Cloud Native Computing Rheinland - Summer Edition @ viadee

Hi everyone!
Our next meetup will take place in the viadee offices in Cologne.
Please keep in mind that we only have space for a limited number of participants. Please only RSVP if you actually intend on joining for the event, and please cancel your RSVP again should your plans change so others can take your spot. Thanks for your cooperation!
Drinks and snacks will be provided.

Preliminary Schedule:
18:00 Beginning and Socialising
18:30 First Talk and discussion
19:15 Pizza & Drinks
19:45 Second Talk and discussion
20:30 Socialising and further discussions

Your APIs are already AI tools! You just don't know it yet
Everyone wants AI agents that can work with real business data. Most teams assume that this requires new services, AI-specific endpoints, or a backend rewrite. It doesn't!

In this session, you will see a plain REST API—an Azure Function with zero AI code—become a complete toolset for an AI agent live on stage. The entire transformation occurs at the gateway. Azure API Management exposes the API's operations as MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools.

In the end, a chatbot will answer questions such as "Where is order ORD-2026-0142, and when will it arrive?" by autonomously selecting the appropriate tools and accessing the live API.

You will leave knowing what MCP is and why it's popular, how API Management turns operations into tools while maintaining governance, rate limits, and observability, why tool descriptions are the new API contract, and how to determine which of your existing APIs are AI-ready.

Florian Lenz is a Microsoft Azure MVP and Cloud Architect with over 10 years of experience building secure, scalable cloud platforms on Microsoft Azure. He specializes in Azure Landing Zones, DevSecOps, Infrastructure as Code, and cloud-native architectures, and has worked across industries including energy, finance, retail, and software.

As a speaker, author, and content creator, Florian shares practical lessons from real-world projects through conference talks, articles, and his YouTube channel—helping engineers and teams design systems that are secure, maintainable, and built for long-term success.

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From Prompt to Product: Why AI Only Becomes Enterprise-Ready with the Right Method
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can already write code, generate tests, and sketch out entire applications. But can it actually deliver good software?

This talk explores why the real bottleneck in AI-assisted development is no longer the code itself, but the context: requirements, architectural decisions, product clarity, quality assurance, and governance. If AI is used merely as a faster code generator, the result may be impressive demos — but not necessarily maintainable, secure, and operable systems.

In this hands-on session, I’ll share my experiences with vibe coding and similar approaches, and how the journey changed once I started using BMAD. We’ll look at how structured agent workflows can help turn AI from a prompt-driven toy into a serious tool for software delivery.

The talk highlights both the magic and the limitations: AI can accelerate development enormously — but without methodology, review, and accountability, the main thing it scales is chaos.

Ralf Richter is a true veteran of the Microsoft community and a long-standing MVP. Ralf works at CGI as a Director Consulting Expert and will share an exciting session based on his own hands-on experiences.

Disclaimer
By attending our meetups you agree that the photos and videos taken during the event can be used in social media platforms like LinkedIn to promote our future events.