From Azure Security Castles to Agentic AI in Production

We are thrilled to welcome you to our 8th edition of the AI Native Netherlands, hosted at the TomTom headquarters in Amsterdam.

We’re shaking things up! We are incredibly excited to debut an interactive panel at the end of the evening. Throughout the talks, you’ll be able to submit your technical questions online in real-time. We’ll then bring our speakers together to dive deep into your specific challenges. We’re excited to try this new format with you and get the whole room involved in the conversation.

A massive thank you to our host, TomTom, for their generosity in providing the venue, food, and drinks for this evening and for supporting the Dutch AI engineering community.

We’ll cover:

• Implementing Zero Trust principles and network controls within mission-critical Azure environments.
• Scaling secure cloud foundations by mapping real-world bottlenecks and architectural "dragons."
• Adapting cloud-native patterns for the non-deterministic execution paths of AI Agents.
• Managing observability and latency challenges in production-grade MCP server deployments.
• Extracting deep technical insights from our speakers during the interactive community Q&A.

Speaker 1: Ahmed Hussien (Schuberg Philis)
Ahmed is a Mission Critical Engineer specializing in Azure security, cloud governance, and real-world architecture. Known for turning complex cloud concepts into visual stories, he builds “security castles” on stage—complete with sentinels, defenses, and a few unexpected dragons. He combines practical field experience with humor and animation-heavy presentations to make security both understandable and memorable.

After years of solving high-severity incidents, navigating Azure’s quirks, and surviving more than one cloud outage, he now shares those lessons with a mix of clarity, honesty, and a touch of comedy. His goal? Help teams build stronger Azure security foundations — one castle wall at a time.

Talk: Building the Azure Security Castle That’s Never Finished
In this high-energy, visual session, Ahmed explores Azure security as a growing medieval castle. We’ll start with a simple blueprint and expand layer by layer—uncovering Zero Trust, network controls, and storage encryption. Each "stone" of the castle appears gradually, mapping real-world bottlenecks and best practices from the field. You’ll leave with a grounded understanding of how to strengthen your AI infrastructure foundations, one stone at a time.

Speaker 2: Metin Yazici (TomTom)
Metin is a Senior Software Engineer at TomTom, where he's helping bring AI-powered agentic assistants to vehicles. From early prototypes to production-grade deployments, he's been hands-on with the challenges of making agentic AI systems reliable, fast, and observable. He spends his days building reliable, scalable infrastructure and keeping production systems healthy.

Talk: TomTom's journey towards deploying agentic products
Deploying a traditional cloud service? You can estimate resource usage from request volume. Deploying an AI agent? Not so simple. A single user query might trigger one LLM call or twelve, fan out to maps, routing, traffic, and web search APIs, and take a completely different execution path every time. This talk follows TomTom's journey from prototype to production with the AI Agent and MCP server. It covers lessons on adapting cloud-native patterns for AI, handling observability for non-deterministic flows, building fine-tuning pipelines, and chasing latency when 'fast' is unpredictable.

Agenda:

• 18:00 — Arrival, food & drinks
• 18:30 — Talk #1 | Ahmed Hussien
• 19:15 — Talk #2 | Metin Yazici
• 20:00 — The Interactive Panel: Open conversation & audience Q&A
• 20:30 — Networking & more drinks
• 21:00 — Wrapping up

What to bring: Just curiosity and questions. We'll be diving into Azure Security, Agentic AI, and MCP servers, and we’d love to hear the audience's specific questions about the talks during the interactive panel.

Who is this for: Platform engineers, AI/ML engineers, SREs, architects, and engineering leaders focused on building and validating reliable AI systems in production.

Where to find us: TomTom De Ruijterkade 154, 1011 AC Amsterdam, Netherlands View on Google Maps