One-day AI Platform Engineering meetup held at Dierenpark Apenheul, a primate park in Apeldoorn, Netherlands. Talks, workshops, a keynote and a dinner for Dutch platform engineers and cloud architects working with Azure and AI infrastructure. Sessions are in Dutch.
APE is an annual community-run meetup for AI platform engineers organised by the Dutch Azure and platform engineering community. The 2026 edition is held at Dierenpark Apenheul (a primate park in Apeldoorn), a deliberate venue choice that signals the informal, community-first register of the event. The one-day programme combines technical talks, workshops and a keynote, followed by a community dinner. Sessions are delivered in Dutch. The event targets platform engineers, cloud architects, DevOps engineers and SREs working with Azure and AI infrastructure.
The APE acronym stands for AI Platform Engineering, and the Apenheul primate park provides a memorable, non-corporate venue that reinforces the event's community identity. Platform engineering events in the Netherlands operate at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, AI integration and DevOps practice. APE gives this community a dedicated annual gathering outside the vendor conference circuit.
Sessions focus on AI platform engineering in practice: Azure landing zone design and evolution, infrastructure automation, governance frameworks, platform operations, AI workload integration, and security for AI-enabled cloud environments. The content is intermediate to advanced level, hands-on and opinionated. Sessions run approximately 50 minutes including Q&A.
The day includes technical talks, practical workshops, a keynote session, and a community dinner. The informal setting at Apenheul encourages open discussion between practitioners. The Azure user group community organises the programme.
AI Platform Engineering is the discipline of building and operating the cloud infrastructure, tooling, and workflows that enable development teams to build and deploy AI systems reliably. It overlaps with cloud platform engineering, MLOps, and DevOps but focuses specifically on enabling AI workloads.
APE is an independent community event organised by the Dutch Azure user group community. It is not an official Microsoft event, though content focuses heavily on Azure technologies.
Sessions are primarily in Dutch. This makes APE distinct from international platform engineering conferences and positions it as the peer-to-peer Dutch community forum for this discipline.
Dierenpark Apenheul is a primate park at J.C. Wilslaan 21, 7313 HK Apeldoorn, Netherlands, known for housing apes and monkeys in naturalistic enclosures. The park provides unique event facilities and an outdoor campus environment suited to informal community gatherings. Apeldoorn is served by direct trains from Amsterdam (approximately 60 minutes), Utrecht (approximately 45 minutes) and Arnhem (approximately 25 minutes).
APE is organised by the Dutch Azure platform engineering user group community, related to the Azure user community active in the Netherlands. The organiser maintains a presence at ai-ape.nl and through the associated Meetup group (azure-platform-engineering). Registration and CFP run through the Azure APE platform.
APE is the Netherlands only platform engineering meetup for AI infrastructure, held at a primate zoo in Apeldoorn to set a community tone intentionally apart from corporate IT events.
Registration details and ticket availability are published at ai-ape.nl. The event follows a community model; check the site for current registration status. The dinner at the end of the day may require a separate registration.
Train from Amsterdam Centraal to Apeldoorn (approximately 60 minutes on IC trains), then bus or taxi to the park (approximately 15 minutes). The park address is J.C. Wilslaan 21, 7313 HK Apeldoorn.
Replay availability is not confirmed. Check ai-ape.nl after the event.
| Official website | https://ai-ape.nl/ |
| Meetup group | https://www.meetup.com/azure-platform-engineering/ |