March Birmingham Digital & DevOps Meetup

Our first Meetup of 2020 will focus on the world of Cloud Native. The lineup is being 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 can be found below. Please do SIGNUP and follow our twitter account to keep up to date with our current and future events (@BrumDigitalMeet)!

17:45-18:00 - Meet & Greet

18:00 - Rancher Labs - Kubernetes:
In this cloud native world software is being created at an exceptional rate and we need platforms to run this software. Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard for this, but Kubernetes is hard, right? We have all heard of Kubernetes the Hard Way, would we not want to do Kubernetes the easy way? I am going to demonstrate how to set up a Kubernetes cluster using RKE (Ranchers Kubernetes Engine) in just a few minutes.

Mike is a Consultant Engineer at Rancher Labs

18:30 - Under the bonnet at Auto Trader:
As the UK’s largest digital automotive marketplace, Auto Trader UK prides itself on how simple it is for its consumers and retailers alike to buy and sell cars on their platform. To do it they rely on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) plus Istio. Istio has helped increase application visibility, org agility and effectively secure their production environment, without sacrificing developer productivity.
Dave Whyte has been in various operational roles at Auto Trader over the last 15+ years. In this session he will take you under the bonnet and showcase some of the inner workings around Auto Trader’s DevOps tooling that has been built to support the new Public Cloud environment and the increase in release velocity.

Dave Whyte is an Operations Squad Lead at Auto Trader UK and a Co-Organiser of the DevOps Manchester Meetup.

19:00 - Break - Food & Drink

19:20 - AWS re/Start - Resourcing Cloud Teams:
Generation is the world’s largest youth employment not for profit organisation, supporting over 30,000 young adults globally to launch their careers. Generation is collaborating with AWS to deliver re/start – a cloud computing training programme that is providing digital employers with the skilled, motivated talent they need. This talk will provide an introduction to re/start, and outline how cloud teams in the area can engage with the programme.

With nearly 15 years’ experience in public service innovation and community development, Patricia has a passion for helping good ideas grow.

19:30 - Multilingual, Multi-Cloud Apps - A Reality Check:
All I wanted to do is run any language on any cloud with state and with no servers to maintain. Of course it also needs to be highly available, observable, maintainable, recoverable and all of the other “ables”. How hard can it be? Let’s dissect what the implications of this goal are and see where we currently stand to see whether this is a current reality or a distant pipe dream.

Toby is a platform engineer at Capgemini currently working on the Securing Our Technical Future programme.

20:00 - Close & Networking.