Michele Leroux Bustamante

Bio

I am originally from Toronto, Canada - but have lived in San Diego since 1992 where I took my first programming job. While I originally moved to California for sunshine and sandy beaches - it seems my first job sucked me into a vibrant and addictive career in technology. Since then, I have been fortunate to experience many opportunities in technology as a programmer, manager, executive, consultant, teacher, writer, book author, public speaker and entrepreneur. Turns out there are a vast number of opportunities in the technology space - and somehow I did not get the memo that you don't have to do them all!

I have dabbled in many areas of technology but my deep expertise lies in designing and implementing scalable cloud solutions, from SOA to (now) microservice architectures, identity and access management, security and compliance, and C-Suite mentoring.

Now, I am CIO and co-founder of Solliance, and I lead the Security and Microservices practices. While Solliance keeps me very busy, I still spend quite a bit of time speaking internationally (DEVintersection, NDC, Techorama, DevSum, SDD and others), delivering microservices or security workshops and producing technical content. I am also honored to be a Microsoft Regional Director since 2003, Azure MVP, and Docker Captain.

To say that I keep busy is a gross understatement, but my husband and son help me keep it real, and balanced.

Talk to me about: Microservices, Docker, Azure, Amazon Web Services, Service Fabric, Security, Compliance, or even fine wine :)

Spotlight

We founded Solliance in 2012 after years of independent consulting and product development - with the goal of assembling the best people in the industry to help customers as a team. Solliance is a unique consulting firm that assembles the "dream team" of hand-picked deep technical experts balanced with a trusted implementation team to help customers solve problems, scale their operations and deliver value and innovation. We are based in San Diego but our partners are worldwide. Many of those partners are also fellow RDs - we come together merging our specialties as one team for the customer.

I started the microservices practice with internal projects to validate the various platforms prior to doing any customer work, and since then we’ve successfully implemented production solutions for several companies in the travel, retail, medical and technology industries - including solutions using Azure Container Service (AKS), Amazon EC2 Container Service, and platforms such as Kubernetes, Apache Mesos - DC/OS, Azure Service Fabric, Docker Swarm, and Docker Enterprise Edition.

A lot of this expertise in microservices stacks is hard one and takes a team, so I've been sharing back to the community by delivering workshops that provides insights into platform comparisons and production experiences.

The security practice at Solliance also spans many areas including identity, access management, SLAs, compliance and enterprise / cloud solution security. We frequently help customers implement identity protocols with Azure AD and other platforms - helping educate customers on secure coding practices, threat modeling and derisking custom work around the platforms.

Most recently, I've launched a new product business - PolicyServer - a solution for centralized access management for applications. This is a joint venture with Solliance of identity and access management. PolicyServer is compatible with any identity system including Azure AD.