Thursday the 25th of June Cloud Builders’ inaugural event take place.

Cloud Solutions: How Would You Build IT? was attended by engineers, thought leaders and cloud enthusiasts from around the globe, with digital attendance being held via YouTube Live.

Featuring speakers from all corners of cloud technology, audiences were encouraged to fully engage with the event’s concept: BYOP - Bring Your Own Problems. After each discussion, questions were asked through live, fireside chats, moderated by Anton Babenko, CEO at Betajob.

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📌 Acting as host, presenter and moderator in one, Anton introduced the event, highlighting the advantages - and disadvantages - of running an event such as Cloud Solutions. Given the tumultuous times we’re currently experiencing, why not make the most of all things digital during an event? Live discussions, constant chat commentary, a Zoom Q&A afterparty… Just because we’re all communicating wirelessly over screens, it doesn’t mean we can’t use this digital space as efficiently as possible.

After introductions were made, we had the pleasure of hearing from Paul Czarkowski, Developer Advocate at VMware. Brandishing his case studies, greenscreen-fu and years of industry experience, we learned how vitally important controllers can be for Kubernetes, alongside key insights into aspects such as team sizes, risks, and GKE approaches. With a brief interlude of audience questions, we were then onto our next talk, from none other than our sponsor: Intellias.

Represented by their VP of Technology, Roman Pavlyuk, Intellias gave a quick talk, describing current industry trends - and how they’re impacting the Ukrainian DevOps career market. With offices across cities like Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv, as well as an international presence in Krakow and Berlin, Intellias currently has a number of great opportunities for IT professionals. Roman went on to emphasise a major, all-too-easily-forgotten point: concepts we find easy are not so understandable for long term companies undergoing a digital transformation. So we need to help them.

Then, it was onto Sergey Pugachev, Solutions Architect at AWS. A common thread throughout his discussion with our audience was people. Human beings, talent, employees. Sure, technology is important, but it’s completely useless without the right people utilizing it. When you’re looking to build something that aims to get up there with Grammarly, Google, etc - focus on the people who will be doing that building. That extends from your initial planning, through to prepping your platform to handle predictable, human-caused events.

Shailendra Chauhan was up next, representing Microsoft as one of their Global Cloud Solution Architects. Adding to several points heard earlier on in the event, Shailendra brought up the danger of relying solely on technology - you need equal skills for business, opportunity and implementation, otherwise what’s the point of having anything else? Highlighting Service Fabric as the secret sauce of Azure, audience members were prompted to ask themselves whether they were fully incorporating this vital ingredient into their own products. Upon being asked what elements every cloud engineer should be learning about, Shailendra noted microservices, APIs, DevOps and Containers as criminally-underrated areas for growth.

As Anton then delivered the closing remarks to Cloud Solutions, a common theme between every talk was again brought forward: have fun. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, don’t be afraid to celebrate successes, and overall enjoy what you’re doing. Being passionate about cloud engineering is the biggest differentiator between progress and regression!

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🚀 Once again, we’d like to thank Intellias for sponsoring this event. Make sure to check them out and find current opportunities that might match your skill set! Also, check out our Twitter feed  for additional insights, links to future events, and tags for all our attending speakers.