Gerald Bachlmayr - Patterned Security

Death by Snowflakes

Abstract

In the race to scale cloud-native systems, many organisations unknowingly fall into the trap of creating "snowflake environments" - infrastructure and platform setups that are not fully automated and dangerously inconsistent across stages and teams.

These snowflakes might seem like business-aligned one-off solutions, but they silently accumulate configuration drift, obscure bugs, inconsistent security postures, and massive cognitive overhead for developers and operations. This presentation examines the Snowflake anti-pattern and its adverse effects on business agility, security, and reliability. We'll trace how snowflake environments originate and why they are so difficult to reverse once they are embedded in culture and pipelines.

You will learn how to recognise the warning signs of this anti-pattern and understand the long-term costs these inconsistencies impose. Through real-world examples and hard-learned lessons, this talk offers practical guidance on reestablishing consistency by applying platform engineering principles, infrastructure as code, policy as code, and other best practices.

Whether you're building a new platform or modernising an existing one, this session offers a compelling argument for investing in consistency as a first-class feature. Attendees will leave equipped with good practices and strategies to prevent snowflake sprawl and foster a platform that enables speed, scale, security, and operational excellence.

Speaker Bio

Gerald Bachlmayr is an experienced cloud strategist and DevSecOps professional with over 25 years of experience in IT.

Gerald spent many years as a software engineer before moving into various roles, including team lead, principal cloud architect, and chief cloud architect. He designed and implemented cloud native solutions for various industries, including financial services, tertiary education, and government organisations. As a security practitioner, he ensures that blueprints meet security, resilience, and regulatory requirements.

Gerald is a passionate AWS Community Builder. As an experienced consultant, he has witnessed many things going wrong, which also inspired him to write the book “Cloud Native Anti-Patterns”, published by Packt earlier this year. Gerald is eager to share his insights and learnings with the community, making the cloud an even better place.