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Cloud & DevOps meet AI: what we learned in Amsterdam
- Dennis Vroegop
- Cloud and Devops
What happens when systems behave exactly as designed, but not as expected? On 18 March 2026, cloud and DevOps engineers came together at our Amsterdam Zuidas office to explore that question. Speaker Dennis Vroegop took us from infrastructure as code to infrastructure that decides for itself, and into the questions of control, trust and autonomy that come with it. The evening started with dinner and ended with drinks and networking between peers.
This event has already taken place
What this meetup was about
For the past decade, we’ve turned infrastructure into code: predictable, observable, repeatable. Now we are doing something far more dangerous: we’re teaching infrastructure to decide. This meetup was not about prompt engineering or copilots. It was about what happens when engineers are no longer the most brilliant actors in their own systems.
The key message: there is no checklist for autonomous cloud environments. What engineers need are sharper questions about control, trust and responsibility.
Who it was for
The meetup was aimed at senior engineers, architects and consultants working with cloud and infrastructure platforms.
Sessions
The session: when infrastructure starts to decide
Dennis challenged the way engineers think about AI in their platforms. Rather than seeing AI as just another tool, he treated it as a new infrastructure layer, one that quietly changes the assumptions modern cloud platforms are built on.
Topics covered:
- What it really means to treat AI as a new infrastructure layer, not a tool
- How decision-making systems break our assumptions about observability, ownership and responsibility
- Why “self-healing” can quietly turn into “self-directing”
The topics
In this meetup
- We’ll explore what it really means to treat AI as a new infrastructure layer, not a tool.
- We’ll look at how decision-making systems break our assumptions about observability, ownership and responsibility.
- We’ll discuss why “self-healing” can quietly turn into “self-directing”.
The speaker
Dennis Vroegop – Senior Tech Lead / Interim CTO
Dennis has been programming computers for over four decades and has no intention of stopping any time soon. He has worked on AI systems since his studies in the late ’80s and stepped up his focus on AI in 2016. Today he is a sought-after speaker and trainer on anything AI, both the GenAI kind and the more “old-fashioned” kinds.
Dennis has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 20 years, the last three as an AI MVP. He has spoken at most major tech conferences in the region, including dotNed Saturday, Future Tech and Techorama. This meetup was one of his last talks in the Netherlands before his planned move to Australia.