Chris van Sluijsveld

CTO Zure Netherlands

About

Chris helps companies embracing the full potential of Cloud Technology. He is experienced in advising and implementing Cloud technologies for new and existing businesses. He enjoys the challenge of finding the best solution for the problem. In his spare time Chris enjoys playing the occasional digital or analog board game.

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Build a cloud native engineering platform in a day

Building and running software in the cloud can overwhelm developers with many tools and settings. Platform engineering fixes this by giving teams one open-source, cloud native platform that hides the hard parts and offers ready-made golden paths. This approach lowers cognitive load and helps developers ship faster. Self-service platforms are on the rise and a lot of companies are building them from scratch hoping their developers will come and use it. We believe you can use existing open-source tools to compose a platform and spend your time designing the services you want to offer to your developers. In this full-day workshop you will build such a platform, starting on a small local Kubernetes cluster and finishing on Azure, setting up the groundwork so you can take the lessons back to your workplace to focus on implementing the services that your company needs. What we will cover: Build a cloud native internal engineering platform with CNCF projects & Kubernetes clusters created locally for zero-cost experiments, then repeated on Azure Kubernetes Service for real world scale. Adopt GitOps with Argo CD so the cluster always follows what is in Git, giving safe and fast releases. Learn about tools such as Azure Service Operator, Crossplane, Terranetes & KRO and how they can help you design automated self-service scenarios. Create golden path templates that let a developer generate a new service repo, pipeline, and manifests in one click. Show a clear return on investment and gather facts you can use to convince leaders to fund a platform team. Deploy a service from commit to traffic and watch every step in the portal and GitOps dashboard, proving the value in minutes. Learning objectives: - Learn how platform engineering can cut developer cognitive load by providing a single self-service engineering platform. - Automate build and release with GitOps, kubernetes & Argo CD. - Learn to navigate the CNCF landscape regarding platform engineering with tools like Argo, Crossplane, Backstage, Azure Service Operator, Terranetes & KRO - Build a short business case that secures support for a platform team in your company. Prerequisites - A laptop that can run Docker - A GitHub account - Basic command-line knowledge - An Azure Account you can use - Any existing Kubernetes knowledge would speed things up but is not required

Co-presented with

Geert van der Cruijsen

Cutting Through the CNCF Noise: 10 Must-Know Projects for Azure Engineers

Abstract: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape is vast and rapidly evolving, with hundreds of open-source projects vying for attention. For engineers working in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, the challenge isn’t just keeping up—it’s identifying which tools actually move the needle in real-world cloud-native environments. This session demystifies the CNCF landscape by focusing on 10 high-impact projects every Azure engineer should know. Whether you're managing Kubernetes clusters, streamlining CI/CD pipelines, enhancing observability, or securing infrastructure, these tools offer direct value and seamless integration with Azure-native services. From Helm to ArgoCD, Kyverno to OpenTelemetry, we’ll explore how each project fits into the Azure architecture, share practical implementation strategies, and provide actionable insights drawn from real-world use cases. Takeaways: Discover which CNCF projects offer the highest ROI for Azure-centric environments Learn how to integrate these tools with services like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Monitor, and GitHub Walk away with concrete examples, implementation tips, and resources to deepen your expertise Who Should Attend: This session is ideal for cloud architects, platform engineers, DevOps practitioners, and developers looking to sharpen their CNCF tooling and maximize the power of open source in Azure.

Empowering Developers with a Modern Developer Platform

Abstract: In today's fast-paced software development landscape, reducing the cognitive and operational load on developers is paramount to fostering innovation and accelerating product velocity. The paradigm of "you build it, you run it" has revolutionized team dynamics, enabling ownership and frequent, high-quality releases. However, it has also imposed significant burdens on developers, necessitating constant upskilling, broad cloud service proficiency, and meeting escalating product delivery expectations. This session shows what role a modern developer platform in enhancing developer velocity and experience can have. Serving as a self-service hub a internal developer platform enhances efficiency, and promotes standardization, security, and compliance. By minimizing manual tasks and providing seamless integration using tools like AKS, ArgoCD, Crossplane, and Backstage, developers can focus on their core expertise — solving customer problems through code. Audience: This session is tailored for software development leaders, architects, and practitioners seeking to optimize their development processes and empower their teams. It will benefit those interested in leveraging modern developer platforms to streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and elevate the developer experience. Whether you're involved in DevOps, cloud-native development, or software engineering management, this session offers valuable insights into harnessing platforms built on AKS, ArgoCD, Crossplane, and Backstage to drive innovation and accelerate product delivery.

Modern authentication with Azure AD B2C

By moving user accounts away from applications and into an Identity Provider, we can use a single account on multiple systems and benefit from single sign-on. But what can you do when your applications need to support multiple Identity Providers? And how can you develop a sign-in flow with the look and feel of your application? Or what if you need to add a fully customized sign-in experience? How do you debug it? And how can you build a CI/CD pipeline for this? In this Developer focused session about Modern Authentication, we will show you how to tackle these challenges using AAD B2C.

WORKSHOP: Build the distributed apps of the future using Dapr

Building distributed application is hard… As developers we want to focus on delivering business value with new features but there are so much things to also take care of on the side, especially in a distributed environment. Things as pub/sub, state management, bindings & triggers, service discovery, distributed tracing etc. Dapr tries to solve this problem by providing all of this to you so you can mix and match what pieces you want to use and also pick between many implementations of for example state management like cosmosDB, redis or dynamoDB In this workshop you'll get hands on experience in building your own microservice based application using Dapr. You'll learn the following features of Dapr: • State management • Service discovery • Actor framework • Pub/sub • Distributed Tracing We'll be building the application using several programming languages, Docker & Kubernetes. Basic knowledge of Docker & Kubernetes is advised to get the most out of this workshop.

Azure API Management inside out

In this session Chris will explain how to use Azure API Management to expose your private workloads to 3th party's. Chris will explain the various parts of API management and show demo's on how to implement this inside of API Management. Demo's for example could be: API management and azure functions API management and OpenIdConnect API management and policy's to do the heavy lifting on security settings

terraform in practice for modern cloud infrastructure

This full day workshop is a hands on session focused on building and operating cloud infrastructure with Terraform. You work with Microsoft Azure as the main platform, while also using cloud agnostic services such as SQL, GitHub, and Cloudflare. The goal is to apply Terraform in setups that are close to real production environments. We start with the Terraform and OpenTofu basics to align everyone. Providers, resources, state, and modules are introduced and used immediately. The workshop also compares Terraform with Azure native tooling such as Bicep, and explains when to use which approach in practice. Hands on labs are combined with short theory blocks throughout the day. You work with CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, security controls, and platform engineering patterns. Topics include environment separation, secrets management, policy application, and keeping infrastructure changes controlled and repeatable. At the end of the workshop, you can use Terraform to build and run production ready cloud infrastructure. You leave with working examples, reusable patterns, and practical experience you can apply in your own projects.