Balance for Better - Women in DevOps & Tech Women Collaboration

The world has made progress on the problem of gender inequality, however, inequality is still a global issue.

We exist to support and inspire, empower and diversify the technology world. A balanced workforce drives innovation and we believe that businesses need to do more than attract and retain women into their communities, we exist to bridge that gap.

In line with International Women’s Day 2019 we have teamed up with Cloudreach's, Tech Women. The event will celebrate the amazing achievements of women in the tech industry, whilst giving you the opportunity to network with market leading professionals and campaign together for greater progress towards gender equality.

We will be providing complimentary food and drinks. So join us to be inspired, engaged and empowered. This is a free event for all to attend.

Confirmed speakers:
- Ariane Gadd, Lead DevOps Engineer @ KPMG
- Leigh Dixon, Head of Employee Engagement @ Cloudreach
- Tania Ash - Azure Cloud Architect @ Cloudreach
- Idelkys Quintana - Cloud Systems Developer @ Cloudreach

Tania Ash & Idelkys Quintana
Tania Ash, Azure Cloud Architect, who joined Cloudreach as an experienced Architect, and Idelkys Quintana, Cloud Systems Developer who joined Cloudreach through the Fast Track to the Cloud programme will share their experience, possible career paths and some of their project work. We will have a look at BigData workflows in Azure DevOps and Terraform/Jenkins CI/CD pipelines in AWS.

Ariane Gadd
Ariane is a Lead DevOps Engineer at KPMG in the Solutions & Digital Cloud Ops team. She leads a team of 6 DevOps engineers, delivering solutions in the public cloud for a variety of clients. The focus is on CI/CD, automation and infrastructure-as-code, hosting projects across AWS, Azure and GCP. Her specialties include AWS, Terraform, containers and Jenkins.

Summary of the talk:
KPMG has built out a DevOps Cloud capability, starting with just 3 engineers 4 years ago, to almost 100 engineers today. We are more than 30% girls, a really high percentage compared to majority of the tech industry. Today Ariane will talk the kind of projects our engineers get involved with on a daily basis, in particular, the deployment of a customer due diligence solution for a high-profile banking client in AWS. This solution is composed of a number of microservices that are deployed to containers using AWS Fargate. She will dive into the details of the solution's architecture. We discuss how the infrastructure and applications are deployed using third-party tools, such as HashiCorp’s Terraform and Jenkins, and share best practices for running containers in production workloads. We also go into detail on the AWS resources used in the solution, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, and Amazon S3, as well as CI/CD and automation.

Leigh Dixon
Originally from the North of England and a proud Yorkshire woman Leigh has lived and worked in London for the past ten years. She started her career working at a Venture Capital company evaluating and investing in early stage startups where she got to experience the importance of strong people operations and employee related strategies. After completing her CIPD qualifications she spent five years at a tech company helping expand the business across the EMEA and APAC regions before joining Cloudreach just over one year ago as their Head of Employee Engagement

Summary of talk:
'My Journey, Lessons and Takeaways'

#BalanceForBetter #WomenInDevOps #TechWomen