: The Art of Measuring the Immeasurable: Unpacking Observability 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: Scattered microservices, multiple products talking across who-knows-how-many cloud environments... and you're trying to keep the whole thing afloat with just basic metrics and logs? It's like navigating a storm with a compass and a leaky boat. But what are you really observing? Can you spot customer trends before they become traffic spikes? Are you just keeping the lights on, or are you truly understanding your systems? In this talk, we'll unpack what observability should mean. It's about way more than just monitoring - it's about truly understanding how your systems behave, what your products actually do, and whether you're even aiming at the right target. We'll go beyond the usual suspects – metrics, logs, and traces – and see how they can all come together like a system-wide nervous system, providing early warning signs and actionable insights. So, if you're tired of flying blind and want new ideas to elevate your systems thinking, come along. We'll navigate the messy world of modern software, armed with the tools and mindset of observability. We'll learn how to measure the things we thought we couldn't, untangle the chaos, and build systems that aren't just working, but ones we genuinely understand.
Jimmy Dahlqvist
Lead Cloud Architect
Jimmy a developer and architect with a great passion for the Cloud in general and AWS in particular. He has been working in tech since 2003 and transitioned into cloud and AWS in 2015, and has since then been a true AWS-evangelist, leading to him being recognized as AWS Serverless Hero and AWS Ambassador. He was named #1 Top Ambassador in EMEA by AWS in 2023. His greatest passion lies in serverless technologies, and he love to share his knowledge with others and think it's really rewarding to see people grow. Every moment of his spare time he spends coding and testing new things, blogging about it on https://jimmydqv.com/ He started https://serverless-handbook.com as the home base of all his serverless adventures in 2024. When he’s not writing about serverless, you will find Jimmy talking about his other passions, IoT and BBQ. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: /Automate DevOps, boost productivity & developer experience 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: In today’s fast-paced development environments, reducing manual tasks is crucial for productivity. This talk will explore how MyMoney, fintech market leader in Sweden, leveraged Slack integrated with AWS, creating an event-driven solution, to automate tasks across a multi-account setup. Learn how this journey enhanced productivity and security by eliminating repetitive tasks, minimizing human error. A key aspect was integrating alarms and notifications directly into Slack, enabling developers to take immediate action on system alerts. We will look at the problems, implementation, and challenges faced. Join us to gain valuable insights and practical tips for transforming your workflows. Audience will learn how we integrated our DevOps way of working and tooling with Slack to automate tasks, boosting productivity, creating better developer experience and at the same time reducing cost. Key Takeaways: - How to automate task to increase developer experience - How to create an event-driven solution across multiple AWS accounts - Using automated scheduling to save cost.
Michael Coté
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Michael Coté 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. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Escaping the Legacy Trap 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: Sadly, older applications and services too often slow down and stop business innovation. Yet, 76% of executives said they are too invested in legacy applications to change. They’re caught in the legacy trap! Organizations simply can’t figure out how to prioritize this invisible work over adding new features and apps. But today, there’s no room to avoid modernizing core systems if your business wants to keep up. No more new features can be added to software and no more progress can be made on transformation journeys until this fear is faced. This talk will cover one mindset and methodology that’s been used with several large organizations for escaping the legacy trap, SWIFT.
Tudor Codrea
Senior Software Engineer
Tudor is a senior software engineer, renowned as a Cognizant Romania Java Champion in recent years. With a remarkable career spanning over 10 years in software development, he is involved in many distributed software architectures and big data projects, having a keen affinity for the data handling challenges. He is committed to tech communities and promotes team working and collaborative efforts for finding the optimal solutions. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Smart handling the auto-generated boilerplate code 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: After last year's presentation about automatically generating integration tests to validate existing functionality, I will now focus on automating the generation of boilerplate code and managing it in a modern, clean, and fully controlled manner. As AI is increasingly being used in various fields, can it handle this task? This presentation aims to establish a foundation for automating the environment, allowing complete focus on business logic and functionality.
Matteo Emili
Director of Software Engineering
Matteo Emili is a Director at Avanade UK and Ireland, leading the talent in Software Engineering and always looking at new ways of applying technology to solve business problems. He is a passionate Agile advocate and a technologist at heart, a Cloud Architect who is always driven by using technology as a vehicle for change and continuous improvement. A Microsoft MVP since 2010, he enjoys sharing back as much as he can with the worldwide technical communities – especially about Agile and DevOps. He founded several User Groups in Europe and he is a regular speaker at meetups and conferences. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: DevSecOps...do you really need DevSecOps?! 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: It’s all about labels these days – AI, Containers, DevSecOps. Many people claim to ‘do it’, very few *actually* do. Take DevSecOps: it’s about adding Security practices to DevOps. But how do you measure the value derived from it. Also – how do you make sure you are not disrupting your team in the process? If you already have an established DevOps practice, what's going to change? In this session we will see why you don’t need a label to add these, and how to introduce sustainable solutions in your build and release pipelines in order to achieve a higher security standard across your projects.
Mircea Rugina
Senior Engineering Manager, Cloud Data Platform
Mircea is a Senior Engineering Manager at LSEG, based in Romania. His focus has been on building cloud platforms for clients in the financial and e-commerce sector. Mircea thrives on challenges and is dedicated to nurturing the growth of DevOps and Platform teams. He aims to be the mentor he needed (and was lucky enough to have) when he started his career in IT. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Taming multi-cloud deployments like a Pro (DevOps edition) 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: In today's software development landscape, the role of a DevOps Engineer is both challenging and rewarding. Drawing from over 10 years of hands on experience, this demo aims to share some of the insights gained (and pains experienced). In this presentation, I’ll talk about multi-cloud deployments, drawing from my experience working with various cloud providers. One project, in particular, challenged me to think about a multi-cloud setup. During the presentation I will share my thoughts and possible solutions to deploy to 2 cloud providers using terraform and trying to abstract the modules as much as possible. We're going to experience errors, face validation issues but also the sweet taste of success when a CI/CD pipeline with out deployments runs successfully. Let's roll up our sleeves and dive into how a DevOps engineer tackles challenges!
Adnan Olmez
General Manager
Adnan Olmez is the General Manager at AD/01 with over 20 years of international leadership experience in sectors like retail, e-commerce, loyalty, gaming, and digital advertising. He is passionate about leveraging technology to drive business transformation, building multicultural teams, and aligning IT strategies with business goals. Adnan has led successful digital and business transformation initiatives, implemented new operating models, and utilized cloud technology to enhance operational efficiency. His leadership philosophy centers on fostering collaboration and innovation, ensuring technology serves as a catalyst for growth and success. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Opening speech
Edgars Cupits
Principal Engineer
Edgars Cupits studied Computer Science at the Riga Transport and Communication Institute. He began his career as a developer and later progressed to a senior full-stack developer role. Transitioning into a DBA and database developer role, he also became a trainer at an Oracle-certified center. His work with European customers led to a consulting career as a DBA and system implementation engineer. Since 2020, he has been working with Ahold Delhaize in the BeCSE Digital team, coordinating work of two dedicated DevOps teams during company’s digital transformation journey. In his free time, he enjoys exploring IoT and electronics as a hobby. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Fortifying Kubernetes: Strengthening Security Across the Cluster and Supply Chain 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: Fortifying Kubernetes security involves securing the cluster, software supply chain, and key areas like access control, network, and runtime security. This includes leveraging Istio service mesh for secure traffic management, enforcing policies with Open Policy Agent (OPA), and using tools like Syft and OWASP dependency trackers to scan and monitor vulnerabilities in container images. Additionally, secrets management, continuous monitoring, auditing, and a strong incident response plan are essential for comprehensive security.
Bogdan Stefan
Software Engineering Senior Manager
Bogdan is a Software Engineering Senior Manager within Deloitte Technology Delivery Center and has over 12 years of experience in building and evolving Cloud, Web, and Enterprise-scale Applications in multiple industries such as Automotive, Financial Services, Retail, Manufacturing, and the Public Sector. His blend of technical expertise and strategic business insights makes him committed to driving innovation and operational excellence in the Cloud Services domain. In the last few years, Bogdan has significantly contributed to developing the area dedicated to Cloud Managed Services in Deloitte Technology Delivery Center and forming high-performance teams for Cloud Operations Engineering. Additionally, he has been instrumental in shaping Deloitte NSE’s direction concerning a standard tooling approach, supporting as an Enterprise Architect and Digital Transformation Lead for Operate. Previously, Bogdan enabled Nearshore Delivery using Agile methodologies as part of Deloitte Technology Delivery Center Software Engineering capability for Customer & Marketing. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: A CloudOps evolution: Engineering for Resilience 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: The presentation explores the transformative journey of CloudOps, delving beyond the traditional borders of Release management. By examining advanced engineering methodologies and their impact on business transformation and resilience, the presentation aims to highlight how CloudOps can be a catalyst for growth and efficiency. Attendees will gain valuable insights on aligning engineering practices with business goals to drive sustained success and innovation in a competitive market.
Ionut Dumitru
Founder/CEO
Ionut Dumitru, CEO and founder of Soft Dreams, is a seasoned entrepreneur with a strong technological background, dedicated to enhancing the stability and accessibility of high-performance web applications and server solutions. Based in Bucharest, Romania, Soft Dreams specializes in web development and server management, facilitating a resilient infrastructure network for clients across regions worldwide. Driven by a commitment to innovation, Ionut Dumitru started ClusterCS to address the core challenges of scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency in server management. Since its launch in 2016, ClusterCS has evolved into a robust, user-friendly control panel that empowers businesses to manage web servers with ease and confidence. By focusing on high availability, streamlined performance, and a seamless user experience, Ionut remains dedicated to refining ClusterCS, guided by customer feedback and a vision for accessible, powerful server management solutions. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: DevOps optimization through value stream management 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: How easy is it for businesses to manage complex server architectures without needing advanced technical skills? As platforms grow and experience more traffic—particularly those on WordPress, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento, and other popular e-commerce solutions—the challenge of managing infrastructure while maintaining performance and cost-efficiency becomes more daunting. Traditional server management often demands specialized knowledge, extensive time, and significant financial resources—factors that can strain growing businesses. In this talk, we’ll discuss how ClusterCS removes the complexity from scaling and managing high-traffic platforms. ClusterCS automates scaling, resource management, and configuration, turning a complex process into something intuitive. Say goodbye to endless tweaks and configurations—ClusterCS enables seamless scaling, traffic handling, and performance optimization, all without requiring advanced technical skills.
Bogdan Vizureanu
Co-founder
𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿: Bogdan is one of the co-founders of Code for Romania and he is currently one of the Technology Officers that help in coordinating the project teams and in delivering the civic apps the organization’s volunteers are working on. Having over 10 years of experience in .net, flavoring from version 2.0 in a POS Windows application, to multi-tenant Azure enterprise solutions, Bogdan is also a Technical Team Lead for a technology company whenever he is not managing the coding teams in the biggest civic tech ONG in Romania.