August Birmingham Digital & DevOps Meetup

Containers, containers, containers!

Our next meetup will focus again on the world of Containers. The lineup is now finalised, and as usual it'll be an interesting evening of Tech Talk, Demos and Networking, with a few drinks and nibbles to boot 😁

The event will take place at The Old Joint Stock (http://www.oldjointstock.co.uk/) in Birmingham, starting at 18:00. We've booked the larger Theatre so there is plenty of space to bring your colleagues along.

Details on the agenda below. Please do SIGNUP!

17:45-18:15 - Meet & Greet

18:15 - Elton Stoneman - Just What Is A “Service Mesh”, And If I Get One Will It Make Everything OK?

Communication is the backbone of distributed applications. Imagine you could control that backbone independently of all the components, so your application code just makes simple calls to other services, and your communication backbone does all the complex non-functional work. Load balancing, traffic management, fault tolerance, end-to-end monitoring, dynamic routing and secure communication could all be applied and controlled centrally. That's a service mesh. In this session Elton will cover the major features of a service mesh using Istio - which is the most popular technology in this space. He will show you what you can do with a service mesh, how it simplifies application design and also where it adds complexity. His examples will range from new microservices designs to legacy monoliths, and you'll see what a service mesh can bring to different types of application

Elton is a Pluralsight Author, Microsoft MVP and an Architect at Docker. He has been building and delivering successful solutions with Microsoft technologies since 2000, most recently Big Data and API implementations in Azure, and distributed applications with Docker.

Currently he is interested in the evolution of the Microsoft stack, exploring the great opportunities to modernize existing .NET Framework apps with Docker, and run them alongside new .NET Core apps in Windows and Linux containers.

He is a regular presenter and workshop host at conferences, and has been fortunate to speak at DockerCon, NDC, DevSum, ProgNet, SDD, Container Camp and Future Decoded. You'll often see him at user groups too - Docker London, London DevOps and WinOps are his locals

19:00 - Break - Food & Drink

19:20 - James Relph - Container Security Fundamentals

Many organisations are using containers but it’s easy for teams to start treating them as a traditional VM and forget the security and operational implications that containers introduce. This talk will cover and demo some of the fundamental security and operational issues that containers introduce, and how to mitigate them.

James is a Senior Platform Engineer with Capgemini. James spent 12 years managing Unix systems for companies around the UK, before working with clients across several industries in early transitions to AWS. Since joining Capgemini he has primarily worked with public sector clients dealing with large scale AWS estates, Kubernetes clusters and CI/CD pipelines. He lives in Middlesbrough with his wife, two sons and too many chickens.

20:00 - Close & Networking.