STARWEST 2026 - DevOps
Customize your STARWEST 2026 experience with sessions covering DevOps.
Monday, September 21
Becoming an AI-Native Testing Organization
NewAI is changing how software is designed, built, and validated. As industries transition to AI-native product development, testing organizations must adapt their practices and skills. Manual testing is no longer enough; traditional automation should be enhanced with AI-driven quality engineering, autonomous agents, and data-powered tactics for faster and more reliable product delivery. Join Adam Auerbach to explore what it means to become an AI-Native Testing Organization. He will outline the AI-native software development lifecycle (SDLC) and highlight necessary changes in quality...
A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning
Although there are several controversies and misunderstandings surrounding AI and machine learning, one thing is apparent — people have quality concerns about the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of these types of systems. Not only are ML-based systems shrouded in mystery due to their largely black-box nature, they also tend to be unpredictable since they can adapt and learn new things at runtime. Validating ML systems is challenging and requires a cross-section of knowledge, skills, and experience from areas such as mathematics, data science, software engineering, cyber-security,...
Cursor and Claude Code for Test Automation Engineers (Advanced)
NewYou have the basics of AI tools covered, now let’s push them to the limits. In this advanced, hands-on workshop, we’ll go beyond vibe-coding and explore how to use AI tooling as a strategic orchestration tool for test automation engineers. Suitable for QA Engineers, Test Automation Engineers, Frontend Developers, and DevOps Engineers; we’ll dive deep into advanced techniques like multi-agent reasoning for debugging, building robust end-to-end tests, maintaining long-context conversations without drift, and crafting reusable automation patterns. We’ll be building custom tooling and agents...
Tuesday, September 22
Agentic AI: From Rules to Reasoning
NewAI agents have existed for decades, but generative AI has fundamentally changed what agents can do and how they are designed and built. Come and explore the evolution of AI agents across two major waves. First, learn the foundations of Agentic AI through agents built using rules, heuristics, and traditional machine learning, examining where these approaches excel and why they struggle with complexity, ambiguity, and scale. Then dive into the second wave of agents powered by generative AI and multimodal large language models. These modern agents can reason, plan, use tools, and interact...
Wednesday, September 23
Telemetry at Scale: Lessons from Building Observability for Distributed Systems
Modern distributed systems fail in messy, non-obvious ways: a small latency spike in one microservice can cascade through queues, sidecars, gateways, and control planes, yet traditional logging and isolated dashboards rarely reveal the true root cause. In this talk, Sneha will share how Microsoft tackled this while building the telemetry and observability platform behind Azure Container Apps and the Aspire Dashboard, used across thousands of customer environments. They standardized on OpenTelemetry to unify traces, metrics, and logs across heterogeneous workloads, invested in consistent...
AI-Driven Identity Governance: How Testing Teams Secure Access in Zero Trust Environments
As organizations adopt Zero Trust Architectures, Identity and Access Management has become a critical security control that testing teams can no longer treat as a black box. Traditional role-based access models struggle to keep pace with dynamic cloud environments, non-human identities, and evolving threat patterns. This session explores how AI-driven identity governance transforms access validation into a continuous, testable security practice. Drawing from real enterprise implementations across finance, healthcare, and e-commerce, the presentation demonstrates how behavioral analytics,...
From Local to Cloud: Scaling Your Load Tests with AWS (Without Blowing the Budget)
Many teams begin load testing on a local machine or inside their own network, but quickly hit limits with CPU, bandwidth, realism, and scale. This session addresses the challenge of moving from local load testing to cloud-based execution in a practical, cost-conscious way using AWS. The session will walk through how to spin up EC2 instances as load generators, create and manage SSH keys, transfer and run tests remotely, and collect results without needing deep cloud expertise. You’ll learn how to use Spot Fleets to reduce costs, structure your test setup for repeatability, and safely...
Thursday, September 24
Testing Event-Driven Systems Without Losing Your Sanity: Practical Patterns for AWS Serverless and Asynchronous Workflows
Event-driven architectures promise speed and scale, but they also introduce testing pain: eventual consistency, non-deterministic timing, duplicated events, and failures that only appear in production. In this talk, Parthiban will share a practical, field-tested approach he has used while leading distributed teams building regulated FinTech workloads on AWS serverless components such as Lambda, EventBridge, Step Functions, SQS, and API Gateway. He’ll start with the common failure patterns that make traditional end-to-end testing brittle, slow, and expensive. Next, he will walk through how...
SLO-Driven Testing: Turning Reliability Targets into an Executable Test Strategy
Modern delivery pipelines still treat “testing” as something that happens before release, yet most high-impact failures in distributed systems are reliability failures that only show up under real traffic, real data, and real dependencies. In this session you will learn a practical, SLO-driven approach to unify quality engineering and reliability engineering. Shalini will start by translating critical customer journeys into a small set of measurable SLIs like latency, availability, error rate, and correctness signals and setting SLOs that reflect user expectations. Then she will walk...