SRE Triple Threat, from design to build to buy (Utrecht)

Come and join us at our Dutch national pride NS at Utrecht's Central Station Katreinetoren for our first meetup after the summer break. This time we do 3 talks from design to build to buy.

Please pay some special attention to our location as it is located INSIDE Utrecht Centraal - this means that you will need an ov chipkaart or ticket to make your way to the entrance. NS has another office at Laan van Puntenburg (don't go there!) but we are hosting this event at Katreinetoren/Stationshal 17.

Agenda

17:45 Walk-in with dinner (vegetarian option available)
18:30 Opening by SRE NL Meetup Host
18:35 Enablement & Platform Engineering at NS - Mart Noten and Roel Beelen
19:05 Solving Complex Problems with Systems Design: Lessons from Air Traffic Control Applications - Jan Gabriel Pretorius (freelance / LVNL)
19:35 OpenFeature in production: Introduction feature flags @Mollie - Phil Fehre & Mike Petruzelli (Mollie)
20:05 Networking with drinks
21:00 End

Abstracts

Enablement & Platform Engineering at NS by Mart Noten and Roel Beelen

At NS, we actively focus on enablement and platform engineering to drive innovation and efficiency across our diverse digital landscape. Our organization consists of many different teams, working with a wide range of technologies, stacks, and practices—each with their own needs and challenges. Despite this diversity, our overarching goal remains the same: empowering teams to take ownership of their own success.

Within our approach: we do not aim to take over teams’ work, acquire in-depth domain knowledge for every context, or create dependencies on a central group of specialists. Instead, we enable teams by fostering self-sufficiency and ownership. We achieve this by providing self-service platforms, emphasizing automation, and offering accessible, practical support—so teams can build and operate their solutions faster, better, and more securely within their own context. Platform engineering is at the heart of this approach: we build and maintain robust, intuitive platforms and delivery pipelines, ensuring that teams can focus on their unique products and added value—without being burdened by generic infrastructure and tooling challenges.

During this session, we will explain our approach, using our central observability platform as a practical example:

• How teams benefit from standardized observability
• How we overcame both technical and cultural barriers and shaped collaboration with suppliers
• The role of training, workshops, and migration support in accelerating adoption
• Best practices and lessons learned to make enablement and innovation work in a large, heterogeneous IT environment

Join us for insights into our approach and practical takeaways you can use in your own organization!

Solving Complex Problems with System Design: Lessons from Air Traffic Control Applications by Jan Gabriel Pretorius

A structured approach is key to solving complex problems in systems design. It acts like a magnifying glass, highlighting hidden details and patterns that might go unnoticed. Over the past few years, I have applied and refined this approach while designing and extending ATC simulators and operational Air Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) for Dutch air traffic control. In this talk, I will share the lessons I have learned - successes and failures - in applying systems design principles within the ATMS domain.

OpenFeature in production: Introduction feature flags @Mollie by Phil Fehre & Mike Petruzelli

Being founded in 2004, in 2023 mollie made its journey into GCP, and deeper into Java world. While Mollie has been a user of feature flagging for customers for a long time, with an implementation tied to the monolith, the journey into a multiservice cloud world was not obvious. Born out of a focus on reliability, feature flags for all services were first introduced mid 2023, with one clear decision early on to bet on OpenFeature to avoid vendor lock-in. A PoC was built using split.io and successfully adopted into core payment method flows. Since then, the infrastructure has evolved and is now fully embracing open source, by self-hosting a flagd based backend. This is also a story about taking an iterative approach to core infrastructure components, based on lasting decisions: Betting on OpenFeature, embracing open source with flagd. Flagd and other backend components have been running in production now for some time, serving as the backend for feature flags for some of Mollie's most critical components in the payment infrastructure.

Privacy notice(s):

• When you sign up to this event you agree that photos and/or video can be made and published, with your face potentially visible.
• For security purposes your name, organization and e-mail will be shared with on-site security.

If you have any issue with this, please let us know and we’ll work something out.