Inaugural Grafana & Friends Amsterdam Meetup!

We're thrilled to invite you to the first Grafana & Friends Amsterdam Meetup! Many thanks to our friends from Ahold Delhaize's who have kindy offered to host us!

Join us for an evening of exploration into the world of observability featuring speakers from Ahold Delhaize, ING and Grafana!
And as always, we'll also be serving up piping hot pizzas and ice-cold beer to keep the good times rolling!
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Agenda:
18.00-18.30 Welcome

18.30 - 20.00 Talks:

• Self-hosting the LGTM-stack at Ahold (Mitch Hulscher, Ahold Delhaize)
  In this presentation, we will explore how Albert Heijn has set up its implementation of a self-hosted LGTM stack. We will showcase how we have set up this stack with Terraform and GitHub actions. Specifically we will be showing you the automation and testing strategies that we have implemented to ensure solid lifecycle management of our monitoring setup. We will dive into the details of our end-to-end deployment and testing pipeline and demonstrate how we have achieved high confidence in maintaining our monitoring stack.
  You will gain valuable insights into how we have automated our monitoring setup and testing, and how we have optimized our monitoring process. We will also discuss best practices for implementing similar automation and testing strategies in other organizations.

• Banking observability at Scale (Salvatore Vitale, ING)
  In this talk I will share our experience in productizing open-source technologies into our banking-grade observability platform, the Monitoring Data Pipeline (MDPL). During the talk, I'll demonstrate the steps we took to meet the standards of usability, scalability, and security required by the ING organization. You'll see firsthand the reality of our solution through live demonstrations, rather than just slides. By the conclusion of this talk, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of our implementation of open-source technologies like Prometheus, Envoy, Mimir and Grafana in creating a secure, reliable, and scalable monitoring solution for the ING infrastructure and application workloads.

• Green Code, Green Server: Sustainable K8s Resource Optimization through Continuous Profiling with Grafana Pyroscope (Ward Bekker, Grafana)
  Exploring innovative strategies for reducing Kubernetes' environmental impact via Grafana Pyroscope's continuous profiling, this talk presents methods for efficient resource management and sustainable coding practices.

20:00 - 21:00 Q&A and Networking

We are looking forward to seeing you!

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About the speakers:

1. Mitch Hulscher
Mitch is the Tech Lead of the AholdDelhaize Observability team. At his previous assignments he worked mostly on building self-service, multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters in AWS. In his spare time he enjoys dancing salsa, reading and spending time with his friends.

2. Salvatore Vitale
With a passion for technology and over 10 years of experience in software development, Salvatore Vitale is a skilled professional who brings a wealth of expertise to the industry. Early in his career, he worked as a researcher at TU Delft, where he built computational models for the analysis and optimisation of fluid-dynamic flows in jet engines. He then transitioned to the industry, where he quickly established himself as a C# software developer at Shell. Currently, Salvatore is a backend developer at ING, where he utilizes his expertise in Golang to tackle challenging projects and continuously grow his skill set. In his free time, Salvatore is an avid player of Padel, and he finds great joy in cooking delicious meals for his family. When he's not pursuing his passions, Salvatore can be found with his nose in a good book or fully absorbed in a gripping TV series

3. Ward Bekker
Ward Bekker is based in The Netherlands and is part of the Solutions Engineering team at Grafana Labs. Besides a fan of Grafana Pyroscope, he’s also a big fan of the Grafana Loki project, he likes to publish Loki how-to videos on YouTube, share project news and tips on social media, and give Loki- and observability-flavored workshops and webinars. Earlier in his career, he specialized in big data cybersecurity and worked as a developer of high-traffic websites.