Hi folks,

Welcome to the Cloud Native London virtual meetup - Xmas edition! We're trying something new, so join us on Rambly to see this month's fantastic speakers and hang out with your fellow techies.

6:45 Kick off
7:00 Welcome
7:15 The challenges of exposing and connecting microservices (Denis Jannot, Solo.io)
7:45 Sharing Kubernetes Apps: Can we do Better? (Xavier Millot, Nectar)
8:15 Break
8:30 Moving to the cloud with evidence (Peter Parkanyi, Red Sift)
9:00 Wrap up

See you there!

Cheryl (@oicheryl)

The challenges of exposing and connecting microservices (Denis Jannot, Solo.io)
In this presentation, I'll cover the common challenges people are facing when they expose and connect micro services. I'll review the different options to expose services running on Kubernetes (Ingress vs API gateway) and to manage service to service communications (API gateway vs Service Mesh). I'll also discuss the additional complexity introduced when services are spread across multiple environments (multiple Kubernetes clusters, Service Meshes, ...). Finally, I'll introduce several Open Source projects (Gloo Edge, Gloo Mesh, Web Assembly, ...) we are working on at Solo.io to tackle these challenges.

Denis is the Director of Field Engineering at Solo.io, a company building application networking solutions for the edge and service mesh. He has spent his career in technical roles working directly with customers and users in architecting and adopting technologies like Object Storage, Big Data, Containerization, Service Mesh into their infrastructure. He enjoys sharing what he learns with the community and can be found creating demos, writing blogs, and speaking at events. Twitter handle: @djannot

Sharing Kubernetes Apps: Can we do Better? (Xavier Millot, Nectar)
At Nectar, we went beyond sharing charts: we made it possible to share applications. With our SDK, publishers generate control panels for their Kubernetes applications that users can operate in a controlled, safe, and self-explanatory manner.
After a demo of the SDK and client app, I will briefly make the commercial case for an App Store for self-hosted Kubernetes applications.

Xavier came to London from Washington D.C to start Nectar. Before that, he was CTO at Hinge Health and Computer Science graduate from McGill University. Nectar's origin is simple: SaaS often doesn't fly in regulated industries like healthcare where I worked. When we self-hosted our first Docker image for a mission critical third party app, it was an instant game changer and answers the question: where does one go to systematically buy and sell self-hosted software? Where is the App Store? Off social media today.

Moving to the cloud with evidence (Peter Parkanyi, Red Sift)
Companies moving to the cloud are looking at a myriad of challenges ranging from compliance, through operational changes, to security. The journey to a more efficient development workflow can also be a rollercoaster, exploring different directions, and approaches, or even multiple cloud providers. When designing for outcomes, a principled approach is always helpful, and using the right kind and amount of monitoring plays a key role in understanding our own infrastructure, teams, and how they interact. In this talk we'll go through what a layered security approach looks like, the key tools that are available to help make evidence-based decisions, and how they can support changing our workflow and development culture bit by bit.

Peter has been working on monitoring solutions for over half a decade, most recently at Red Sift, where he's leading development on InGRAIN, a runtime security solution not only for cloud native companies. He enjoys low level tinkering with systems, and is always looking for new ways to break and secure them against new threats. Can often be found on Twitter @rhapsodhy