CloudFest 2023 – Our consultant Till Gorr was there!

by Till Gorr, March 31, 2023

What an amazing venue for an event! I've attended quite a few conferences before, but this year's CloudFest venue was truly spectacular. Not only did the sessions and the booths revolve around cloud infrastructures, no, you actually flew through the cloud!

With topics such as cloud migration, cloud development, cloud security and for me the most interesting part: artificial intelligence and machine learning, CloudFest is one of the largest conferences in the field of cloud infrastructure and this year offered space for 138 booths in the conference center of the Europa Parks.

Anyone who knows me knows that I mainly deal with messaging and exchange, so I had no choice but to look around for the booths and products that deal with messaging infrastructures. At this point I would like to highlight Flowmailer who invited me to the CloudFest. Flowmailer provides e-mail SMTP and API gateways that can be configured depending on the environment and use cases and expanded with functions such as autoresponders or forwarding.

If you connect your sending mail applications to a central SMTP gateway such as Flowmailer, this has the advantage that you can drastically reduce your SPF and DKIM entries! Instead of including many individual senders in the SPF record, it is sufficient to store the central SMTP gateway there. You save yourself the management of many entries. It is also recommended to adjust the DMARC configuration to "p=reject" to protect the domain from misuse by third parties. To check which systems are sending on behalf of your domain, you can look at the DMARC reports sent to your RUA address on file. Tools like Flowmailer's DMARC reporting tool help you better analyze these reports and get a better view of compliant, partially compliant, and non-compliant senders. If you want to dig even deeper into DMARC analysis, DMARC Advisor offers detailed reports.

Unfortunately, looking through the agenda, I couldn't find any Microsoft 365-related topics, but that's to be expected at a conference that focuses on the cloud in general. Still, I learned a few things about products and solutions that might prove useful in the future. The topic of artificial intelligence was also hotly debated at this conference and I was able to take away a few food for thought here and there. The session "Cracking the Black Box of AI Decision-Making" dealt with how the AI ​​classifies and processes the selected browser for the upload of applications in a selection process of applications, although the selected browser was not previously specified as a criterion. Why does the AI ​​decide to evaluate this information and what does the chosen browser say about us?

The session that I will definitely remember is the session of Neil Harbisson, who shared some controversial ideas with us. For those who don't know him - He's a little different from us ordinary people, because Neil Harbisson had an antenna with a sensor operated in his skull. He can use the sensor to pick up the vibrations of colors and translate them into colors based on the vibrations in the back of his head. He also talked about his history and the past ethical discussions that this intervention led to. With his humorous manner, he then showed a few more examples of "cyborgs". In short, a very interesting session with a lot of potential for ethical discussions about whether and how humans are evolving with technology, for example to perceive senses that are otherwise reserved for certain animals.

To be honest with you, I wasn't expecting much from CloudFest 2023 on a technical level as only a few topics matched my area of ​​interest. Nevertheless, I was able to take a lot of impressions with me and I'm curious to see where the topic of cloud and especially AI will develop. An incredibly fast progress of the AI ​​can already be seen today, e.g. with ChatGPT or Midjourney.

Till Gorr