Couple days ago I have attended the two day Cloudná akce conference in Brno. The event was hosted by the Tietoevry and attracted the attention of all the cloud and security enthusiasts from the area. In this article I would love to take a look back at the event.
About half a year ago, I visited my first event held by Tietoevry. It was Security Days in Brno, and I have even written an article about the conference. Seeing the level and quality of that event, I was already interested when an invitation for their next conference landed in my mailbox. Knowing the organizers behind the event and the overall quality of their events, I had pretty high expectations. The format of two days instead of three suited me pretty well, and the format of the presentations being two hours instead of the regular one or one and a half hours allowed the speakers to dive deep into the details. And speaking about speakers, when I first saw the lineup, it warmed the cockles of my heart, and I was already looking forward to the event. Speaking about speakers, I should probably introduce them and their sessions. One interesting thing you might notice is that on both days, there was one Tomáš and one Marek speaking. Is that a coincidence?
Tomáš Sobotík
Tomáš Sobotík is a Lead Data Engineer at Tietoevry. He is a true unique snowflake as he is universaly acknowledged as one of the Snowflake SME (Subject Matter Expert). For his outstanding activity and contributions he has been named a Snowflake Data SuperHero, a title he holds to this day. Besides that Tomáš is also an O’Reilly instructor and he often leads live online training sessions.
During his talk, Tomáš has showed us that Snowflake is much more than a data storage in the cloud. It is the data platform that can be used for anything from data science and engineering to application development. At the end of the talk, Tomáš has also covered the hottest upcoming events in the Snowflake community.
Marek Chmel
Marek Chmel is a Sr. Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft. He is helping Microsoft partners in areas such as databases, Big Data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. He is also an active member of Cyber Rangers and an author and reviewer for Packt. In his talk, Marek showed us Azure Databricks which is a handy technology that can be used together with Data Lakehouse to create a data warehouse.
Tomáš Kubica
Tomáš Kubica is an Azure Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft. He is an active blogger (tomaskubica.cz) with an interest in data processing, machine learning, AI, automation, containers, and cloud-native. In his talk, Tomáš talked about what is currently “hot” and what will be “sexy” in the upcoming years. His presentation covered various topics such as OpenAI, ML, containerized applications without the need to know Kubernetes, serverless Spark, IaC, and GitOps. Even though it might seem that these topics do not have much in common, Tomáš was able to cover them really thoroughly. And on top of everything, Tomáš has also shared some of his tips on how to stay relevant in the ever changing field. One key takeaway is that AI won’t make us all obsolete. But it will make those who don’t know how to leverage its power obsolete.
Marek Šottl
Marek Šottl, also known as Hackitect, is a Principal Product Security Engineer at Tricentis. His interests are cloud and security. He is helping companies with AppSec, DevSecOps, cloud, and innovations. Marek is an active AWS community member and Snyk Ambassador. During his talk, we witnessed the use of visual novels in the presentation on Serverless Security. Through the story of a cloudonaut heroine, we have learned about the techniques and tools that we might leverage, not only when dealing with serverless.
The whole event was held in the beautiful location of the Tržnice in Brno. The fact that this old building is currently going through reconstruction and that the service lift was hidden in the garage gave the whole event a “secret society gathering” vibe. Jokes aside, the organizers prepared everything in such a way that everyone felt welcomed.
And by feeling welcomed, I don’t only mean the delicious food and beverages, but also the fact that everyone was just super friendly despite the fact that the weather wasn’t so pleasant. Luckily for us, the organizers were prepared and provided everyone with a complimentary T-shirt, and it looks great!
Two days of concentrated learning and networking—that’s basically what Cloudná akce was all about. I would like to thank all the organizers for hosting this, and I look forward to seeing you all at some of the future events!
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